Finding Community In The City Of Brotherly Love

Marketing Lesson of The Week

► Unconferencing at PodCamp 2023

Our main reason for heading to Philly was to attend PodCamp 2023, an unconference headed by Whitney Hoffman and Gloria Bell. At an unconference, the attendees make up the schedule when they get there and offer to talk about their areas of expertise.

Gloria Bell, Heidi Cohen and Whitney Hoffman

To put this in context, people are still grappling with what to do post-pandemic.

Roughly, 3 out of 5 people work remotely, either full time or part time. This WFH option works well for people who have long commutes or family to take care of at home.(Source: McKinsey 2022)

The WFH option works well for people who have long commutes or family to take care of at home but they feel less connected with their co-workers.

By contrast, other employees prefer to go to their workplace.

Now, post-pandemic, we’re in a period of extreme uncertainty where we’re trying to figure out our path forward. Trust is at an all-time low. Additionally we’re not sure of what’s happening with the economy, especially in light of the last week’s failure of Silicon Valley Bank which was bailed out by the FDIC.

Looking back, our trip was really about getting out of our everyday environment and going somewhere to be with others who have similar interests.

Since the pandemic, people feel a need to get together in real life and feel connected with others.

PodCamp was kicked off with a ChatGPT presentation by the extremely smart Chris Penn. Others talked about podcasts, video and search. Attendees were looking for new ideas they could apply to their work or side gigs.

For many of us, PodCamp was a wonderful opportunity to get out and be with other like-minded individuals; to be part of a community exchanging our ideas on these topics.

► Podcasting

Podcasting provides an intensely personal experience for listeners. An estimated 74 million of Americans 12+ listen to podcasts on a weekly basis. On average, they listen to 8 podcasts per week.

The key podcasting take-away:
When and where your audience is listening to your podcast has probably changed.

Prior to the pandemic, podcasts were often the length of a commute, roughly 20 to 25 minutes, or of a workout, roughly 45 minutes. (Source: Edison Research – Infinite Dial, 2022)

But realize that when your audience likes your content, they’ll listen for longer. It’s like binging their favorite television show, except that it’s in their ears.

Content Communicates

► Visual Curation

One of our tourist destinations in Philadelphia was the Barnes Foundation.

At its core, the Barnes Foundation is one of the world’s greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern European paintings. Notably, it includes 181 Renoir paintings, the most in any one place.

Beyond these well-known European artists, Dr. Barnes added examples of African art, Native American pottery and jewelry, Pennsylvania German furniture, American avant-garde painting, and wrought-iron metalwork.

Unlike most museums today that curate exhibits to enhance the visitor’s understanding by how the art is presented, often by period or artist, the Barnes retains its donor’s eccentric view of art.

Dr. Barnes arranged his collection into “ensembles”. These groupings represented his personal view of art but don’t translate well to current art experiences. Each ensemble mixes objects from different cultures, time periods, and media. He structured them into what he called “the universal language of art” based on light, line, color, and space.

As a result, visitors see a mix of works by a variety of artists including everyday pieces of period furniture and wrought iron objects on each wall. These crowded arrangements make visitors view the art in a different context than they’re used to.

This extensive collection contains many significant works of art but the sheer quantity and proximity of each layout can be overwhelming.

Dr. Barnes requested that the collection remain unchanged. So that curators can’t re-contextualize the works for modern visitors or lend them to other museums.

While I appreciated the art, I found it difficult to get a cohesive sense of what I had seen. Fortunately, the Barnes Focus, a downloadable smartphone app, allows you to get information about the collection. Point your camera at a work of art to get its description. Even better, you can download the images you viewed for review later.

Actionable Content Marketing Tips

• Curate your content to provide your audience with new insights to enhance their knowledge. But, take care not to overwhelm them like the Barnes Foundation. Otherwise, your audience may miss the point you’re trying to make.
• Extend your customer experience beyond your physical location. For example, you can view the Barnes collection through their website collection page where you can learn more about most of the works. Also, it shows you the entire ensemble each work is hung within and gives you the option to find similar works in the collection.

Artificial Intelligence

► AI Leaps Ahead

Generative Artificial Intelligence is about to go hyper — again! As if all the excitement about OpenAI’s ChatGPT over the last few months was not enough.

The easy availability of robust, innovative, AI tools and services continues to expand exponentially. So expect big changes for your marketing.

OpenAI just announced the availability of GPT-4, an upgrade to its current Large Language Model (LLM) GPT-3.5. According to their website:

[GPT-4’s] deep learning approach leverages more data and more computation to create increasingly sophisticated and capable language models.

OpenAI says that GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5.

Since ChatGPT is a conversational front-end to GPT, the new version expands ChatGPT’s capabilities and addresses some of the problems that have surfaced to-date.

Most notably, the new version is multi-modal. In addition to text generation, it generates images, music and computer code from text queries and prompts.

The real power of ChatGPT comes from its easy integration with other online products and services. For example, Canva added a text-to-image app to its popular online drawing platform by incorporating ChatGPT and DALL-E, OpenAI’s existing text-to-image tool.

My husband generated this image on Canva by typing in the prompt:
“A robot standing at a drafting table drawing an image of a robot action figure”.

Will AI will replace jobs? Maybe. Speaking at PodCamp last Saturday, Chris Penn pointed out that AI will replace tasks, not jobs.

But expect jobs to change. While AI can do some content creation tasks in minutes that usually take hours or days, it works best as an exploratory tool for creators who already have the requisite job skills. So they know how to edit and customize the AI’s output to meet their brands’ needs.

When it comes to image creation, most of the eye-popping AI-generated images you see now require a lot of trial-and-error work to construct the final input prompts.

How Will AI Change Marketing?

• Marketing agencies and departments that replace content creators with AI to save costs often will lose to companies that use AI to automate tasks and expand their offerings. If you ignore AI, your best creatives will leave for more up-to-date jobs.
• The content glut will worsen as people with fewer creative skills use AI to rapidly churn out bland, me-too content marketing. Remember, AI remains based on its initial training dataset.
• Companies and organizations will need to focus more on building trust in their brands and offerings. They can build trust by using AI to improve customer onboarding and service. They can lose that trust by misusing AI to generate content that feels fake.
• New AI-based products and services will continue to come to market across industries. Also, businesses will find new ways to reduce repetitive tasks.

Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar

► Social Pulse Summit: ROI Edition – Online, March 16, All day

► Project Voice 2023 – April 24 – 28 in Chattanooga, TN

The number 1 event for Conversational AI / Voice tech in America

► Creator Economy Expo – May 1-3 in Cleveland,
OH
If you run a content-first business this is the event to attend!
Use the code AMG100 to get $100 off any pass. I’ll be there along with Jesse Cole (Savannah Bananas), Joe Pulizzi, and other inspiring creators.

► CX Connect– June 13–15, Online via Zoom

► The Conversation Design Conference – July 24th – 25th in London, UK
bringing together the leading thinkers and doers in Conversation Design

► Are you hosting an event that you’d like us to add to the Marketing Calendar?

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Event For AMG Newsletter Calendar.

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Happy Marketing,
Heidi

P.S.: Want Heidi Cohen to contribute a quote or other commentary to your next article, presentation, video, research, or book? Then hit reply to this email and ask.

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