Agents of Change in Marketing from Podcasting to Social Media, Events and How Marketers Can Win with AI

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Rich Brooks.

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He is a digital marketing consultant and guru.

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Welcome to the show.

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Really glad to be here, Eric.

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Thanks for the invitation.

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Absolutely.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, I've been the president of Flight New Media, a digital agency that I started for the past 27 years, which seems crazy to me now that I've been doing it for so long that I actually have employees who were not born.

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When I started my company, I started in my apartment in Jamaica Plain in Boston and at the time I was just building simple websites, but I soon learned a little bit about SEO.

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I ended up moving to Maine and I added more services like email marketing, social media, paid search, paid social, and just continued to grow and broaden people who were much better at my job than I was.

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And now we offer branding and design as well, and we work with small to medium-sized businesses, primarily in the United States.

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We have a lot of clients who are local to Maine, but we work with people all over the US and a few clients in Ken as well.

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And then I also founded the Agents of Change, which is a weekly podcast that I've been doing for over 10 years, and also an annual in-person conference, again in Portland, maine, and we're coming up on our 10th annual conference this year.

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And then just this year, we added a virtual summit to the mix, and it's all about just helping people reach and engage more of their ideal customers online.

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So tell us a little bit about your podcast and also about the events that you're doing.

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That's interesting.

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Yeah.

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So this was something I've just always liked to put on a party and then have a reason for having a party.

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And so the agents of change conference was really that opportunity is to bring a bunch of people in.

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I had been speaking all over the country or attending conferences all over the country and no matter where I went in these big cities, I never found anybody from Maine.

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So I was like, why don't we just bring this experience back to Maine, where we can bring these world-class speakers who have changed the trajectory of my business and get people coming to these events in Maine?

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And that's what we started doing.

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And the conference has been a huge opportunity for us from a marketing standpoint too, because, even though the conference is under this agents of change brand and my company is called Flight New Media, the bottom line is I'm doing one of the keynotes, I'm up there emceeing Flight New Media has a booth.

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It's a major sponsor of the event, and so people immediately realize that Flight New Media and Agents of Change are pretty much synonymous with each other.

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And very often when a new business comes to us and says they want to work with us and for whatever they need, I'll ask them, of course.

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How did you hear of us?

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Work with us and for whatever they need.

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I'll ask them, of course, how did you hear of us?

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And very often the answer is, oh, I've been going to the agents to change conference for years.

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But I'm finally ready for a new website, or I'm finally ready for SEO, and so it's been that conference that we put on.

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That is unrelated in some ways to our business.

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Like, you don't have to become a client to go to the conference, and if you go to the conference it doesn't mean you're a client.

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It's two separate but related things.

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But it's again creating that valuable content, bringing in world-class speakers, but always being there and always being present.

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It starts to establish in the minds of business owners around the state and in New England that Flight New Media should be at least considered when they're making that decision.

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It's been a great feeding ground for us and also just a great way for us to make connections with other experts in our field that maybe have a very special, a very niche specialty that we just don't have.

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Yeah, in-person events are a great way to really build relationship with people.

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How did you come up with the concept of the event agents for change?

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Yeah, so I'm definitely a comic book nerd, right?

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So I had another conference called Social Media FTW, with a couple of friends that we had put on.

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But when I wanted to go back and do it, I wanted to bring in more than just social media, which was the hot topic of the day.

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I wanted to talk about search engine optimization and I wanted to talk about what I thought would be a big thing mobile marketing.

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This was back in 2012, when most websites were not optimized for mobile and, as it turned out, that guess was correct, and so our first conference was going to be something like I had been saying social media is a catalyst and I'm like the catalyst conference.

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It didn't sound right to me, and when I went to the thesaurus, I saw that one of the synonyms for Catalyst was agents of change, and all of a sudden, my nerd brain just turned on.

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I could envision these superhero marketers and, with my friend, josh Fisher, who did all the artwork for us, we created at first it was three agents search, social and mobile marketing.

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And then, when we rebranded out of COVID, we added three more AI, neuro short for neuromarketing and blockchain.

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And so those are the six agents of change and basically, when people are speaking or when we have a podcast, we always try and find is there a relevant agent that we can use to further promote what this expert is talking all about?

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But yeah, it was just basically an idea of I wanted to put on a conference, I wanted to bring in these people that I thought were so cool, and it just became this thing that now has been going on for over a decade.

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And you've been building it up, like how many people attend the conference ballpark.

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I'm just curious.

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This year we're looking at about 400, maybe 450, which is huge for a state that shares only one area code.

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So to bring in 400 people into one event and Mainers are like oh, I don't know if I want to take a, I can't take a day off.

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I've got to work, which was a whole mental thing.

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It's a mindset thing where I'm like you need to sharpen the saw.

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So I've slowly been getting people to leave their desks and come into this space where they can meet with other marketers and other business owners and really learn more about their craft.

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And that's a great local marketing thing as well, like just focusing on your area, your state, right?

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That's interesting.

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Absolutely, Eric, and even though we can do business anywhere and our audience for the podcast is global, I've had people reach we sold when we did our first virtual conference earlier this year.

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Some of the first tickets we sold were in like Korea and countries all over the world, which was just awesome to see that we had this audience that had been following primarily the podcast all that time.

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Obviously, most of those people were not coming to beautiful Portland Primarily the podcast all that time.

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Obviously, most of those people were not coming to beautiful Portland, Maine.

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But yeah, so the conference itself does tend to have more of that local vibe.

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No-transcript.

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Absolutely.

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That's great.

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So tell us a little bit about your experience running the podcast, because a lot of people, I think are considering hey, is this a good channel to either advertise on or to run their own podcast?

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What has been the business impact of you having a podcast?

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Great question, eric, and it's been huge because when I first started it was more or less I was looking for new ways to use content marketing and I thought a podcast would be great.

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It was actually my second podcast.

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The first one was an utter failure because it was taking me six hours to get 10 minutes of content out.

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When I rebranded, or when I rebuilt it out, I called it the agents of change.

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The focus was more on this interview style, which is a lot easier, as you probably know, because you don't have to come up with fresh content 45 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever every single week.

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So I could just interview people and it was a lot easier.

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And now we're up to.

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I think I just sent over to our post-production team episode 536.

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So we've been going for quite some time.

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There was a point when I was looking for how do I monetize this podcast and let's face it, unless it's a hobby podcast, you want to monetize it in some way.

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But when I looked at the ad rates that most people were getting at the time and my niche audience, I just didn't see how it was worth it to make maybe $200 a month by putting in three commercial breaks during my podcast.

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I didn't think my audience wanted that and I was still trying to figure out how do I actually make money off of this when I saw somebody retweet in an episode of our podcast about conversion rate optimization and he said I need help with this.

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So I tweeted him back.

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It led to some DMs, it led to emails and ultimately to phone calls.

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We ended up getting that business and he has been a client who spent over six figures with us since then.

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So I, after that moment, never worried again about trying to get advertisers or sponsors for the show.

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I realized and there's nothing wrong with that and I realized for me, the best thing that I can be doing as a lead generation tool is just curating and creating great content that would attract the right type of audience for us.

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And although that was probably our biggest win, we've had many other clients over the years who found us through the podcast and it's just been a great opportunity and a really good feeding system for Flight New Media.

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That's awesome.

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I was looking at Google Trends over the years.

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You can look back from 2004 all the way to today and it's really cool to see when you do it.

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On Google Trends they have a scale of 1 to 100.

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And it's gone from 10 years ago being less than 50 to now being at the top of the thing that people search for is podcasting.

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So it's like right there at 100.

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And I think it actually backed off a little bit in the first quarter.

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It was like down to 90 or something, but it's still like one of the most popular things that people are consuming now and I think it's great to have a goal where it's not advertising-based.

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I listen to a lot of podcasts and I think the sponsorship aspect of it is a little bit awkward.

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Listening to podcasts that have a lot of commercials.

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I don't think it's great content marketing and thought leadership to support a business like yours, because podcasting can be emotional, you hear people's inflection of their voice and you can really get into some good topics.

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It's just a very different way than written content right Of sharing ideas.

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And I love to write, but I also know that I love listening to other podcasts and I love listening to audio books, and there's just times where you can't be watching a video or reading something like when I mow the lawn or when I go to the gym.

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So to be able to have that additional channel that you can use to engage another segment of the population can be a very powerful tool indeed.

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So what are you seeing in the market right now, in mid 2024?

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What are you seeing is big shifts for marketers and businesses who want to do successful marketing.

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Obviously, the 800 pound grill is AI there.

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It's the biggest opportunity and it's the biggest threat to anybody doing marketing these days, and I've definitely talked to people who have lost their jobs because their boss walked in and says chat, gpt can do everything you can do.

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I think those bosses are foolish and possibly evil, but the bottom line is people are losing their jobs.

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That's a real threat, and I know that there are agencies who have lost business because their clients have seen, because of AI, it devalues everything they're doing.

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So there is some real concern I have around it, plus the latest information from Google about how they're going to be using AI for their SGE.

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Their search generative experience makes me worried about any sort of helpful content that will actually drive traffic back to our website.

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So those are some of the things that I'm keeping my eye on right now and trying to think about.

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What are some other ways outside of SEO that we can really drive more qualified leads to our website and creating content with AI?

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Ai should be a helper, it should not be the final product.

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And then should we be doing things like podcasts, should we really be focusing on things like building up our email list, and I'm even taking a stronger look at organic social, something that I'd really moved away from in the last decade, because I feel like organic social is just not a strong driver of traffic.

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Paid social is a different story.

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But now, if Google kind of goes through with some of their latest plans, I'm definitely going to start looking at some other opportunities to be driving qualified traffic and then staying in touch with these people.

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Maybe it's email marketing, maybe it's SMS the future will tell, but I'm keeping my eye on everything.

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What is some of the coolest things that you have done with AI and playing with it?

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Anything that you want to share Building personas, both for ourselves and for our clients.

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Basically plugging in some of the information about their ideal client and then being able to quote unquote talk to that ideal client is pretty cool, and what we're doing right now for a client is we're doing a series of interviews for their ICPs their ideal client personas and then take all those interviews and feed them into ChatGPT along with who we think our ICP is, so we can build out a more accurate buyer persona.

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I think that opportunity is really interesting, and that's where I am in right now in terms of my own personal AI journey.

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It's not just what are the latest tools, what does this version of ChatGPT have over the last one, but it's how does this fit into our workflow?

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Like, literally, how are we going to create SOPs that include AI?

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At what segments?

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Which tools?

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Where do we draw the line on what's ours and what was created by ChatGPT?

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That's more or less what I'll be working on for the next three to six months.

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That's really cool.

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The persona is development using AI.

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That's a really great use case.

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I think A lot of people have suggested that ChatGPT, in particular, is a great research buddy for marketers and I think, if you can give it good direction, I think it is a really great research tool.

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It perhaps is more efficient than Google in some ways.

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I do think, as you were saying, the AI summaries at the top of Google search results will affect SEO.

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Search results will affect SEO, but I do think that people have to evolve because this technology is there and people are going to use it.

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Some people have said every single process in business is going to be reviewed, reimagined and discussed.

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Does AI fit here?

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And it just it makes sense.

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Just like the internet was very disruptive and over time, it really caused almost every process in business to be relooked out of what makes sense to be online.

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So I think that this is going to happen and I am empathetic to people losing their roles and people changing how they do business with agencies.

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But I think there are some jobs in particular and I know this is very controversial, but there are some jobs in particular that shouldn't have been jobs to begin with.

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Business leaders tend to sometimes just throw human labor at work that could be done with technology, because they just don't want to spend money on the technology, which I understand, but it's not really a great job for those people.

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Data entry is an example right, and so I think that some parts of it are a healthy evolution.

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I think the one thing from my perspective is marketers can be most successful with AI if they become a great director and get really great at giving clear instructions and creative prompts, they come back with really creative results.

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I think that's where the rubber meets the road for marketers.

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What do you think?

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I agree.

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At the end of the day, I think that we're going to have to get better at prompts so that we create content that is still unique, because most of the content that comes out of a single prompt from ChatGPT or any AI tool is pretty generic and vanilla and it doesn't have a brand voice.

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It's not taken into consideration the buyer persona.

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So I think if we use AI to speed up certain processes, but the human is always involved, that's where I think you'll see the most success, which I think is basically what you're saying, eric, is it's really a, it's a helper, it's a tool.

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I'll use it throughout the process.

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I might use it even if I love to write, but I might ask ChatGPT to create a framework for me and or for a blog post sake, and or at the end I'll take my email, or I'll take my blog post and I'll feed it into Cloud or ChatGPT and I'll say how would you improve on this?

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And sometimes they'll suggest a section that I hadn't considered, or they'll suggest a resource that I hadn't thought of, and sometimes they'll suggest changes.

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I'm like, no, my version's better.

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But whatever it is, it's just nice to get that other opinion on your work so that you can be the best marketer you can possibly be absolutely.

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I think my favorite tactic with ChatGPT to get the best results is a really simple one is sometimes I'll start with a really broad instruction and prompt just to see what it'll do, because I'm curious.

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But then I think the key is not to put in a new prompt but to go back and revise the prompt, and then I just keep adding more and more details and adding more and more details, and every time you revise the prompt itself from the previous query instead of putting in a new one.

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Chatgpt tries a little bit harder which I think is really interesting to get it right.

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I do think that giving very clear direction and creative direction is impactful.

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I've seen a lot of CEOs and business leaders that purposely give vague direction to people to test if they can figure it out, which I think is a fun thing to do.

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But I just think you can't stop.

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There is my take on it.

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But I just think you can't stop.

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There is my take on it.

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You have to be prepared to go in and give really great direction to get really great results.

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One thing related to this as well that I've done that's really fun is I created like a 10 page overview of how to do image prompts in mid journey and I put that into chat GPT and then I use chat GPT to help me create very detailed image prompts to get the best images out of mid journey instead of using stock photos, and so it'll give three or four paragraphs of the exact camera settings to use for the image it generates, and you can generate some really great stuff if you give really great direction like that, and so these examples are what I really mean by great directions equal great results.

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Absolutely, and the one fun thing that I've been trying lately is if I've been going back and forth with ChatGPT or any AI and I finally get that result that I was looking for, I might say ChatGPT, how would you create a prompt to get us to this point right now, and then it will sometimes summarize everything we've talked about to that point.

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So now I have something for my prompt library for the next time I need that.

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That's great.

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Any final thoughts before we wrap up Anything you wanted to share that we didn't cover.

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I covered a lot of good stuff, but people want to learn a little bit more about me.

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They can check out my podcast because they're obviously already podcast fans.

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The Agents of Change and I am the Rich Brooks on every social platform.

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So if anybody ever wants to chat about AI or Maine or anything else, be happy to have that conversation.

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Awesome.

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Thanks so much for being with us today, ridge.

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I will link to your podcast and your website in the show notes so people can easily get there.

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Thanks for being on the show today.

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Thank you, eric, appreciate it.