One of the most significant periods of my life was the three years I studied under the world’s greatest business consultant, Peter Drucker. Dr. Drucker is known as the father of modern management, but he also contributed to the creation of marketing as a professional discipline, wrote extensively about entrepreneurship and innovation, and is generally regarded as the greatest business philosopher of all-time.

There is not a single day that I don’t hear his voice in my head as I work through customer problems. His advice has become the foundational pillars of my work and in many respects, my life.

But there is one piece of advice he gave me that is remarkably useful to me in this overwhelming world of change, and I think it will help you, too. Let’s reveal that today.

Immersed in the problem

I studied under Dr. Drucker while pursuing an MBA at the Claremont Graduate University. He had retired from most of his professional life and devoted his time to mentoring students in the business school that now bore his name.

He would sit on the edge of a desk with a carafe of coffee and talk about his books. It was impossible to outline his talks as he took us on a jagged journey through his life and the fascinating people he met along the way.

Dr. Drucker taught us through the Harvard case study method. We were assigned a long text detailing a complex business problem. Over weeks of classes, we would dissect the issues from every angle. As business leaders, our tendency was to try to solve the case and resolve the problem.

And that’s when Dr. Drucker would go nuts.

It’s not about the right answers

This class was filled with experienced leaders eager to display their intelligence and insight by “solving” the case study.

Nothing irked Dr. Drucker more.

“The people in this case study have been working in their business for 30 years or more,” he would say. “What makes you so arrogant to think that you can solve the problem when they can’t? Your job is not to have the right answers. Your jobs is to have the right questions.”

This might be the most important advice of my professional life and informed how I approach all my business consulting assignments. I approach business problems very humbly because I am never the expert in the room. Why would I have the right answers?  However, I can guide people to the right questions — the real key to a resolution.

I’ve found that most leaders have the knowledge and insight to solve their problems if they know where to find an answer.

Relevance of the right questions

The marketing world is far too complex to be an expert in everything. I’m not sure you can be an expert in anything! However, you must be immersed enough in the day’s issues to ask the right questions. You have to have a sense of what is possible.

I think curiosity is the most important soft skill for marketers today. For me, asking the right questions is not just a prerequisite to effective consulting. It helps me become a better author, speaker, and teacher.

Asking the right questions is also the true heart of all great content creation. If you put the work into finding the right questions, great content will surely follow.

Jay Acunzo and I just dropped a fun podcast episode demonstrating the opportunity to ask the right questions. We challenged each other to pose questions that the other person had never been asked before. And it worked! I invite you to have some fun with us and enter a world of challenging questions.

All you have to do is click here >

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 305

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Illustration courtesy MidJourney

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What were the most popular blog posts of 2024?

This is more difficult to answer today than a few years ago because my posts are read in so many different places today. I don’t spend the time curating social media views across all the various channels (like Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn) but certainly can see when a post goes “viral.”

Here at least is an estimate of the most popular posts of 2024 based on post views.

1. How to Reimagine Universities for the AI Era

Although this post appeared just a few weeks ago, it was “boosted” by Medium and appeared on the front page of the platform’s website. There is some wild thinking here, and most people agreed with my view that colleges need a radical new start.

2. In Defense of Jaguar (I think I’m the Only One)

A post that caused a rumble, earning 17,000 views on LinkedIn. I almost didn’t comment on this car controversy, but so many people wrote to me to ask what I thought about it that I took the plunge.

This is a good example of “spiky” content. I posed a contrarian view, not to be contrarian but to expose a defensible argument.

3. The Real Reason Marketing Content is Getting Worse

The idea is that a creative dependency on technology limits people’s ability to innovate because they don’t know the craft. This hit a chord with people, resulting in hundreds of reader comments across the web.

4. The Biggest Threat to Free Speech and Democracy Isn’t Speech. It’s Amplification

There are so many arguments about protecting free speech and the limits of free speech but most people are missing the point entirely. The opportunity for vast amplification of any view was something the Founding Fathers never anticipated.

5. It’s Time to Create a Creator Guild

One of the major limits on AI progress is a lack of access to high quality content. I would happily turn over almost 20 years of content to my AI overlords for fair compensation. Wouldn’t you? Solves so many problems.

6. Ten Non-Obvious Social Media Trends

In my early days as a blogger, I commented on social media almost exclusively. I thought it would be fun to return to my roots and point to some trends that seem to be passing many people by.

7. How Blogging Changed My Life

2024 marked the 15th anniversary of my blog. I normally don’t dwell on the past but this was an opportunity to reflect on how far I’ve come as a blogger. While blogging might seem like the OG social media content, it is still as vital as ever and still growing.

8. Why AI Will Not Doom Marketing

Open AI founder Sam Altman blurted out that AI will easily and rapidly eliminate 95% of all marketing jobs. I don’t know AI, but I do know marketing and I had to point out why this is view is simply wrong.

9. How to be the Best Fake Possible

If I hear the word “authentic” one more time I think I’ll hurl. Do we really want authentic? It never crosses my mind when I watch a spectacular action movie created almost entirely by CGI. If I value spectacular in the real world, why not in the business world. Should we embrace the Era of Spectacular?

10. The Biggest Mistake Content Creators Make Today

This might seem like a click-bait headline, but it’s not. I’ve done hundreds of personal coaching calls, and 90% of the people I speak to have grotesquely sub-optimized their content because of this one mistake.

So that’s a wrap. I’ll add that my top five podcast episodes of the year were:

1. Why it was time to burn this community to the ground

2. Beyond Imposter Syndrome

3. Creating your signature story

4. What business are you in — really?

5. The inescapable role of humans in an AI world

If you’re a fan of the blog, I think you will love The Marketing Companion podcast! 

Thanks for being here, and here’s to a great 2025.

Need a keynote speaker about brand communities? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustrations courtesy MidJourney

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I’m a big fan of Rick Beato (one of his 4 million subscribers!). He is a passionate, intellectual YouTuber who dissects and explains much of the music that I love.

He recently created a video called The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse, and as I listened to his reasoning, I felt as though he was talking directly to me as a marketer in the AI Age. If you haven’t discovered Rick and you’re a music lover, I hope you’ll check him out. But in the meantime, let’s see what he says about making music in the AI Age and discover if this speaks to you, too …

Music, and Marketing Content is getting worse

Here are the notes I took from Rick’s video:

Technology makes the act of making music too easy. It’s difficult to play an instrument, and it’s really hard to record it well and produce a record. Rick received this note from a fan: “I wrote this song using AI, and I think it’s pretty good, but I literally know nothing about music.” Music has been commoditized.

Technology allows you to save a lot of money and take shortcuts, but the artistry and soul are stripped from the music. He compared an original recording of John Bonham drumming to a loop of the drumming, and it’s a hygienic version.

A creative dependency on technology limits the ability of people to innovate because they don’t know the craft.

When everyone relies on the same tools, you create a homogenized sound and a lack of diversity in the music. Music today is formulaic because people follow trends of certain types of sounds that are in style in the moment.

Ease of production speeds up the process, creating an oversaturation of music and making exceptional work harder to find. AI songs will make the level of saturation even worse as record labels produce their own AI songs instead of using original artists. One new song is added to the streaming catalog every second.

Finally, he explained why human creativity is undervalued. In the golden age of music, you would have to have a job to make money to buy a record album. You had to expend energy to find, buy, and consume the content. There is no sweat equity needed to enjoy music today. You can pay $10.99 per month and have access to any song ever published. So music becomes value-less or at least under-valued for many people.

A record bought for your collection became part of your identity, part of your history. A record was something shared among friends. We would read the album cover and learn about who made and produced the music. The creator and creative team had value.

Lessons for the AI Era

See, I told you he was speaking to marketers. This is EXACTLY  the problem we face when AI churns out content at lightning speed. We risk drowning in a sea of mediocrity. The craft of marketing — the human touch, the unexpected twist, the soul — is in danger of being automated away.

AI presents many existential issues, but here is the one that haunts me the most: When we eliminate all the entry-level jobs, how will young people learn their craft? And if they don’t learn a craft, all we’ll have is “auto-tuned” perfect content, stripped of artistry and soul.

Like artists, will we become so dependent on the same technological tools that everything becomes homogenized?

Here’s what will drive AI adoption: cutting costs. Sorry, that’s the way of the world. So it seems inevitable that we’ll experience an AI pandemic of dull as every possible task moves to a machine.

The other day, I picked up my car from the shop and the technician had tuned my radio to a pop station. I don’t normally listen to current pop music, so I listened for a few days. The music today is truly awful, and I’m a person who embraces new musical ideas.

But here’s what excites me. True artistry still breaks through. I recently saw Jon Batiste in concert and no AI on earth will hold that man down.

As a marketer, you’ll have to be that Jon-Batiste level outlier to swat back the AI. Create work that no AI could dream up. Be so good they can’t ignore you.

There is still room for the crazy ones who push boundaries—there always will be. Start pushing, my friends.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post The Real Reason Marketing Content is Getting Worse appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

A member of my RISE marketing community felt a bit stuck after blogging for a year. It occurred to me that I had not written about basic writing tips for many years, so let’s do that today.

Blogging still plays an important role in the digital marketing ecosystem, and it’s also a lot of fun. Here are some tips to re-energize your blog. Some are refreshers, some will be new to you …

1. Write “upside down,” meaning, tell the reader immediately what this story is about. Don’t make them work or they will leave. This is a non-obvious blogging tip because it is the opposite of what we’ve been taught in school — start with the introduction and work your way to the conclusion. Start your blog with the conclusion first.
2. Remove every word and sentence that doesn’t move the story along. Mark Twain famously quipped, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Remove the fluff!
3. Read it aloud. If your post doesn’t sound like your natural voice when you read it out loud, re-write it.
4. Add your own story. This is a noisy world (and AI is making it worse!) To stand out, you have to be original, and to be original, you really have just one choice: Add your own story, perspective, and passion to the post. There’s only one you. If you have the courage to show your heart, you’ll stand out.
5. Be spiky. Publish something that can be challenged. Don’t be controversial for the sake of it, but offer an opinion that’s debatable. I wrote about this in detail here. There is no better to re-energize your blog than stirring up a little sh@t.
6. Help, don’t sell. I know some gurus encourage you to have a call to action in every post, but I disagree. Why would I subscribe to content that just sells me something every time? Serve the reader.
7. Double down on quality. You can trick somebody into clicking a link, but you can’t trick them into reading it or subscribing. If you ask any creator what drives subscriptions, they’ll respond, “quality.” I don’t use AI to create my posts, but if you’re not a natural writer, use AI to brighten your content through better editing, tone, and style.
8. Don’t overlook headlines. The most important part of your content isn’t the content—it’s the headline. People will decide to click or not based on their first impression. Don’t make it an afterthought.
9. Stick to a lane. Determine the content that best supports your personal brand and your learning journey and focus there or you will confuse the reader.
10. There’s no great writing, only great re-writing.

Re-energize your blog and don’t quit

In my Personal Branding Master Class, I take participants on a deep dive into the role of content and the importance of consistency and patience. I thought I would end my post today with my favorite quote about blogging success.

Sisters Elsie Larson and Emma Chapman started the “A Beautiful Mess” blog in 2007. The blog covers home decor, crafts, recipes, and lifestyle tips. Today, they oversee a profitable media empire.

But their success never would have happened if they had not started the blog and kept going. This is the quote from Elsie Larson that I love:

“I built a readership over the course of many years. I focused on quality posts that take a lot of time to write and develop, being consistent (I’ve been posting almost every day for several years), and being myself. The blog evolves as I evolve; it’s slow and steady. Nothing happened overnight. I have never paid a penny to advertise ‘A Beautiful Mess;’ I just kept doing my best and a readership developed over the years. It’s the product of hard work, constant evaluation, and lots of love.”

That sums it up, folks. Quality, consistency, slow and steady. The winning formula to re-energize your blog.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Re-Energize Your Blog: 10 Tips You Didn’t See Coming appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

The topic for this blog post came to me in a dream. I woke up from my dream thinking, “Yes, it’s true. There really is one big mistake content creators make. I should tell others about it!”

I’m sorry this dream wasn’t more exciting or titillating. Maybe my other dreams will be a story for another day. Or not.

Before I reveal my dream-truth, I need to review a basic content marketing philosophy:

Content must be unleashed.

It doesn’t matter if you’re creating epic content or the best work of your lifetime if nobody sees it. The power in your content doesn’t from the content. It comes from the transmission of the content. We want our work to move, which leads to awareness, fans, subscribers and people who will buy things from us.

The biggest mistake content creators make

OK, let’s think this through.

You create great content. You post it everywhere. Somebody bites. They click on the link and what do they see when they arrive at your website?

A blog post? A video? A podcast episode?

Of course … but what else? If you’re like most people, the answer is … nothing. And this is the problem.

When I visit most blog posts or other web content, I can’t even tell who wrote it. I don’t know what this site is about. I don’t see a place to subscribe. I don’t see a place to share the content on social media if I like it. It’s a marketing dead end!

When people click on a link to your content, they don’t arrive at your home page. They arrive at your content. And if all you have on this page is your content, you’re missing a massive opportunity. In fact, this is by far the biggest mistake content creators make today.

In essence, your content page needs to be a mini-landing page for your business. You spend all this time bringing people to your business, but it’s not your business—it’s just a piece of content. They read it and leave. TRAGIC!

Here is your goal: Keep them on your website. You should put as much thought and design into your standard content page as your home page. The longer you keep them on the page, the bigger the chance they will subscribe to your content, share it, or even buy something from you. So don’t miss this opportunity.

Let’s learn how to do this …

The mini home page

If I were sitting with you over coffee, I would pull out my laptop and give you a demonstration. I would probably even buy you the coffee. But since we might be thousands of miles apart, I’ll walk you through it and owe you the coffee when we finally meet. Deal?

As I give you this lesson, it would be helpful to look at how I display my own work, the result of many years of testing. If you like, open up this blog post as you read the rest of my tutorial so you can visualize the lesson.

We’ll start at the top and learn how to make your content into a mini home page.

On my post, what’s the first thing you see under the headline? Social sharing buttons. I can’t believe how often I go to a site and have to work to figure out how to share the content.

Research shows your content will be shared 400% more if you simply add social sharing buttons. The total social shares displayed on my buttons isn’t accurate. It’s sort of a long story why they’re not, and it’s frustrating that nobody has worked that out, but put the buttons up there anyway. No excuses.

Next: An eye-catching graphic. If somebody sees your content shared on LinkedIn or Twitter, the first thing that grabs their attention is the graphic. Maybe you can stop them long enough to read the headline and get a click. The image that goes with your content is also an SEO boost because you can add meta tags to the photo to help Google figure out your content.

Let’s start looking at the right-hand column. You first see a call to action to spend time with me. Cool.

However, the next field, an invitation to subscribe, is the most essential item on the entire page. Why? Because a subscriber is opting in to you and what you do. They are volunteering to hear more. They are becoming members of your email list and possibly future customers.

You might be asking yourself, if the subscribe button is the most critical part of the page, why isn’t it at the top of the column? Heat map studies show that the top right corner of the web page is invisible to many people. I don’t know why, but the conclusion is consistent. So, the top of the column is sort of a throw-away item to get people to the next block which encourages them to subscribe.

As you go down the rest of the column, you’ll see:

• An opportunity to buy my book
• An invitation to attend my marketing retreat
• News about a class I am teaching
• An ability to search the site
• A little welcome message so people know who I am
• Boxes to search my posts by topic, date, or recent articles.

These are all things you might expect to see on a homepage. But most visitors who click on a link never see your home page. We need to fill that gap and give them lots of things to do. Remember, we want to keep them on the website.

Now let’s skip to the very bottom of the blog post. What have we here? A photo of me and further invitations to engage and connect. 

You might note that this page has lots of reasons to buy something from me, but I never sell within the content of the post. Some content gurus insist that you should sell something on every blog post, but I say phooey. I think that’s annoying and disrespectful. I wouldn’t want to subscribe to a constant sales pitch, would you?

But we’re not finished. Under my bio is another opportunity to share the post on social media because we want to get this content to move!

Next, there are a couple of prompts to send you to similar posts on my site. These are free WordPress apps that increase your time on my site by 18%. Huzzah!

And we wrap things up with another opportunity to connect with me on something like buying a book.

Just copy me

I just gave you some ideas for overcoming the biggest mistake content creators make today. My guess is that you have almost none of this on your page today. These ideas are easy to implement and can elevate your content immediately.

Everything I’ve covered here is free if you have a WordPress site. Nothing custom. Ask your web person to review my blog posts and copy my format. I’m happy to help you in that way.

It’s upsetting that so many people put their heart and soul into great content, only to have it languish on a boring, useless page.

I hope these ideas will give your content and business the boost they deserve.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post The biggest mistake content creators make today appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Here are three colliding trends that seem to indicate a massive business opportunity:

1. AI models are running out of content they need to grow. Companies like OpenAI are so desperate they are bending the rules of copyright, or breaking them, to keep growing. AI companies are under attack by copyright lawsuits.
2. Some companies are willing to pay for new sources of content. Apple, for example, floated offers worth $50 million in licensing multiyear agreements with news publishers in order to train its AI models. OpenAI is paying the Financial Times, The Associated Press, and others for content. Here is a list of all the content licensing deals in progress.
3. We are at a unique moment in the history of writing. Individuals (like me) have been creating volumes of well-written, well-researched content for many years. Millions of creators are sitting on a mountain of content that could be monetized by AI, but its not.

Do you see where I’m heading here? This is a business waiting to happen.

The Content Creator Guild

“The biggest bottleneck today is data. We often have a pretty good sense of what are the AI algorithms that we could build if only we had the data to build them. But for a lot of applications, it’s just really hard to get the data.” — Andrew Ng, founder DeepLearning AI

Let’s look at this opportunity more closely.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are revolutionizing how machines understand and generate human-like text. But these powerful AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. They require vast amounts of high-quality, diverse content to improve their performance and produce more accurate and nuanced outputs.

The industry is so desperate for content it’s creating synthetic content — AI content fueling AI models — which represents an obvious long-term problem if most of the internet becomes self-generated.

Like it or not, AI companies require human-generated content to compete and grow.

This is where we, the creators, come in.

For years, we’ve been pouring our hearts and souls into blogs, vlogs, videos, and podcasts. We’ve amassed an enormous backlog of copyrighted material that sits idle, waiting to be discovered and appreciated by new audiences.

What if we could do more than just hope for organic traffic and a little affiliate ad revenue? What if we could actively monetize our content by licensing it to train the next generation of LLMs?

Let’s imagine this new content power. I have 15 years of blog posts, 12 years of podcast transcripts, and a dozen books about marketing sitting largely unnoticed, gathering pixel dust. Now pile on the extensive, multi-year assets of people like Seth Godin, Martin Lindstrom, Philip Kotler, David Meerman Scott, and hundreds of others, and you will have the most comprehensive marketing database on the planet.

Keep going. Gather the assets of the greatest content creators for music, home improvement, fashion, sports. This is a goldmine of nuanced expertise and opinion on any niche topic … just what the AI ordered.

The benefits of organizing

“I have content. Come and get it Elon.” — Mark Schaefer, a nice guy who enjoys money

No individual creator could get the attention of OpenAI or Google or Zuck. But a unified Creator Guild representing tens of thousands of creators could:

• Collectively negotiate with AI companies and other technology giants
• Set standards for data usage rights, royalty structures, and attribution practices
• Create a pool of money to compensate real humans in the AI Era
• Establish incentives for new human content creation
• Navigate legal gray spaces and establish precedents and guidelines around ethics and fair use. A Creator Guild could be a unified voice for our rights while providing AI content fuel that is free of legal ambiguity.

A Creator Guild is a slam dunk win-win that pays worthy creators and solves the biggest headache for AI tech companies.

Beyond the current AI opportunity, a unified organization could also have collective bargaining power to negotiate better terms with traditional publishers, platforms, advertisers, and others who are ripping us off.

A Creators Guild could create a support network for creators, offering resources, mentorship, and opportunities for collaboration. We could even fund our own research and development initiatives to explore new ways of creating and distributing content in the age of AI.

The time is now.

This is a good and obvious solution. My concern is that the train is already rolling without us.

Tumblr and WordPress are reportedly set to strike deals to sell our data to OpenAI and Midjourney. While users have an option to toggle a button and “opt-out,” there is no provision to “opt-in” to the money.

Hold on there Sparky. You’re going to take our work and monetize it … WITHOUT US?

Without a unified voice, creators are going to be squashed.

Plus, we don’t really know how our content is already being used in the planet-sized minds of AI supercomputers. If the tech companies are already skirting the law with YouTube and other platforms, chances are they’ve already scraped my blog and yours.

But here’s the problem — at some point, these companies are going to face the music with their reckless approach to copyright and guarantee safe, license-free results for text, images, and video generation. An agreement with a massive Creator Guild would be a huge step forward to provide lawful and ethical results.

To solve this problem, AI companies are already posting jobs for human writers (for less than $20 per hour!). They need quality, creative, niche content if they want these models to provide output that is less generic and more “human.”

But they will keep taking advantage of us and our work if we don’t have bargaining leverage.

An existential issue for creators

We are rapidly moving toward a post-link world. Today, if people share links to our content, we don’t get paid, but at least we are driving potential customers to our content. That benefit is vanishing.

Analyst Benedict Evans wrote (edited for clarity):

“If an LLM can read the internet and answer questions about it based on everything it’s read, then it’s not indexing pages and links anymore, but unbundling and rebundling the contents of the pages themselves. When we went from print to the web of links, we unbundled the publications: links sent us to one page.

“If I ask an LLM what credit card to get or what hotels are good in Rome, then it abstracts and synthesizes the answers from hundreds of web pages and doesn’t send anyone any traffic. It unbundles the job-to-be-done – was the aim to find a page, or to read some prose, or to get an answer? This is an existential question for the future of the web.”

The beginning of a Creator Guild

Here’s the part where you expect me to say, “Hey gang, join me and my new Creator Guild!”

Nope.

This is a big job … a complex job. It will take a sizable company with resources to organize talent and pay for lawyers to figure all this out. Perhaps this task might fall to an existing union like the Screen Writers Guild or the Writers Guild of America.

Or, perhaps some tech giant will get smart and create an opt-in contract that provides a monthly salary for the free use of content based on the size and quality of the assets (I’m sure an AI could figure this out!). Or, maybe a venture capitalist will read this post and organize a company around the idea.

I have faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. There is money to be made. Somebody out there will figure it out.

I hope this post is the spark that gets things going, and fast. Sign me up.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post It’s Time to Unite in a Content Creator Guild appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I published a second edition of this bestselling book in 2018, so it was time for another refresh through a new edition. But mentally, it was difficult to get up for the challenge.

When I write a book, it takes everything out of me — mentally and even physically. So I was determined. There must be a better way. It was time to embrace Artificial Intelligence and use it for all it’s worth! I’m entering the new age of book writing. This will be my first AI-assisted book.

And so I began.

But after about a day of intense effort, I quit. Using AI to try to write a book was a total flop. Here’s why.

The AI-assisted book flop

Almost every publicly available LLM is a sophisticated word calculator programmed to interact with humans in the most efficient way possible. It’s like a puppy dog trying to please you. It scours its billions of data points — all created in the past — to assemble the answer with the highest probability of making you smile.

But I found the best average answer from the past creates a lousy book. If you want the best average answer from the past, use Google. It does a great job.

A great book requires insight — something you can get nowhere else. An insight is a personal revelation.

It’s that lightbulb moment that makes you say, “Oh, so THAT’S what’s going on!” Like discovering that your neighbor’s prize-winning roses are so vibrant because he’s taught his dog to pee there. It’s the shocking realization that the “secret ingredient” in your grandma’s famous meatloaf is pulverized Cheez-Its (this traumatized me).

It’s unique to you. It’s your story, your humor, your style.

To stand out in the world, you must be original, and to be original, it has to be your story. Even when I asked AI to write in my voice, it was just guessing, really.

And that’s why AI flopped. It was doing an OK job … but it wasn’t me. 

I learned that, at least for now, I still matter.

But there was one way I used AI that helped a lot … and it might blow your mind.

My digital twin

For my new book, I used AI in a revolutionary new way—I employed voice synthesis to narrate the audiobook.

Narrating an audiobook yourself is a pain in the patootie. I have to work around allergies, birds singing outside your window, and sore throats. People love hearing my voice tell my own stories but I hate the weeks of work that go into it.

If you’ve been following my content, you may recall that I created the world’s first AI-generated podcast episode when I had COVID last year (I lost my voice!). The show blew people away. It sounded just like me!

So, I doubled down on the synthesized voice by loading files of my voice narrating other books into a technology called 11 Labs. It is NOT easy getting an audiobook approved by Audible, but I ran the files past my audio editor, and she said it was great. Audible approved it on the first try!

I believe this is the first voice-synthesized audiobook ever to be published. You can find it here.

Now, about this new book!

Social Media Explained 3.0 might be the most unusual and important social media book you’ll ever read. It’s not a book of “tips and tricks.” The book describes how social media fits into the marketing ecosystem today, and that is radically different from just a few years ago.

My premise is that most social media marketers are sleep-walking. They’re robotically pumping out the posts like they have for three, five, or even ten years. It’s time to “look up” and see how the world is truly working today. This book is a wake-up call!

Social Media Explained 3.0 is perfect for the busy executive, business owner, entrepreneur, or student who needs a quick and simple explanation of “what to do.” The book provides insights into:

• How social media strategy has dramatically changed (I contend it’s no longer a strategy at all)
• Unique insights into the role of content, engagement, and timing
• Practical ideas to initiate and measure a paid strategy
• The growing impact of AI on social media effectiveness
• Insights into measuring results
• Case studies illustrating social media success
• Answers to the biggest questions about measurement, organization, and budgeting

There’s another new chapter in the book that I think will be particularly helpful—a guide to keeping up with all the changes in the world of AI and social media.

In the end, this book is all me — my ideas, my insights, my way of connecting the dots in a new way you’ve seen in all of my books.

I hope you’ll check it out and leave me a review. Thanks! — Mark

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Why writing an AI-assisted book was a total flop appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my blog. Crazy, right? I realize that nobody cares about an anniversary like this … I don’t even care, honestly … but I thought I would use the milestone as a teachable moment because blogging changed my life. And here is the main lesson of the milestone:

To stand out in this world, you have to be known. To be known, you have to show up consistently. Consistency is more important than genius.

Unfortunately, this is where most people fail. They stop and start, or perhaps they never start at all.

In my Personal Branding Master Class, I show a slide depicting my personal income attributed to “being known.” My income grew steadily over time (except 2020!) because the more I am known, the bigger my audience, the greater the opportunities, the higher the book sales, and the more valuable the speaking and consulting engagements. This progress can only come through consistently showing up with helpful content.

Creating meaningful content is hard work, and at low times, I wonder if it’s worth it. While I’m working on a blog post, my friends might be reading, hiking, or cooking a great meal. Blogging is a sacrifice.

But when I emerge from this introspection, I return to the same conclusion: Everything started from the blog, and every business benefit comes from the thought leadership I’ve built from this space. In fact, without a doubt, blogging changed my life forever, in these five ways:

1. Deep emotional connection

A few years ago, I received an email from a blog reader: “I’ve been reading your blog for three years. It led me to buy your latest book, and it is the best business book I’ve read in the last ten years.”

It was signed by the CMO of a Fortune 100 company. Two years later, he hired me for a consulting project to transform his content marketing department.

Let’s dissect what happened:

• A stranger built an affinity for me through my blog.
• Over time, the affinity became trust … a strong enough bond for him to hire me, even though I had never met him.
• To earn his business, I didn’t have to apply for the job or bid against competitors. I was simply awarded the work, and I named my price.

If I didn’t have a blog, how much would I have had to spend on advertising to have a success story like that?

Brand marketing is about building an emotional connection that differentiates you from the competition. What a wonderful world we live in where a guy like me has the opportunity to build relationships — and a business — through my content. You can do it, too.

2. The introvert’s revenge

I hate networking. I am the worst networker in the world. I’m an introvert who loves a quiet dinner with friends, but put me in a room with a lot of people, and I want to crawl into a hole.

I know that sounds weird coming from a person who delivers keynote speeches in front of thousands of people, but it is different. I come alive on a stage because I can teach and entertain, and I’m really good at it. But shaking hands all night at a cocktail reception is my idea of torture.  I am a mingler misfit.

But through a blog, I can build business friendships with people every day without actually meeting them!

3. The fuel for a legacy

When my blog hit its tenth anniversary, I wrote that my biggest accomplishment was that over all those hundreds of posts, I never humiliated myself. My record still stands!

I have not made a major stumble because blogging forces me to clarify my ideas. Before I put something into the world, I think it through deeply. Is it thorough? Have I considered all sides? Am I being kind and showing up in a way I can be proud of?

These clarified blog concepts are later used in my speeches and books. The seeds of my legacy are planted here.

4. Personal reward

When I was in the corporate world, I would get an annual performance review (if I was lucky!).

Although I generally had an idea of how I was doing, there always seemed to be a zinger in there. Nobody gets a perfect performance review, right?

The cool thing about blogging is that I get a performance every week. Here is a comment posted on LinkedIn recently by Jim Hunt.

Isn’t that awesome? It makes my heart soar. I just can’t believe how lucky I am to have an audience of people who appreciate my work.

That’s the fuel that keeps me going. When I create a blog post, a podcast episode, or a book, I have only one mantra in my head: “I will never let you down.”

5. Personal healing

In the first chapter of my book KNOWN, I wrote about the darkest time of my life. This was so difficult for me to reveal, but I did it to show the reader that when I started my personal branding journey, I was a mess. I was below zero. I wanted to encourage people — If I can do it, you can too.

In those dark days, the stress of my life was killing me. When I went to see a doctor, my blood pressure was so high she would not let me leave her office. She was afraid I was about to have a stroke or worse.

The doctor demanded that I monitor my blood pressure every hour of the day. And this is when I witnessed something miraculous. There was one hour every day when my blood pressure was normal. It was when I was blogging.

There is a zen about blogging that sends you to a different place of focus and peace, even when the world is terrible.

Even more importantly, when I started posting my ideas online, I received feedback from people who didn’t know what I was going through. It was so nice to connect with people who didn’t know of my suffering. I was so tired of being sad.

Perhaps it is too dramatic to say that blogging saved my life, but mentally, physically, spiritually, and financially, I am transformed from creating these words on a screen.

Thank you, friend

I will never forget the moment 15 years ago when I received the very first comment on this blog. It was a moment of awe. Somebody read my work and spent their precious time commenting on it.

I have never forgotten that feeling. I re-live that sense of awe every day when I get feedback on my work.

Whether you have followed me for 15 years or this is our first meeting, thank you for being here. I’m just getting started, and I will never let you down.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post 15 Years On, Five Ways Blogging Changed My Life Forever appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” — Pablo Picasso

I was just scolded in a Facebook Group.

I love nature and participate in several communities that share photos and experiences with wildlife. One group is dedicated to sharing photos of birds. I don’t have a great camera like most of the people in the group, but I recently posted a watercolor painting I did of a popular local bird called a black-capped chickadee.

I received many warm responses from people who loved the art, and they encouraged me to share more. In fact, this post received more likes (275!) than any post in the group for the entire year. Here is the art:

But then the group administrator stepped into the comment section and asked me if the painting was based on my own photo. I said no, and he threatened to kick me out of the group. I’ll get back to this controversy and how it relates to you, your content, and AI, but first, I need to set up my case with a little story about Leonardo Davinci.

Bet you didn’t see that coming.

Art is iteration

Leonardo DaVinci was arguably the most creative human being who ever lived, a magical genius who was endlessly curious.

What struck me about his life was how most of his ideas and breakthroughs were collaborative. Even his most famous illustration, “Vitruvian Man,” was inspired by Vitruvius, a Roman author, architect, and civil engineer who lived centuries before Leonardo’s time.

Leonardo was a beloved man, always surrounded by friends. One day, his friend Francesco showed him a sketch of a man in a circle, based on the detailed descriptions from a Vitruvian book. Part of the Renaissance movement was rediscovering ancient ideas and reframing them in modern terms, and Francesco was excited by his revelation. It spurred Leonardo to consider the dimensions of a human being in mathematical terms.

Another friend, Giacomo Andrea, scribbled some interpretations of the Vitruvian idea and showed Leonardo how the human figure could be circumscribed in a circle.

Leonardo was mesmerized by the idea and inspired to find his own manuscript of Vitruvius’ ancient work. He developed his famous drawing from those ideas, and in both scientific precision and artistic beauty, his illustration is in an entirely different realm than the work of his predecessors.

Leonardo’s most famous drawing was built upon an ancient idea that inspired a scribbled drawing by a friend that led to a discussion and more drawings by friends. Yes, Leonardo delivered something exquisite and unique, but it could only have happened from a combination of ideas from four different people.

Placing this in the context of today

Let’s connect the dots and get back to my painting. Where did the inspiration for the bird come from?

I’m not a good enough painter to create something out of my head, so I needed a model. Here’s my process: I go to MidJourney — an app that creates generative art — and type in what I want to paint, like, “watercolor painting of a black-capped chickadee on a branch,” and the program delivered this:

This computer image is much better than the hand-made painting I ultimately produced, but it gave me a general direction. I reduced the busy background and used a technique that I favor to create abstract patterns behind the bird. I changed many little details, largely due to my limitations as an artist!

My work was not completely original. It is an iteration of an AI work — which is an iteration of many other artworks. I participated in a virtual collaboration. Leonardo would have loved it!

The AI work that served as my model is an amalgam of other artists. Am I hurting these artists by not providing attribution? No. The AI art is simply a guide, but I’m producing something of my own.

If you go into any major art museum in the world, you’re likely to see art students sitting at the foot of a painting, drawing it. Iteration and practice are how we all learn to be great bloggers, podcasters, speakers, and video producers. The excellent work of a creator comes from thousands of intentional and unintentional sparks from those who came before us.

The very day I was scolded, somebody from my RISE community asked me, “I loved your blog post today. Can I steal that idea for my own?” I was flattered and, of course, agreed. What a wonderful moment! Somebody is making progress in the world based on inspiration from my own work. My writing provided a spark of momentum for another person.

That’s how the creative world works, at its best.

The future of creators and copyright

Let’s bring this down to a practical application and the problems we face today.

All creativity and invention depend on iteration. Today, the existing copyright laws aren’t built to handle AI amalgamations. Similarly, AI companies aren’t built to reward or even acknowledge individual contributions. Creators are suing AI companies. AI companies are suing creators. Something has to give.

I want to be clear that I am not dismissing true copyright infringement, where wholesale content is literally lifted and pasted without attribution. This has happened to me many times, and it hurts. More than once, a famous author stole something right out of one of my books without attribution  … and later apologized, but that doesn’t change anything, does it? They stole it on purpose.

Similarly, the recent lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI showed many examples in which OpenAI software recreated New York Times stories nearly verbatim.

In an IEEE Spectrum article, authors Gary Marcus and Reid Southen pinpoint the problem.

“LLMs are “black boxes”—systems in which we do not fully understand the relation between input (training data) and outputs. What’s more, outputs can vary unpredictably from one moment to the next. The prevalence of plagiaristic responses likely depends heavily on factors such as the size of the model and the exact nature of the training set. Since LLMs are fundamentally black boxes (even to their own makers, whether open-sourced or not), questions about plagiaristic prevalence can probably only be answered experimentally, and perhaps even then only tentatively.

“…The mere existence of plagiaristic outputs raises technical questions (can anything be done to suppress such outputs?), sociological questions (what could happen to journalism as a consequence?), legal questions (would these outputs count as copyright infringement?), and practical questions (when an end-user generates something with a LLM, can the user feel comfortable that they are not infringing on copyright? Is there any way for a user who wishes not to infringe to be assured that they are not?

This is the ultimate answer. We need a process where truly generative content is free from copyright constraints. If we don’t, the future of creators — and breakthrough creativity — is in jeopardy. Perhaps we need an official designation for generative content that assures a work is so far from an original that it is free from licensing issues. Maybe we call it a genuine fake? : )

In any event, we need to recognize a truth of the human experience — the most imaginative movies, art, and books we love were built on the shoulders of others.

Or, perhaps, the servers of others.

Something new: My bird painting and a few of my other watercolors are now available to buy as prints at this online shop. 

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. 

Images courtesy of MidJourney

The post Artificial Intelligence, Iteration and the Future of Creators appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.