I just got back from Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World
and after seeing everything for a few days I came to one conclusion.
AI is not gonna save bad marketing.
In fact, it might almost expose it even faster.
Let's talk about that today.
G'day everyone, it's Michelle J Raymond here back from a week and
a bit in the US of A in Anaheim.
Yep, that's right, home of Disneyland.
But this time it was for Social Media Marketing World which also
incorporated AI Business World this year.
So for those of you who haven't been before, set the scene.
It's about two and a half thousand marketers, social media managers, business
owners all in the one place, all there to talk shop across all the social
media platforms and obviously how AI is impacting all of that was a big part.
So we have vendors that are showing off new tools which was
kinda cool to go and check out.
Um, but ultimately we had marketers, and I watched them, cramming their brains full
of new ideas for, the best part of what?
Two and a half, three days straight and I watched them furiously
typing and trying to keep up with everything that they're learning.
I guess if you saw them it's almost like brains exploding.
I know how they felt because I was doing the same thing.
Now I'm gonna share what I think actually matters in B2B marketing
right now based on the lessons that I learned while I was at the show.
But honestly I'm gonna have to say that my favourite part is still being in
the room with so many amazing people.
I'm going to share with you some of my key lessons from what I've taken away so
far with the disclaimer of this I suck at learning in a classroom style environment.
So having the most amazing speakers in the world, on stage, it is
still very hard for me to sit still and listen and take it all in.
My preferred learning style is reading.
And so those of you who are listening to this podcast, you're probably laughing
thinking, "Well, why do I do this?" It's exactly the reason why I do this podcast
because there are those of you out there, if I say, "Go and read this really long
blog or newsletter or post or article," whatever it happens to be, your eyes
are gonna roll back into your head and you're gonna go, "No, give me a podcast."
So that's the first thing.
I haven't watched all of the speakers back.
There are some that I've definitely tagged that I wanna catch up on.
But that doesn't mean that I didn't learn a lot, and that I don't have
anything that I can share with you.
So let's go into key lesson number one, and it's the one that I've been banging
on about pretty much all year on this podcast, and that is strategy matters
so much more now than it ever has.
And I know that obviously there are so many tools out there that
AI helps you to do so much more, but the volume isn't the goal.
And I think that that's what's happening right now is where AI tools promise
productivity and to give marketers back all of this time, we've actually
just swapped that time savings out into doing so much more stuff, and
keeping up seems to be part of the problem that we've got right now.
Now, my talk on Company Pages, five strategies that everybody misses for
conversion, was kind of built on the promise of if we go back to clarity
and we get that right in everything we do from the time we build the Page
through putting content out, engaging with our audience, that is gonna help
us so much more than just doing stuff at scale which lands, like, with a splat.
Feels like you've been slimed, right?
That's why I think there's so much pushback right now on AI content
and tools, and I've been guilty of that myself, because the volume
is there but honestly it doesn't feel like it's talking to me.
I miss that feeling when content I read it or I watch a video, whatever
it happens to be, when I go, "You're actually talking to me, Michelle J
Raymond. This is me. Are you reading my mind?" And so I think that's why the
content has become so easy to ignore.
And if we come back to how LinkedIn's changed right now, LinkedIn wants you to
be an expert on the topic of your choice.
You choose, but just make sure that you stay on track and make it
really, really clear what you do.
So coming back to strategy is, I don't know.
I don't know how many times I can say this, but it is so, so, so important.
And shout-out to all of the LinkedIn speakers that were there.
We had AJ Wilcox, Judi Fox, Louise Brogan, Mandy McEwen, and myself.
Like, go Team LinkedIn because we all were there to support each other, and
if you listen to each of our talks, you will actually find out that we were all
kind of saying, "Get back to strategy," because it's so easy to be distracted.
Lesson number two, I'm going to say that the general vibe is that most AI tools
are accelerators and not replacements.
Now, I have to confess something.
I got the chance to speak to a couple of the AI speakers, and this was offline,
as I said, in some of the corridors, which is where the magic happens.
And one of the things that they said to me is, "Yeah, this is really cool.
I went down a rabbit hole to learn this for eight hours, 12 hours, days at a
time" to learn how to be good at the skills that they brought to the event.
And I was just thinking about the B2B marketing teams that I work with, and
I'm wondering, when do you guys ever get eight to 12 hours to just go offline
and learn how to do these skills?
And that's why I think there's a lot of hesitancy around adopting AI
tools, not because you don't like them, and I had that conversation
with a lot of people, but if it takes too long to master, then you just
don't have the time to give to it.
So That was kind of interesting for me.
And another interesting thing was, yeah, that's really cool to have all of these
tools, and the AI is great, but I'm not allowed to use it within my business.
So for instance, a lot of people are only allowed to use Microsoft Copilot,
and they don't wanna lose their jobs because all of a sudden they're putting
proprietary information into these other tools, and the repercussions
of that nobody wants to risk.
And so that's another reality for what's going on with marketers.
And I would love it if you are watching this on YouTube, leave me a comment, let
me know what's going on in your business.
Is your business fully supportive, or are you hesitant because you don't wanna
do something that jeopardises your role?
Now, that also applies if you are running your own business
and using your client's IP.
And that's something that we discuss in, our business right now is,
are we allowed to use this stuff?
Now, it's great for me.
I can use whatever tool I want.
And that is something that I, you know, try to reel it in because
there are so many different tools.
I was trying to think of examples, but I was reading someone that
said today, you know, we don't have every single streaming service.
You know, we don't have a log-on for all of them all at the same time.
That's a lot.
Now, in fairness, I do have quite a few.
But it's about picking and choosing the right one for the right time.
So I think the plan here is, and the important nuance, is that most of
the AI team were saying it's useful for repurposing, interesting for your
workflows, but it still requires strategy and obviously editorial judgement.
Lesson number three for me was that the human perspective is
definitely becoming more valuable.
If I had a dollar every time I heard someone speak about authenticity
or storytelling or emotions things like loneliness came into play in
some of the, speeches that I heard.
When you think about that, if we come back to it, it's your lived
experience Which is so valuable.
Now, for some people, you might be high-fiving and excited about
that, and I am one of those people.
I love that opinions matter right now.
I love that the more you show that you understand your customer,
the better off that you will be.
And original thinking does matter.
But I also think from this is that there are a lot of people out there
that will hear things that I've just spoken about, and be honest, does the
thought of being more human and share your thoughts as a marketer or as a
business owner or as a social media manager, do you get pushback on that idea?
'Cause I'm not convinced that everybody wants to be out there storytelling,
and storytelling sometimes gets confused for sharing personal stuff
when it comes to LinkedIn especially.
So I know that I've spoken about previously the power of thought
leadership, the power of employee advocacy, how company Pages and
employees work together, the power of two, how powerful comments are,
how important conversations are, how much we value real expertise.
But I'm still not convinced that there's anything more than a few percent of
people in any business that are prepared to put themselves out there and do this.
And I think that fear factor, which we don't talk about on those stages enough,
is the thing that is gonna hold a lot of people back as individuals and as the
business, and that comes from the top to the bottom and everywhere in between.
So does AI help with this?
Maybe.
But I'm not seeing that those who didn't wanna create before all of a sudden going,
"I've now got AI tools. Get out of my way. I can't wait to do this." So that was
another thing that I've been pondering.
And again, DM me on LinkedIn.
Let me know, what are you thinking about all of this stuff?
That, as I said, has been my favourite part of the whole three days in
Social Media Marketing World, having conversations with real-life marketers
that are doing this day by day.
So if we are not connected on LinkedIn, please make sure that you reach out.
Let me know that you listen to the podcast.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how AI is in reality in your day-to-day
jobs because, yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure that it's living up to the hype.
What's the next lesson that I take away from Social Media Marketing World
that I think that you need to know?
I think that B2B marketers need to find a way to make sure that they
don't burn out and don't live in a constant state of being overwhelmed.
And I really got the pressure to master AI, the pressure to
post more, the pressure to be experts across all platforms.
I was having a chat to one person, shout out to Erica, and when she told
me what a day in the life was for her role, and we spoke about this in
depth, it's definitely the standout conversation for me over those three
days, my jaw was on the ground.
I was thinking how do you do comms?
How do you do social?
How do you do thought leadership for leaders?
How do you do blogs?
How do you keep it updated?
And she just shrugged and she's like, "That's my job, Michelle. That's
the requirements of the job that I have." And I could see just by how
many notes people were taking during the sessions, they were typing away.
We had people that had recording devices, which is a story for another day.
But ultimately, at some point you become the own bottleneck to your leveling
up, and I think the key here is to come back and just pick one small problem.
What is one thing that you could implement over the next three months?
And let's have realistic timeframes 'cause most of you are in back-to-back meetings.
Is it that you could get better at repurposing?
Or is it that you could now learn how easy it is to add captions into your videos?
Or clipping tools, like maybe that's something that
you haven't checked out Opus Pro,
which makes this process really easy and I'll shove my affiliate link into
the show notes because I think it needs to be part of the arsenal of tools
that you need in today's creator world.
And I think then there's also tools that can help you with research or
obviously meeting summaries are out there but, and you can use them for content.
But also how are you gonna organise your content?
I think they're the things or types of topics that if you just pick one, right?
Just one.
Just breathe in, breathe out, and make this happen over the next three months.
And unrealistic timelines are the thing that's probably gonna kill most
people because you think it's so easy.
Everybody else appears to have this under control.
Yeah, I'm telling you in the conversations that I had I'm
not so sure that's the case.
If I had to wrap up the podcast episode today and talk
about what surprised me most,
what surprised me most is that a lot of the talks went back to fundamentals,
back to getting strategy first, back to things like authenticity,
back to things like building trust.
I don't think, marketers, that there is anything new right now in
marketing that you missed out on.
Every talk was about getting back to fundamentals because it's like that whole
concept of putting icing on a mud cake.
If you don't get the base built right and you try and use AI to make
up for that, you just get exposed quickly, and you go back further
faster than any of your peers that maybe aren't even trying these things.
The best marketers that I met at the conference were strategic thinkers.
They were looking for one piece of the puzzle or answers to something
within their business that they could take back, rather than, as
some other people described it, drinking from the fire hydrant.
Honestly, there is so much information in those three days
that I'm not sure that you could take it all in, and you certainly
couldn't go away and implement it.
So those that don't chase trends, those that look for, "How can what I'm learning
build on the strategy that I've already built?" Those that are open to realising
that they've drifted off course and need to go back and course-correct,
they're the best marketers that I think are gonna have the most success.
And from that perspective, I challenge you listeners this week to go back...
And this is a example of one of the tasks that I gave in my presentation.
Go back to your profile or to your Company Page and ask somebody else who
doesn't work closely with you, give them 10 seconds, set a timer, and ask them
to come up with what you do, who you do it for, and what makes you different.
Even if they can answer one of those three things, you're way out in front And
it was so fun to talk to a group of page admins after my presentation who asked
me to do that on each of their Pages.
And what we realised was their Pages were the most bland version of
what their businesses had achieved.
So if you discover the same thing, you know what you need to fix.
If you need help, you know where to find me.
But ultimately, marketers that are listening to this, the thing that you
need to know is getting back to strategy and as part of that clarity is the thing
that is the most important lesson that I took away from Social Media Marketing
World and the one that I think is going to improve your results on LinkedIn
more than any other thing that you'll learn this year, more than any algorithm
report, more than any research report.
Get back to strategy and in turn clarity.
Until next week, cheers.