S E751: SEO in the AI Era: Stephan Bajaio on Digital Visibility

Speaker A: And in the world of AI, where we're about to go, you know, where synthetic content means less and people are starting to become desensitized to it, the humanity of there's a person, a real person behind this with something written by a real person with the wisdom of your 10,000 hours. That's going to cut through the noise that that's going to make all the difference. That is the differentiating quality that wins over the next five years versus trying to chase a chatbot that shouldn't be a chatbot.

Speaker B: Step into the world of success with your brand Amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. 25 years in digital will either make you cynical or make you wise. My next guest chose wise. He's one of the original co founders of Conductor, one of the world's leading enterprise SEO platforms, where he spent over a decade as chief evangelist building a 65 person global team, working with Fortune 500 brands and watching the company navigate a, uh, WeWork acquisition on its way to a $500 million plus valuation. Today, he's the CEO of Vibelogic, a digital strategy firm built on a simple but uncomfortable truth. Most businesses are invisible to the very customers who need them most and they don't even know it. He's also a husband, a girl dad to a five year old who has absolutely zero respect for his calendar. So hopefully we'll get this done before she comes home from the park and someone who openly admits he's still figuring out how to be a human being instead of a human doing. That last part is a big part of why I wanted him on the show. Stefan Baggio, welcome to the show, Anika.

Speaker A: Thank you. That's a very nice introduction. I'll do my best to live up to it. How's it?

Speaker B: Well, I want to talk about the origin story that nobody tells. The founding of Conductor is interesting, but it's not the most interesting part. What happened inside the run, the identity evolution and the cost is. You've described yourself as someone who wore a lot of hats at Conductor, but the chief evangelist title stuck. So what does it actually mean to evangelize something in your own hands without it becoming performative?

Speaker A: Oh, I'll step back for a second. Everything I ever built a Conductor and um, you know, I was officially a co founder. Entitled. But like, not in the same way as let's Say, somebody who gets to ride off into the sunset at the end of the thing or whatever, but nonetheless a shareholder and someone who had tremendous stake in it. And the reason I preempt all of that is, is my title became something I had to earn. So the co founder aspect of my title was something I had to earn. When we reconstituted the company, which conductor had many incantations or versions of itself throughout the 14 plus years I was there. But when we first founded it, everyone who was left from the original company of link experts, who was not sold off with the business, which was myself and about 20 some odd other people, were all named co founder in title and in share. To some degree, more token than otherwise. We could say that was a way to keep people there. We could say a lot of things if you want to be cynical rather than wise. But I looked at it as an opportunity to say, okay, what if this was my business? Like, I do have shares, and I was given more over time, and I got percentages of the company. And, uh, ultimately it was, what am I doing to make this work, this mine? How do I own it? Not to mention most of my companies or my clients were Fortune 500, Internet retailer 1000. So in order for me to walk into the room, which by the way, I still have imposter syndrome to this day, but in order for me to walk into the room, that title meant a lot. That title let the CMO of Logitech in, let me into the room, or the CMO of Shutterstock, or the entire C Suite at, uh, StubHub. Right? And let me tell them what I knew. Now, the interesting part about how we built things at Conductor, oftentimes Seth was the original co Founder. Founder of the company. And I would always tell him, because I'm ADD and I am, um, better at setting ships to sail than I am bringing them back to harbor. Let's build this. We need to do this. There's a m. Need. There's a need. There's a need. So the first need I saw, the people selling the product or the people the account management group couldn't be the ones to upsell. Didn't make sense. Wasn't working. It was a trust issue. It was an inability to, like, renew. And I said, seth, uh, let's do this. And of course, Seth said what he always said to me. Prove to me it can happen. Like, go do it. I said, okay, well, I currently have a job of managing this team, but I guess I'll do it as well. And that's Every time I would go and do the job myself, prove that it worked, and then hand it off to someone else, right, who could carry that ball, build out the teams, do a lot more stuff than I could. I'd say the biggest version of that was saying we don't have enough SEO power inside of an SEO product for enterprise, where we're handing them the keys to, let's call this a fancy race car or a Ferrari. And these people on the other side of the phone, frankly are uh, like 16 year old learner's permit kids. So they shouldn't really have the keys to a Ferrari, let alone should they be leasing one. So it became a thing where I said, okay, well we really need to get the internal knowledge in place. Let's start from zero. As usual, Seth goes, go start it. So me, two kids, one job out of school, are doing keyword research until 87% of new business is adopting that as part of their onboarding. They're buying it, literally. So we're like, oh no, no. Well they shouldn't have to buy it. Let's make it part of onboarding here. You guys will get the credit for bringing that in. Okay, then it's managed services. Then, then, then. But what was the reason why I've taken you down such a long, long path is not just because I'm long winded, but it's because you need to understand that I grew up in a time, place and space where I was doing an educational process with companies that were too big to understand what was at their disposal. So the SEO inside of every one of those companies was a lowly. Hey, Jeff knows HTML. Let's bring him in as the SEO. Right? Jessica's been running our. They don't all start with J's, I promise. Jessica's been running our. She's a general marketer here, so she knows how to do paid. Let's bring her in on organic. And it was basically this like fill in the blank kind of situation. And I kept trying to speak truth to power in saying, guys, you're missing it. Like there's so much more opportunity here. The search engine, no one lies to it. It's an engine of intention. And what they find is transformative to your business not because you're just selling, but because you can solve, you can build relationship, you can do things in a digital way to, you can't otherwise do. And it's, uh, at your disposal if you choose to open your eyes to it. But unfortunately they treated it very much like a channel. So that led to evangelism. It led to this idea of, okay, I've been doing this. By the time I became the evangelist, I think it was the last five years, let's say, at my time at Conductor, and I had had so much experience with all these companies fighting uphill synthesis, like, pushing the boulder, that I could point out all of their shortcomings. Like, very quickly. I could show them that the professional services team had given them recommendations for content or strategy or technical and how few and far between were actually able to fulfill it. Which really showed these large companies, you're a cruise ship, and it takes 40 people to turn the boat. And right now your competitors are speedboats, and they're able to disrupt you at any given moment. You're wondering why you're not successful. And even in the state we're in, we still can't get the 40 people to turn the boat. Uh, so, like, that was a little bit of why I felt the need to be the one charged with field loyalty, brand marketing in that and thought leadership marketing, really. And I was given the right to speak on stages all over the world and paid to do it, which was nice. And I got to support the company I'd helped build for, you know, over a decade and try to influence the SEO industry in a way that allowed for them to see further than just the channel they were stuck in. Maybe I made a little difference. Maybe.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I would argue that you made a pretty large difference, but you mentioned that you had imposter syndrome and that you still have it sometimes when you walk in a room. Talk to us about that.

Speaker A: Sure. I mean, I, uh, think if you don't have that, Honestly, if you don't have that, I'm worried. And I mean that in the best way. Like, as soon as you start believing your own press, it's the beginning of the end, in essence. Right. You've crescendoed like, it's done. And that's not to say confidence isn't possible, but it's just to say, like, are you coming at it with a sense of, I don't want to be the smartest one in the room. I shouldn't be the smartest one in the room. As they say, if I'm the smartest one in the room, I'm in the wrong room. Right. So, of course I know walking in. I've had a tremendous amount of experience, but I'm A, I'm never going to use it as a sword, so that's not my approach. And then B, I think you should come to the situation a bit humbled to be able to have the right kind of conversation you want. Now, that doesn't mean you don't jump in. And God knows I've scared a few executives many a time jumping in. There are some we work stories in other cases where I probably scared Seth and others in my jumping in. But luckily they turned out well and in other cases, fairly well. So I'd say, you know, being cognizant of that, I'd rather live it that way. Maybe that's not the healthiest way to be, but I'd rather be that way than thinking I have all the answers.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's fair. I don't know that I would call that imposter syndrome. Exactly. But I will say that's very valid.

Speaker A: Let me put it to you this way. I have earned my spot in the room, but I never feel like I have. And that's just. That's the aspect of imposter syndrome. I will still. I will still get butterflies before I get on stage, and then I will blank out, do my thing on autopilot in a weird way, not remember what I said, get off stage, and people will come. Not always, but mostly and say, that was awesome. I can't believe that that was well said. I. This disconnected, that connected. I'm. Do we have it on video? Because I don't remember a thing.

Speaker B: Well, this could be a whole other conversation rabble for another episode. But I completely get what you're saying, because you can be. You can have knowledge and you can be at a great place in your career. You can have built a lot of things, help people, but also know that you still have a lot to learn. And also, I think those butterflies are still important because that is the excitement. I still get excited in butterflies when I'm doing my podcast because I'm really excited about the people I get to speak to and now have a new friend. Right. That I can.

Speaker A: I'm excited. I've been excited to come on here for a while, so I'm stoked.

Speaker B: So you mentioned WeWork, so let's talk about the WeWork chapter of the business. You survived an acquisition by a company that was also imploding. That's not a normal founder experience. It's not a normal acquisition experience. So talk to us a little bit about what that was like, what happened and what you did after.

Speaker A: Sure. So I think, like, it's even more interesting in that, uh, Seth and Adam had a relationship. Right. They both were at Baruch in, uh. I think it was. They were getting their MBAs. They were both told that their ideas would not amount to anything. At the time, Seth was trying to push online therapy in a time and place where there was no. Like, I don't even know if high speed Internet existed at that point. So he might have been way too early. And Adam was. Was like, selling onesies with knee pads for kids because he'd had. I mean, he ended up having five kids, but, like, where he felt like that would be valuable, right? Neither of which ended up being successful. So I guess Baruch wasn't wrong in that respect. But both of them would be prolific entrepreneurs, so whatever. What ends up happening is Seth randomly goes downstairs to go cash a check or put a check into the bank. I don't know what the story really is, but ultimately he bumps into Adam. Adam's looking at space for WeWork in 2 Park Avenue, where Conductor was based. They bump into each other in the lobby. Oh, your office is here. So on and so forth. Seth brings him upstairs. Our place was always startupy. Two different brews on kegs, razor scooters throughout the office, beanbag chairs everywhere. Adam, 6 foot 4, Israeli dude with long hair who comes in. I don't even know who Adam Newman is. He's, uh, I love the feeding. Your place is amazing. It's the vibe, you know. And so the story is he asks Seth, take me to your smartest marketer. And so he somehow takes him to me. And like, I'm like, oh. And Adam showed me the app on his phone, which is the app for WeWork. And how, like, you can find people in your building that can, like, be a designer or this or that. And he's like showing me Community and Essence digitally. And so I'm like, that's great, but don't you have multiple buildings? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, so what if I want a designer from like another building? Or, like. And he's like, oh, well, we don't have. And I'm like. I'm like, well, you know, I just do what I do, which is essentially connect dots and look at systems that I think are unoptimized and go, like, how could we do this better? Or what's a different way of looking at it? Because I don't tend to look at things from like A to Z. It's just my nature. So I see this and I just sell. And the next thing you know, he's like, okay, okay, uh, you're going to sell us. And I'm like, what he's like, I'm like, there are four days until like Thanksgiving. So I'm like, oh, shit. And so later he leaves and they're like, do you know who that was? And he's a billion dollar CEO and I'm like starting to understand what we work. And the next thing you know, it's like we're putting together a pitch for them to become our client, not for any acquisition. So I end up sleeping at the office, which has never happened otherwise. I think I lived at the time in Stanford, Connecticut. There's no way at 4am when I was done with the pitch, could go back home and come back. So I had to pick up Seth at his apartment at 8am to make it to the meeting. We ended up going. And we sat there on the floor in one of the main WeWork offices while we watched Adam give a, uh, town hall. Whole company. For context, at this point, they might have been 3,000 employees. For context, when we leave the organization, there's 13,000. That's about two and a half years later. So if that gives you a sense of the rocket ship, which also leads to the demise in my mind, right? So essentially we get them as a client. We build an SEO team for them, we build a content team for them. We build out like 13, 14 people that are on my professional services team, but serving specifically. We work. And I'm having arguments with Adam about the term co working and that, yes, we have to use it and I don't care. Like, this is where I will die on this hill. Like, we're not doing it any other way. This is the vernacular that's used. You can tell me you want to change it, that's fine. But I'll need millions of dollars of budget to convince the rest of the world to use other terms right now. This is what they're looking for. This is what we need to be. And going through that process, Seth and I got to experience. We work, drank for the fire hose. Seth much more than me and being close with Adam. Um, but I was involved in a whole bunch of stuff. And then ultimately the purchase, which I think was well intentioned, and we definitely got in there and got our hands dirty in whatever ways, shapes and forms we could. But I don't think the vision was clear as to what we would do within the company. I think there were a lot of ideas, but again, ideas weren't lacking and even the ability to fulfill them wasn't necessarily lacking. At WeWork, I think the ultimate cohesion of the direction was missing But I will tell you this to this day, Adam was. He vibrated on another level. He's unlike any other human I think I've ever met. I safely say that with no offense to you or any other human for that matter. It was just, um, after the first meeting with him at their office, you vibrated. You felt a different sense of things. You really believed his belief in the ability to change the world. His intention seemed crystal clear. And I think a false bill of goods has been thrown in this whole situation in the way it's been portrayed in the news and in media and all that stuff, because I really do think Adam felt he could change the world. And I think he was trying to. I think it's very hard to grow any company at that speed, to do it effectively. I mean, every meeting I went into There was the VP of. The VP of something or other from Amazon or PayPal or eBay or you name the big company of note. And these are all the new exit. We work with the new Wyatt. We work. And nobody has tribal knowledge because no one's been there. The people that have been there long enough, there aren't enough of them to be in all the meetings. So you're walking in and every single meeting, I'm meeting a new executive who's now charged with a new thing, who's, uh. And I'm m. Like, this is not possible. Like, this. This isn't. How is this going to work? Right? I've seen scale before. I saw it during the dot com boom and bust, but I'd never seen it. I'd never seen scale at this scale. And so it was so massive and so appealing in many ways, but it also. It also was just difficult to understand, like, the magnitude of it, the capability of it, their ability to open locations and more and try and do. And I mean, every good intention, really. Every good intention. So I have no ill will whatsoever. You know, I'm sure everyone's had different experiences in their careers and we work and so forth, but from where I sat, it was a very unique, interesting experience. I wouldn't trade for anything. And while financially it didn't end up being the best thing for me at the time, you know, our ability to buy back the company before the S1, which is what happened, was a little bit of kismet. It was a little bit of, like, strategy on Seth's part. It was a little bit of, like, I'd say, you know, dumb luck. And ultimately, it put us in a much better position. You know, we were able to grow the Business again at a better valuation at uh, more ownership and take that on to a, uh, nice half a billion dollar mark. At which point it was. I was a bit long in the tooth and it was time for me to move on. And I said, let's go see how the other half lives and became a CMO at a software company just to see how that was for a hot second.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you just said a lot about culture, you said a lot about scaling quickly without that institutional knowledge. And one thing you've talked about in that time was also building teams that outlast you.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Can you talk a little bit about that and what that means to you and why that's so important?

Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think it's great that you could claim that people who were at these big companies chose to go to a wework. For example, in my case with Conductor, I was far more proud, and not to take this the wrong way, but I was far more proud of the number of clients that ended up coming to work for us. So like, not that we ever poached them, we never did. But so many people that worked adjacent to us wanted to come work with us. And that was like the best award we got. Lots of people, lots of awards for best places to work and so on and so forth. But to me that was the clearest testament. And where they went afterwards was also the clearest testament. So I never held any sense that this was to be your 14 years. For me it was for other people, it could be their three years, it could be their five years, it could be their one year. Right. But as long as the time in which they invested gave them more than what they put in, and I don't mean that in dollars, I mean that in growth, then it was 1000% worth it. That was all I ever really wanted. That's not to say I don't care about the KPIs. It's not to say I don't care about the business. It's not to say any of that. But it's only to say like those things are fleeting, the change an individual has. Right. It literally is. Time is the only asset we have that's irreplenishable. So even though you can get paid, and I knew we wouldn't pay the most, we wouldn't pay the least. But like, I knew someone could always get. And I used to say this to people in interviews, you can probably get more for your hour somewhere else. The question is whether or not you will get the value of that hour in A different way. So oftentimes I would sit with teams whether it was and I don't even like skip level, uh, that concept bothers me. There's no level. I uh, like to flatten things and just say we're all a team now, let's talk. But when I would go and look and get in conversations with people, especially at the beginning of them coming on board, I not only wanted and I tried broke a thousand HR rules by doing this earmuffs any of my old head is the people. But I, I would say, hey listen, a year from now we're going to be talking about X, Y or Z and it's going to be you were able to accomplish this in the business that in the business you don't even know what you want to accomplish yet. You're too new to know that. But as a person, personally, what do you want to grow? How do you want to be different? And you get really interesting answers. Especially if someone had a lack of self esteem, which often happened, get into that and say, okay, I don't feel comfortable speaking in public. Okay, well that's great. So how about we do this? How about we say that by the time the years come from now, you will have presented in front of at least 50 people or more and we will work our way towards that. We're not going to put you, I'm not going to drop ship you onto a stage and be like, dude, this doesn't even have to be a stage, could even be just to our team plus. Right. But we're going to get to a place where you're going to feel more confident in that. And I used to also draw on a whiteboard, a circle. And I would say to the team, this is your comfort zone. I expect failure. If you live within this comfort zone, no failure will happen. And you can very much live the rest of your year in this zone. The problem with that is there's zero growth there. If you don't move one foot outside, and I'm not saying run 50 meters outside your comfort zone, I'm saying one step outside the comfort zone, go back in. One step outside the comfort zone, go back in. And if you keep doing that across the diameter of your circle, your circle just grew by one foot. Uh, your confidence just grew by one foot. Your capability just grew by one foot. So can you do that over and over again and can we memorialize those things? Oftentimes I think executives look at these situations. I actually told people I wanted them to quote, unquote, update their resumes different way of saying it on a monthly, if not quarterly basis. And I didn't mean that as in like the bullet points that literally go on your resume. I want to have a lot more written there, but after 14 years, and I wish I did this myself way earlier, if you ask me what happened in Q3 of 2017, how am I going to tell you? But I might have given travelers a great strategy at that point as to how to execute their content. Or, or I might have gone to Uber and saved the relationship based on a pitch. Or I might have had a really meaningful conversation with the CMO at, uh, Logitech about how product naming conventions needed to consider search in them. All of those things have happened. Right. But I'm not going to remember where, when and how. And because I haven't commemorated them now with AI being even more important, I wish I had because that knowledge, and I like to say this in the most humble way, I've gotten to this gray haired moment in my career at 47, maybe I shouldn't have as many gray hairs, but it was the stress where I've forgotten more than other people have learned in marketing. And that's not a, that's not like a brag. It's going to happen to all of you in your careers. And it's a weird thing. It's kind of like getting older. Right. But the question is, do you have that written down? Is it anywhere as expertise? Is that wisdom just exist in your brain or can you actually put it into something that a GPT could work off of or something that you could actually use from an AI wisdom perspective? That's unique to you. That's really where I like to go with companies and think about what they have that's unique in this new world is do you have that? So asking my folks along the way to do that I think was hopefully fundamental to them in saying, I'm not worried about you getting poached, I'm worried about you not reaching your potential.

Speaker B: It's such a good point you make there. But I do have a follow up question to that because you did have a podcast when you were a conductor, correct?

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: So that. And I, I'm, uh. Okay, so you had two podcasts. So that is information that is memorialized.

Speaker A: Oh yeah. Like you actually, you know, what's, what's amazing to your point. And I have more than that. I have recordings.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sure you have.

Speaker A: I have recordings of all the stage speeches and whatever else. Now we don't pay for transcription so that's even greater. But I feel really bad for every company that was in the chat business. No one mentions that, by the way. They're the ones that silently died in this whole process. But you know what's really funny is you can actually go back to my, uh, Search from Home podcasts, and you will see. And again, one of my. If we're going to call them superpowers, we used to use that term a lot at we work. One of my superpowers would probably be seeing around corners. It doesn't mean I'm clairvoyant. It doesn't mean I have a crystal ball. I just tend to see dots a little differently. And one of the things I was saying during that time, because Seth, uh, said, start a radio station. I'm like, a radio station. Everyone's at home. Everyone's like, when Covid happened, oh, like, okay, I guess I'll get a guest every single day. Which I did for two months straight. Almost every single day. Maybe I missed, like, four days out of two months. And those were all like, head of SEO at this. Or, you know, person is charged with search there, right? Big companies. But they were all at home, too, and they were friends and clients and everything. What was most interesting is that I call. You'll see the conversations of COVID which are literally, we're talking six years ago, right? And you'll hear me say, like, no, I don't think we're going back to the office for, like, three years. And you'll see my number two at the company, who is a really good friend of mine, one of my best friends, Pat, say, you're nuts. Like, we'll be back in three weeks. You're being cynical, right? Like, I was being told I was being cynical because I wasn't seeing that primrose path, but I was also seeing, like, South Koreans on the street in full PPE spraying down the sidewalks. And I'm like, they've had SARS and they didn't do this. So, like, this is another level. You got to look at the bigger picture. I know what we want, but what's reality is a different thing. And I think we let our emotions sometimes lead the perception of what we want to have happen versus what is happening.

Speaker B: And that example is it really applies to SEO and AI Search.

Speaker A: Nice. Look at the pivot, folks. Look at the pivot.

Speaker B: Well, we will get there. But I also wanted to talk about. You started at Yahoo. You moved on to these companies. You then went and decided, I'm ready for something new. So you became CMO at Turno. Now you're CEO of vibelogic. What were those transition points like for you? What was that decision making process like for you? And then, you know, we will get into the A.I.

Speaker A: uh, conversation, of course. Listen, the Yahoo thing was easy in that I was tired of yelling into the void where I literally had enterprise companies asking to pay for a solution I'd come up with that wouldn't have required a lot of dev and or design work for Yahoo. I literally just wanted, I was at hot jobs. I wanted to make branded job board listings. I taught myself how to do HTML to do it and was like, here, look. These are all branded with their logos. When you click on the logo, it takes you to the website. We have code that'll track everything they do. These will be a lot more worth it. Hey, Siemens and Marriott and all these other companies have already told me they would buy it from us for more. And God forbid I tried to get a meeting with my director, my director's director, vp, whatever. It's just again, the largest companies in the world are echo chambers and you could invent fire in them. No one would notice. So the uh, dismay I'd felt around that at large enterprise corporations put a chip on my shoulder and said not doing this. And I went, followed some really smart people to a company called Link Experts that later would become Conductor. So that was really that transition, the transition from Conductor out was incredibly difficult. That was, to this day it's still kind of a thing on my psyche, even though that was in 2022. And by that I mean when you invest yourself in a way, shape and form where you become the evangelist, right? The differential between the company and me at the time in the industry and everything synonymous, people thought I ran the company even though I wasn't the one. Seth ran the company, but I was the one on stages all over the world having those conversations, meeting people, doing those things, coming in teaching Brother or HP or others or why Search mattered and all that stuff. So letting that all, uh, go, it honestly, it becomes a question of ego. Like people don't want to say that, but that's what it is, right? Who am I if I'm not the co founder or chief evangelist at Conductor? And again, it comes in with that imposter syndrome, right? Have I earned the right as Stefan Begio to walk into the room irrespective? And how much do I need to lean on my past in order to define my, my present or my future? Right? And I think that's something that really was pushing me towards ultimately becoming an entrepreneur on my own. Meaning like I would start a company like 5 Logic myself and own that narrative more simply because trying to be the co founder I was given entitled was not the same as being the co founder.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: And I had to come to terms with that. It was very cool to do this CMO thing for a little bit. Ultimately it was a good experience. I think it allowed me to directly impact things in a more effective way. There were downsides to it as well I won't get into, but I think ultimately it all led to here. Where's here? I think we're still figuring that out. We're two years in, we're growing at a decent pace. My intention was never to build an um agency. Ultimately I wanted to build more software. Even that to some degree I'm not 100% sure of. With AI and everything else happening the way it is, I think the world is in a very uncertain state and I think it's okay for a business to be that way as well until we define really where we want to be right now. Web presence intelligence is one of the most important things in my mind and it's so funny. This is a concept in different name that I've been talking about since 2012 and again talk about seeing around corners. Literally the moment and the medium are meeting each other at this AI inflection point where the supply side of search results and what comes back in AI that I've been talking about trying to influence this whole time is finally meeting. And I've created reporting and other things that give marketers a sense of what that looks like without trying to day trade it which a lot of other people are trying to do. And I think that's a really cool thing. So I think playing with that a little more. But I also think thought leadership is a very big portion that right now I'm thinking about throwing a lot more effort against. It is shocking to me Anika M. How many companies I will look at there about us and we've got a piss poor leadership page. It might have multiple leaders. They don't even have their own bios. When they do have their own bios, it's just like slop. They don't have video, they don't have articles, they don't have authorship, they don't have eat as we call it in search. And it's like hold on a second, I literally have a client who's got the CIO of a major airline on their board and they don't have a full profile for them now. I'm gonna change that by the way shortly. Um, I'm working on that. Right, but it's like guys like it's an embarrassment of riches with some of these companies have in terms of wisdom and, and leadership and knowledge. Or if you're a service company like, like a uh, consultancy and your people don't even. You're not even showing off the product in essence like it's. And in the world of AI where we're about to go, you know, where synthetic content means less and people are starting to become desensitized to it, the humanity of there's a real person behind this with something written by a real person with the wisdom of your 10,000 hours. That's going to cut through the noise that's going to make all the difference. That is the differentiating quality that wins over the next five years versus trying to chase a chatbot that shouldn't be a chatbot.

Speaker B: Interesting. One of the things you mentioned was thought leadership. You've been on a thought leadership journey yourself, even though you have this entire pedigree, two decades of experience. You mentioned before we jumped on that you're on a little bit of a podcast tour right now and I'm your maybe 30 something interview.

Speaker A: Way to make it seem like uh, you. Well, I'm dating all the podcasts.

Speaker B: No, no, no. But I think it's a really great strategy. It's what helped me get the dot com for your brand amplified, which I've talked about before because my podcast, somebody else had it who had, you know, it was a redirect to a branding company in Australia so they weren't really using the name. I had a trademarked in the US and my podcast was in the search and so people are probably going to that person and not getting the right results. And he was getting a lot of inbound requests to be on a podcast that wasn't his. So it, it worked out really well. But I also acknowledge that I still have to look for articles that I can put be quoted in. I still go on podcasts myself. I still go speak at conferences. Whether it's about AI, about podcasting. You still have to do these things to be relevant. And I do have an algorithm that I use like a model that I created to make sure that my guests are truly prepared and the number of executives who are pitched to be on the show. And I can't find any interviews they've done. I can't find the proof that I need to make sure that they're really going to provide the value to my list.

Speaker A: I scored. Okay.

Speaker B: Oh, you are very high. I can actually tell you.

Speaker A: Is there an actual scoring model? Because I would love to know there

Speaker B: is an actual scoring model. Yes.

Speaker A: Oh, here we go. Now we're playing my game. Let's go.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, so we won't get into all of it right now, but. Because that would take too long. But I do. Yeah. All. And you are. And I can, uh. Yeah, I'll definitely follow up with you. But you were a strong yes book immediately.

Speaker A: Oh, nice. Okay, I got past the A.I. uh, overlords, but.

Speaker B: Yes, you did. Yes you did. But. But let's talk about AI SEO.

Speaker A: Let's do it.

Speaker B: I've spoken to people who say SEO is not important instead. But I've seen the other side where it really is that. Well, what do you think? Where is generative AI getting the information from?

Speaker A: Exactly. So I say it's dead. With a tremendous amount of sarcasm. In fact, most amount of New York sarcasm to that statement that possibly could bring. Okay, so please spare me. I've heard this more times than anyone. Okay. It's so dead that voice search will kill search because. Yeah, how those Alexa recipes working out for you guys? Enterprise companies who built them, who couldn't get as many marketers in their own companies to use them as I think they had. Okay, so how about mobile? That was supposed to kill us, right? Like M dots were lost and how many. Every black and white algorithm, Panda, Penguin, you, uh, name it. Like each one of those algos was supposed to kill off SEO. Google should have killed SEO. Like it's so long in the tooth that it's a joke. Honestly, it's a joke when. When people try to approach this with a dead. And you know why? Because the O is the only thing that exists. The rest of it is questionable. So search engine, dumb name for it. Okay. A search engine originally was just supposed to be an engine you search in. It happened to become Google by synonymous nature, right? Just like Kleenex and so forth. But the reality is like anywhere you search is a place that you can optimize for. And. But, uh, you can only optimize for it if you have the data. If you don't have the data, if you don't have the information, you don't have the wisdom, you don't have the capability to express that you have that knowledge, then it's impossible for something else to recognize that and take it and synthesize it in whatever way it's going to so this concept of like, and I use this on almost every podcast, so forgive me if you've heard me speak before on this, but the only people winning right now in this LLM chase are the people selling you the pans and the picks in the Gold Rush, okay? They're the only ones who made money during the Gold Rush for real. And it's the only ones making money now. You can go and try and stake your claim on something that won't even look like this in five to six months from now, let alone two years from now, and you're going to devote hundreds, um, of thousands of dollars to do that. Congratulations. I'm going to tell my customers, clients, people I consult with, to go spend their time focused on what sits within the walls of their website. Their ability to be consumed by whatever comes next. Because whatever comes next shouldn't be a chatbot. It's a very rudimentary and kind of dumb mechanism when you think about it, right? Like, yeah, it's kind of a chatbot, but it's not really a chat bot. These LLMs. And, like, it's not very visual, let's be honest. There's agents that play a whole other factor in this that are a bit confusing in that, like, I think Apple was probably the smartest ones in this whole story. We don't care about the agents. The agents are a means to an end. The data matters more than anyone. And the people who have access to the data and control the moat are the ones who win. Apple said we're not going to be in the agent mode. We're going to be. We will with Siri, but our agent will have access to all the data points you need to connect to make the experience that you're looking to have. So when Anika and I are supposed to have dinner, where are you based out of?

Speaker B: Los Angeles.

Speaker A: Los Angeles. Oh, even more reason for this one. Ana and I are supposed to have dinner. Are you into sushi?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Awesome. So am I. So we're going to go to Nobu, let's say. Wow, we're going. We're going for the nice sushi place. It's probably better, but whatever. I don't know LA well enough for sushi. We're going to go meet there. Here's the problem. I'm driving from one end of LA and she's driving from the other. And if you've ever been to la, you understand that that could mean hours of difference. Now, my ways is on and her ways are on. Right. She's using waze um, I'm using Waze. Google has the fact that we have this dinner set up so it knows that we're both going to be in the same place at this restaurant. But OpenTable has the reservation booked by her and we're supposed to meet at the restaurant, except I'm going to be half an hour late. So now by the way, also a New York thing, not you guys all do valet out there, but in New York we actually have to book like a uh, uh, garage. Right. So you're like frantically at 60 miles an hour trying to find Spot Hero, which doesn't know where you're going and doesn't know where to book it and so forth. But now think ahead. Predictive AI is where it goes. It's the layer you don't need to work with because it's intuitive. It's not asking it to go be the agent, it's letting it do what it should do based on the needs and then getting confirmation from you along the way. So it's the fact that, ah, I'm going to be late. The place that we're going to, Nobu, doesn't have a reservation holding past a half an hour because it's fancy enough. So it's giving us an alternate same level restaurant with same price point and or reviews offers that to Anika saying it's within a 5 to 10 minute radius of there. Are you good with that? By the way, we're booking a discount for you and Stefan at the garage that you're going to park at because you're both coming to it and as long as you guys are good with it, just press a button, it'll all be taken care of. My way switches, Waze switches and we're both driving where we need to be. That is where AI needs to be.

Speaker B: Not that such a good use case. Love that.

Speaker A: That's the thing, right? Oh, and by the way, it knew that it was raining and it knew that when I'm driving towards the evening on a Thursday night for a business dinner that I enjoy listening to a certain music because Spotify has tracked that over time. Knew the weather, knew the distance, knew what my calendar said and it pulls up EDM driving music because it knows that that's what I enjoy listening to while I drive. Like that is the stuff that we're going. You don't need more decision fatigue. All of the agents right now to some degree are creating more decisions. They are, they come back with, oh, do you need to do that? And you still need to. And you've got to craft it and you've got to. All right, that's not to say AI doesn't have its place. That's not to say don't mess with agents. But let me just flip the script for you for a hot second. I've lived in a world where I'm trying to convince execs to listen to SEO tech and the translation didn't exist naturally. So what did I just do? I literally am launching this. By the time you all are hearing this, it already exists. I can't tell you the URL because I don't know. You can look it up and you'll find SEO tech toexec translator. What did I do? Well, I made it so that if SEOs go to this calculator, which all based on a glossary and other things I already had as data. And I said, okay, Claude, let's build a self contained set of code where if you enter words like canonical, which raise more wristwatches than eyebrows. Okay. And you're gonna lose your execs in the room when you do this. You type in canonical. This is the way to say it in layman's terms so an exec will understand. So it allows them to do that. Now, on the flip side. Oh, it even lets you like, add them to a list and then download it. So you have this list that like tells you all the stuff. Another one is the exec on the other side gets this email from their SEO and they're kind of like, I don't want to say embarrassed, but they're probably not prone to asking. What did you mean when you said crawl? A crawl ability. What did you mean when you said crawl? Budget? What did you mean when you said canonical? What's a 404? What's a 301? Redirect? So they just take the text from the email, they dump it in and it finds those words and it shows them in layman's terms what they are. Now, why do that? Because I have an interactive piece of content now that isn't about ranking, it's about providing value. I am now able to provide value to an SEO and a CMO with a piece of content that I could have written and have written as an article that will not be read. But now I give it to you in an interactive format. Second coming of the Internet, right?

Speaker B: Whoa.

Speaker A: But the reality is there is probably a thousand pieces of data that are sitting languishing in the content format of written on your website right now, and you have not tried to convert them into interactive content to make a additional piece of content. Right. We do it with podcasts. Anika's got like 700 ways she's going to repurpose, hopefully this podcast into social snips and blog posts and other things she can do with it. Right. Why in the world would we just, like, let this flat text live there and not think that AI could actually be a way to make it better, a better user experience rather than just trying to hunt down. If someone searches this product, I gotta be the one that gets named.

Speaker B: We are going to do, uh, to be continued. But I have way too many more questions to ask. No, this is fantastic. I love this. But just for my audience to know, because I really want to get into more about what you're doing now and, uh, a whole bunch of other questions that I didn't even get to. So I told you I'm coming. Thank you.

Speaker A: My pleasure.

Speaker B: For this episode and this has been really fantastic. I love talking about business strategy, digital truth, humanity. I want to get more into that conversation. We are going to talk about chasing the right tools, not just chasing AI tools, making sure that we're not just treating our websites like digital brochures. So for those of you who are waiting for part two, in the meantime, you can visit with Stephane at vibelogic.com, find him on LinkedIn and the YouTube channel iVealogic. Links are all going to be in the show note. And if this episode moved, you, share it with one founder who needs to hear it. That's how we grow. I'm Annika Jackson. You're going to hear me back with Stephane very shortly. And thank you for being here and tuning in. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of your brand, Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out@yourbrandamplified.com.