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The 8Bit Podcast – Episode 023

Being that it is a new year (2019), The 8Bit Podcast – Episode 23  does a small recap of 2018 and looking to the upcoming year. But before that exciting review, the guys discuss Bird Box, Voice search and its increasing importance while blindfolded. Ok, maybe not the whole time. And not both of them. Just one, but regardless, the #birdboxchallenge is in full effect in this episode.

 

 

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Transcription

Phil:   I sure hope Stephen tells us when he starts rolling.

Jeff: 
I’m ready whenever you are.

Stephen: 
We’ve been rolling.

Phil:  Oh, hey.

Jeff:  Hey.

Phil:  You look a little different.

Jeff:   I just got done watching Bird Box. Decided to try the challenge. You’ve heard about the
challenge right?

Phil:  You’re checking your email?

Jeff:  Yeah, actually. Hold on a second.

Phil:  Got the coffee down.

Jeff:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don’t wanna look.

Phil:  Yeah. Can you approve that design for me?

Jeff:  Sure, hold on one second, gotta find it in my email. What’d you think of that movie?

Phil:  It was all right. I liked the idea that they were trying to do something different that I’ve never seen before but I think we talked about this earlier where a lot of the series on Netflix and all these other places that ruin movies for me. You get a two hour movie now, that’s it? I can’t binge watch four seasons of something?

Jeff:  Why can’t I watch eight episodes of the first season and see if I like it or not?

Phil: Right. Little trial run.

Jeff:  Little trial run. I’m watching this show now called Frontier with the guy that was in Aquaman this year.

Phil:  Oh yeah.

Jeff:  What’s his name? Something Momoa or something like that. He’s a big dude. I still don’t know, I like it and I still don’t know if it’s good or bad because it’s got some pretty …

Phil:  That’s the one you were talking about in Canada.

Jeff: Questionable acting.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff: 
I like the story, the subject matter. It’s about the fur traders back in the Hudson Bay Company and the English and living up north.

Phil:  French.

Jeff:  French and native Americans and it’s pretty cool, the whole interaction. But yeah, it’s good and yet it’s like I said, there’s some questionable acting in it too that I’m like I don’t know if this is good. I keep watching it though.

Phil:  Hey, going back to Bird Box. Spoiler alert. Fast forward 30 seconds if you haven’t seen the movie yet but still watch our podcast.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  When they were gonna go to the grocery store, I was like okay, how are they gonna get there? They go in the garage and I’m like okay, they got a car, that makes sense. I’m thinking maybe they’ll crack the door or something, just watch on the road. They paint all the windows and I’m like what are they doing?

Phil:  Then okay, they got the GPS. This is getting better. I’m like they’re still gonna run into stuff. There’s bodies and cars everywhere. They got that obstacle avoidance and I’m like son of a- Never thought of that.

Jeff:  They thought of everything.

Phil:  They did.

Jeff:  Make it kind of believable.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  I still don’t think you’d get there.

Phil:  I thought they’d just be like … Over …

Jeff:  It was still a pretty easy road to the grocery store.

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  Just happened they were just down the street a few blocks.

Phil:  And that one guy wanted to stay there. I’m like, it’s kind of a good idea.

Jeff:  I thought of it right away. I’m like why would you ever go back?

Phil:  But then you wouldn’t have the comforts of a house. Beds and couches and-

Jeff:  True. Plus at some point, I mean, I don’t know, it’s kinda far-fetched.

Phil:  You think?

Jeff:  Anywho.

Phil:  All right, Bird Box open. Done.

Jeff:   You sure?

Phil:  I think we’re good. Maybe later you can do the Bird Box challenge and we’ll play catch. Baseball.

Jeff:  Yeah, we’ll do Bird Box challenge with egg nog.

Phil:  Blind taste test. All right.

Jeff:  Well, welcome to 2019.

Phil:  Thank you.

Jeff:  We made it.

Phil:  We did. See ya next year.

Jeff:  Too late. Too late. Should’ve did it last week. Two weeks ago. I don’t know.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  We don’t wanna give away when we did this, now we gotta get this done really quick.

Phil:  We’re gonna edit this today I’m sure.

Jeff:  Oh, I’m sure. Yeah, on episode 22, what did we talk about? We talked about a lot of things but I think the one thing we said we’d come back with today was voice search.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:  I know we talked about what to cover in this episode in general, which we could talk about resolutions and all that but I think everyone does that. I’ve seen a lot of blogs and stuff but it’s funny, when I read a lot of the blogs, one of the top five things to consider for this year, one of them usually is voice.

Phil:  Yeah. I keep coming across that too.

Jeff:  Yep. I think it’s timely and it’s good and for our own sakes. What did we find out?

Phil:  I think I was a little shocked. I thought there was gonna be a lot more to it. It’s not easy. I won’t say that. There’s a lot of work involved to come up on voice search but I thought there was gonna be special software and special apps and programs and everything you needed.

Phil:  But really, it’s just crafty and crafting your content and-

Jeff:  Doing a lot of things you’re probably already doing or should be doing.

Phil:  Yeah, but I thought it was different. I thought- I feel like we’re crafting it differently than we used to for other searches.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  But I’m sure they’ll both come up at the same level.

Jeff:  Yep.

Phil:  There’s a ton of stats that we found that we won’t go into. I think we might even have touched on that last time.

Jeff:  I think we did. That’s what led us down this path.

Phil:  Right, but it’s here to stay. There’s a lot more people using voice and, in fact, I’ve been using it more maybe ’cause we have an Echo at home now but I’ve been using my phone a lot more. I didn’t do that much. This is so easy, why wouldn’t I do this all the time?

Phil:  It’s here to stay and I think some of the- One of the stats I think we were reading, a couple of the graphs of where people are using it, maybe was cool to see that before, voice was only used in an office by yourself or at your house by yourself but now it’s being used a lot more in public and at offices and things like that.

Phil:  I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it is.

Jeff:  Yeah, I think it’s good. I think it’s a natural … The more I think about it, it’s more of a natural fit. To just be able to simply call things out and find things with so much information at our fingertips now.

Jeff:  To be honest, I think when I look back to when voice things started to happen, I was kinda like why? Who cares? Why are we doing it this way? Are we getting lazier? But I think it’s smarter and when I think back to using Alexa for example, when I first saw those things come out, I thought why do we need this?

Jeff:  Now that I have one, I find that it’s kinda cool. I kinda like the interaction with it. I can see the potential. I don’t use it to its fullest extent like some people do but definitely something that, you’re right, is not going away, especially when you think about the phone thing.

Jeff:  That’s one I didn’t even consider. I kept thinking voice as strictly like Google Assistant and all those pieces, talking about Siri and talking about those respective smartphone apps and I’m like, that’s right, that is voice.

Jeff:  Yeah, I do use it occasionally and I probably have found myself using it more or at least being more conscious that I’m using it. It’s interesting.

Phil:  One thing I didn’t consider really was laptops and desktops.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  This is a newer laptop, last year anyway, and it’s got the button bar on it, it’s got Siri right on it. You can do your voice search. I haven’t done that much but I’m starting to think why don’t I?

Phil:  Yeah, I guess I was thinking the assistants like you were saying and then phones and everything.

Jeff:  I can’t wait until I can go, “Siri, make me a logo.”

Phil:  Ooh, yeah. I like that.

Jeff:  Then you sit back and watch Youtube videos while it makes it for us.

Phil:  Why wouldn’t the client say that?

Jeff:  I don’t know, that’s a good point.

Phil:  They wouldn’t even need to hire us.

Jeff:  Oh, shoot. Yeah, I should shut up before I give people ideas.

Phil:  I’m just gonna fall back on acting.

Jeff:  Hey.

Phil:  Yeah?

Jeff:  Right, I can do Bird Box 2. I could be in that. I’ve been practing.

Phil:  You think the cinematographers were bored in that? Hey, here’s some weird light that goes by a blindfold. Voice.

Jeff:  Voice.

Phil:  I took out a few things to talk about but like I said, it’s easier than I thought it was so I think it’s just mostly about crafting your content differently or things to consider. I wrote down a couple things just that I thought were good ideas.

Phil:  Targeting question keywords. Thinking of everything as more of a question than necessarily-

Jeff:  How people are gonna ask, think of it that way.

Phil:  That’s just one way to do it. That’s a lot- For example, they talk a lot about FAQ pages.

Jeff:  Yep.

Phil:  What hours are you open? Where are your locations? Things like that that people might be searching for. A lot of question things like that.

Jeff:  I think too, it makes sense and I’m thinking about the web development side. A lot of sites that we do include FAQs and I think it just makes them even more valuable or more needed. Sometimes you’ve treated them as secondary content, put them up in a secondary nav or sometimes you don’t even do it, depending on what you do.

Jeff:  But I think there’s probably reason now more than ever to include an FAQ section and make sure it’s a good one.

Phil:  Yeah. Then a lot of times for me, I thought with smaller sites, I didn’t think you really needed an FAQ because it’s right there. There’s only four or five pages anyway but now I see the value a little bit more.

Phil:  I think there’s stat type things too that you probably don’t need to have questions for. For an example, if you’re looking up what team does so and so play for or something? I think you’re probably gonna find that without those question key words, but that’s very popular search thing that people are looking for.

Jeff:  I see my kids at home do this a lot when they use it, they like following NBA basketball players and stuff. Sometimes we’ll be watching the Timberwolves and my youngest son, he’ll take his and he’ll just say the name ’cause it’ll just return all the things you wanna know about [inaudible 00:11:17] or whatever from Toronto.

Jeff:  Excuse me, he got traded. Anyway, it’s funny. It’ll tell you every- just like you would normally search but sometimes you don’t even have to ask the question, you just say the person’s name or say something about it and it’s gonna return some pretty awesome stuff, probably the stuff you’re looking for.

Phil:  Right. That’s returning it more as a readable?

Jeff:  Yeah.

Phil:  The Siri or whoever is not reading it all back to you.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  Okay.

Jeff:  I should say though, she will. Sometimes it’ll be like, “Phil Davidson”.

Phil:  Never heard of him.

Jeff:  Yeah, you know what I mean. It’ll kinda give a base about kinda thing, not gonna say all their stats but it’ll give them if you want them. Anyways, it’s kinda cool.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff: 
FAQs are important.

Phil:  FAQs are important. Talks a lot about writing in natural language which makes sense. People are asking the questions differently than they type them in. Found that when people are searching on the search engine, they’re probably abbreviating a lot of things.

Phil:  It’s not a full question, it’s yeah.

Jeff:  Makes sense.

Phil:  When you’re speaking into the voice search, people are asking the question in its entirety. There was a lot about that about natural language and longtail keywords. Instead of just having these short keywords now, have to think more in the sentence form and how people are asking.

Jeff:  That makes sense when you think about SEO ’cause typically if you’re looking for something specific, say it’s creative arcade Duluth, Minnesota, you should come up. If you’re thinking about just saying even ad agency or digital agency Duluth, Minnesota, you’re gonna get a lot more broader things.

Jeff:  If you just say digital agency, you’re gonna get all kinds of stuff. It’s the same thing with just basic search criteria. If you think about- What that kinda tells me too though is on a local scale, you probably wanna be a little more specific in what you ask versus-

Jeff:  A lot of time you might just say what is, I don’t know-

Phil:  Cheeseburger recipe.

Jeff:  Cheeseburger recipe. You’re gonna get a ton of stuff by return, right? Anyway, it’s definitely, when you think about search in general, this is very important and where its coming from is just taking probably the most recent or the highest rated thing on there I would think or highest ranking returned specific I guess.

Phil:  A lot of the stuff we found was basic SEO stuff.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  Keyword research. Research what potential customers might be looking for. You’re doing that anyway if you’re in SEO things. One thing I found was right before ninth grade level or below, which I feel like that would be for general content anyway but I’m not sure. I’m not sure what the definition or the difference is there.

Jeff:  I don’t know, maybe because of the specifics of things or the level of, I don’t know the word I’m looking for. Yeah, I don’t know what that’d be.

Phil:  I guess I was just happy to see ninth grade level.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  I feel like a lot of the stuff you see is fifth grade or below or something. Yeah, just a few takeaways there. We didn’t teach you how to do voice today but I think it’s doable. You do a little research and you just craft your content a little differently.

Jeff:  Well, yeah. [inaudible 00:15:16] but I think you’re right and I think what we learn is a lot of the basic SEO tactics that people should be doing are even more important to consider with voice. If you’re not doing a lot of SEO or work on that to improve your content, you probably need to. For a lot of reasons, not just from the web side of things but from the voice.

Jeff:  I think I read too an article about voice, it talked about featured snippets which are usually those little brief- They’re not necessarily meta descriptions but they’re close to that. They return right away like in search results. If you ever do a thing on Google, a lot of times if there’s a featured snippet about a piece, that’ll come up first.

Jeff:  I think they showed on there that, on this article I read, a lot of times these featured snippets are what’s gonna be found first which means it’s probably what’s gonna be returned from Siri or Alexa, whatever.

Jeff: 
They’re gonna return those snippets first. There are two. There’s if you’re not doing a lot of SEO work on your current website including adding some of those featured snippets and those usually include a lot of keyword rich things, a lot of things you’re talking about, you’re probably gonna get overlooked when it comes to being returned as a result.

Phil:  I think even more so maybe now, I think we’ve talked about personas before on here with Kate and I think even more so now is to find not only that target market but how are they searching?

Jeff:  What are those things that are, when you think about the ideal person or user using that specific content, how are they gonna talk to it, not only from a search standpoint on your computer but maybe even with interacting through voice? Right?

Jeff:  Even slaying and things like that, what are things that they might interact with that more and maybe in a different way than just some general search that anyone could be doing?

Phil:  Right. It talks about natural language, so what is that natural language for that persona and is it different than what you type in?

Jeff:  It’s crazy.

Phil:  Good stuff.

Jeff:  Thanks for looking at that.

Phil:  Yeah, I think I’m just gonna keep diving in more. Not right now, but-

Jeff:  Later.

Phil:  Later, yeah. As we go.

Jeff:  What do you think would be returned if we say, “What is glass blowing?”

Phil:  Good segue!

Jeff:  Phil assistant.

Phil:  Phil assistant.

Jeff:  I bring it up because we just had, we’re shifting away from voice here now. We had our company Christmas party or holiday party the other night and we did glass blowing.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  At Lake Superior Glass. Art Glass.

Phil:  Art Glass.

Jeff:  Lake Superior Art Glass. What’d you think?

Phil:  I thought it was fun. I’m not gonna lie, I really thought blowing glass, we’d be sitting there blowing glass and forming it that way, but I think that’s maybe a few levels above our, what we should be doing at this point.

Jeff:  I had the same thought. I’m like wow, we’re actually gonna be blowing glass but now that I look back at it, that would’ve been an absolute nightmare.

Phil:  Oh yeah. It was a blast though. I had a lot of fun. Basically what we did was we took, we made the little stem in between a glass. I did a wine goblet. I think you did, too, right?

Jeff:  I did too.

Phil:  We did the stem that goes in between the base and the top cup part or goblet part.

Jeff:  The drinky place.

Phil:  The drinky place. We made that and that was fun. Got to mix three colors together and use a blowtorch that was hot.

Jeff:  I knew it was hot, but it was kinda funny that he didn’t tell us how hot it was until we were all done with it almost.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  Wasn’t it like three to five thousand degrees?

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  To where the mixing part and then at the end, he was kinda like brazing stuff together and it was a little bit lower, more even temp. That was crazy to think about, if I put my finger in there, it probably would be gone when I pulled it out.

Phil:  Yeah, not gonna lie, we probably should’ve grabbed them ’cause they’re a couple doors down from us right now. We should’ve grabbed them and had them sit in here. Maybe we’ll take photos after the podcast and show them.

Jeff:  That’s true. Show them in there.

Phil:  We’ll put mine right here.

Jeff:  Yep.

Phil:  And then yours right …

Jeff:  Doing this again? We are now.

Phil:  We have some cool videos too. I know we shared them on social media.

Jeff:  We’ll throw a few in here when we put the final edit together.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). One thing I thought was very cool is with the naked eye or even the videos we took, you can’t see the colors mixing. You just see a big flame but we had tinted glasses on and were mixing the colors, we could see everything and I didn’t realize that’s why we were wearing them until they said to take them off and look and it’s just a big ball of fire.

Jeff:  I had those really cool flip up ones and I showed my kids that when I got home and all they said was, “Dad, those are sick.” It was funny.

Phil:  They’re cool.

Jeff:  Right.

Phil:  Walk around the high school with that. I’m here to pick up my son.

Jeff:  Whoa. Okay, who’s your son? ‘Cause those are really cool glasses.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  It was fun. I had fun. I know we brought our spouses and yeah, they all, at least my wife said she thought it was pretty cool and something different.

Phil:  I knew glassblowing or glass work wasn’t easy but it gave me a lot more appreciation for seeing some of the stuff that was out in the showroom.

Jeff:  That stuff? Yeah. Right. Thinking about some of the pieces that they sell probably a gazillion of like wine goblets and stuff to be able to have a design that you have to replicate. How in the heck do you do that?

Phil:  I don’t know.

Jeff:  You know? That’s pretty cool.

Phil:  I could see why people love doing it so much. I mean, it’s mesmerizing with the flame and the colors.

Jeff:  How long were we there? An hour and a half?

Phil:  We were there about two hours.

Jeff:  It didn’t feel like it.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  Definitely time flies.

Phil:  Yeah. It was fun.

Jeff:  That was super fun.

Phil:  We went to dinner afterwards.

Jeff:  A little din din. It was good. Ate too many onion rings, so I couldn’t eat my other stuff but that’s okay. I had a really good lunch over the weekend.

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  That was good.

Phil:  Should we recap what we did in 2018?

Jeff:  Yeah it was kind of end of the year, we had an end of year party and holiday party but yeah, last year was good. Last year was … Sometimes you don’t, it’s good to sometimes look back and reflect on where you’ve been.

Jeff:  I don’t know, the year went by really quickly but we did a lot of stuff and a lot of good things happened to us this year, Creative Arcade wise, as a company.

Phil:  This list we’re gonna read off was about five seconds of us brainstorming and there’s five things in here I forgot about until we mentioned it.

Jeff:  Nice.

Phil:  Well, how many more things did we do that aren’t in here?

Jeff:  Well, I think big thing, February comes around and we add Stephen.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:  That was cool. He’s in the room.

Phil:  He’s still here.

Jeff:  Yeah.

Phil:  That’s good.

Jeff:  We added Kate. We introduced Kate a few episodes ago but she’s been here since, what? June.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:  Yeah, that was good. We kinda checked some boxes when it comes to the things we offer and things we do that made our lives easier but I think just made our work even better for clients. Adding those folks. Pretty stoked about that. That was cool.

Phil:  When you said we hired Kate, in that episode we introduced Kate is kind of the unveiling of a different type of podcast a little bit for us.

Jeff:  Upgraded. We added some things. You probably maybe don’t notice it but we even have some lights today which we didn’t even have last episode to try and help make our faces look a little prettier on camera. I don’t know if it’s helping, but at least-

Phil:  Put that back on.

Jeff:  At least you can’t see … But yeah, no, I mean, just trying to improve a lot of areas as we grow and that included even quality of our podcast. That was cool.

Phil:  One of the things that we bought for the quality of the podcast was a new camera and some lenses and some things like that, so not only did we upgrade the podcast but we have some capabilities also- I was gonna say in the photography and video world, that we can do outside the podcast. Then the drone.

Jeff:  One of the things with 2019 I think we gotta get some more drone stuff going.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:   Just for fun ’cause I’ve seen a lot more drone, locally some things pop up which is awesome and stuff that yeah it’d be fun to go get ourselves. What else? What else?

Jeff:  Inbound marketing wise, we’ve been talking a lot about it this year, I think it’s been one of our- We’ve been doing it now for two years. I think this last year was really the year we kind of took some huge leaps forward not only for ourselves and our knowledge of it but also I think what we’re providing for clients.

Jeff:  The fact that we’re doing that now and in fact, we are now, I think we’re gonna put up a blog post soon about this but we’re now a silver hubspot partner. That’s cool. We’re starting to grow in that realm. We’re actually not far off from our gold status so that’s kind of a goal for ’19 is being able to add a few more clients and the power of what that provides. That’s really cool.

Jeff:  Content definitely is becoming more and more of a staple, I think, when it comes to the marketing realm for any industry.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  The fact we’ve been doing that and we’re doing it well, I think, is a testament to, again, growth and trying to make ourselves better. That’s cool.

Phil:  We launched a couple campaigns this year with Fairview Range Hospital and Memorial Medical. Those are great. A lot of TV and video.

Jeff:  And even more of a foray into healthcare that we’ve done it in the past a lot and a little bit here and there along the way as far as what industries we’ve been working on but I think it’s just solidifying the fact that it’s an important industry and one that I think to help people, their customers, their patients understand what’s out there for healthcare and the importance of healthcare. It’s all good. Kinda glad we’re doing those things again.

Phil:  Our website.

Jeff:  Yeah, launched a new website of our own which I know we’re already working on a few things to improve where we’ve been even from six months ago that we’re hopefully unveiling here in the next month or so. Just some bigger and better parts of our site to kinda tell people more about what we do and interact more.

Phil:  It was important for us to get it up and going.

Jeff: Yeah and then from there, how do you keep improving or refining?

Phil:  Right.

Jeff:  It’s what we tell all of our clients. Sometimes you just gotta do and get going and then from there, you can kinda- ‘Cause sometimes it’s easy to sit there and go what about this and what about that? Honestly, I think we kinda did that for awhile too-

Phil:  Absolutely.

Jeff:  Where we got kind of paralysis by analysis of having to have everything exactly perfect which it’s never exactly perfect.

Phil:  Right. Not to mention, we were working on other big websites and campaigns and things. Kinda got the back burner quite a bit, which always happens but I feel like now that it’s up and I know some of the things that are coming are gonna be very cool.

Jeff:  Yep.

Phil:  Excited to keep modifying it.

Jeff:  We did our own website and then you were just saying about some of our other clients but a big one is, and I don’t think we even really shared much yet now that I think about it.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  Which we should do soon, the fact that we did a whole brand new website with St. Louis County in Minnesota. The largest county geographically, I don’t remember if it’s in the country or is it west of the Mississippi.

Phil:  West of the Mississippi for sure and it’s top five in the country.

Jeff:  Right. We already did a lot of work with them and continue to do a lot of work with them with their different departments and their needs at times but that was a huge undertaking. It took a year and a half of starting from scratch, meeting with all their departments, getting everyone’s input from not only department head but even those, people that work within those departments and getting some of their thoughts.

Jeff:  Organizing all of that and going through the whole process of what does a new website look like? What should it include? What’s gonna be important to the public? What are things they look for? Looking through the analytics, taking into account verbal comments, then we do a bunch of surveys.

Jeff:  Then all the way through that and formulating a new content strategy then how the design would support that, then approving that. Yeah.

Phil:  You went to a couple meetings.

Jeff:   Yeah, in fact, they made a comment once or twice like you should just get an office here ’cause I was there so much but I mean, we should really be proud of that ’cause that was not an easy thing. From what I understand, it’s been received really well. It’s doing well. Yeah, I’m pretty proud of that.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  Then I think we also got a couple websites that we’re wrapping up for the end of the year here. Actually starting in 2019 but we’ve been wrapping up that’ll all be going live within the next month here, like four projects. All at various stages of closeness to being doneness.

Phil:  What are you gonna do around here after that?

Jeff:  We got a few more queued up now, so yeah. That’s good.

Phil:  We probably talked about, I don’t know if we did or not, in previous podcasts but you and I also went down to watch Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jeff:  Gary Vee.

Phil:  Gary Vee.

Jeff:  I’m not gonna go into a whole lot about him but if you don’t know who he is, you should definitely look him up. He’s all over the interwebs. He’s got some books out that are pretty popular.

Phil:  If you do a search for marketing, content marketing, all those kinda things, he’ll probably show up right underneath us.

Jeff:  Yep. Right, right. I will warn you, sometimes he can be pretty loose with his-

Phil:  Language.

Jeff:  Language, just a fair warning but he’s also very real and I think he doesn’t sugarcoat things. He’s just very smart. I know we respect him a lot and things that he’s said. I know one thing he was talking about recently that we’ve taken to heart and I think it makes sense even when we think about our clients is just the importance of building brand.

Jeff:   I think about the content pieces that we’re doing and the content work that we do week in and week out for clients and ourselves. It just solidifies building brand and he was talking a lot about not trying to sell which is really the idea of inbound marketing. You’re not necessarily selling anything, you are helping people, you’re being a trusted resource, you’re building brand and it totally resonates.

Jeff:  We take a step back ’cause sometimes the grind of content marketing, of consistently making content and putting stuff out and what it all means and being that resource for people, it’s a lot of time and effort and it can sometimes, I’ll be honest, can feel like an endless carousel, but when you think about what you’re providing and you kinda take a step back and look back at all the things you’ve put out in the world and reacted to and helped people with whatever it is that you do as an industry, it’s pretty satisfying to think about.

Jeff:  When we think about building brand and being that trusted resource, makes sense. You know? That was really cool when I saw him say that the other day and again, it’s not groundbreaking when you think about it but just someone to say it and to preach it, it’s kinda like yeah, he’s right. I can get with that.

Phil:  It was great seeing him because we’ve both been following him for several years now and have bought a few books of his and constantly are watching new videos and everything. I kind of thought when we went to see him that we weren’t gonna hear anything new that we hadn’t heard ’cause we follow him so much.

Phil:  But we did. Yeah, there was stuff we had heard before but it really just pounded it into my head, we gotta be doing some of this stuff and learning more about it. But we also had a few new takeaways too. That was fun.

Jeff:  He’s a great resource. There’s probably a lot more but I think we-

Phil:  Those are some good highlights.

Jeff:  Some good highlights and a lot more to come in ’19.

Phil:  We should keep a running tally this year.

Jeff:  We should.

Phil:  Every month, recap something.

Jeff:  Then this time next year, it’ll just be the recap show.

Phil:  Yep.

Jeff:  That’d be kinda cool. One of the first things we talk about is let’s start off the year. Jeff came on and did the Bird Box Challenge.

Phil:  Everybody’s gonna be like what’s Bird Box?

Jeff:  I’ll be like, look at episode 23.

Phil:  Yeah. Forgot all about that.

Jeff:  We’ll probably be talking about Bird Box 2 by then.

Phil:  It could be.

Jeff:  Return of the thing.

Phil:  Yep. They lose a second sense now. They can’t hear anything.

Jeff:  They don’t have eyes and ears.

Phil:  Yep.

Jeff:  That’d be really weird.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  All right, I think we bored people enough.

Phil:  Probably. Can we give a teaser for next week?

Jeff:  What are we doing?

Phil:  By next week, I mean next podcast.

Jeff:  Yeah, next podcast, we want to talk about analytics. We’re gonna have Jan Christensen on next time, our main web developer and analytics extraordinaire. He’s had some really cool stuff lately that he’s been showing me that he’s been integrating for some of our clients who also share some of those ideas.

Phil:  Love it.

Jeff:  And obviously, SEO has a place and I think it’s time we talked a little bit about SEO today in voice so I think there’s a place there to kind of make sense but yeah, we’re gonna talk a lot about that. There are two, just a quick reminder. If you have a question about SEO and/or analytics that you wanna do before next time Ask CA, remember, #AskCA on any social channels and we will definitely try to integrate those questions into that for next time.

Phil:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). That sounds awesome.

Jeff:  Cool.

Phil:  All right.

Jeff: ‘Till next time.

Phil:  Yeah.

Jeff:  If you haven’t seen Bird Box, go watch it.

Phil:  Eh.

Jeff:  All right, see ya later.

Phil:  Buh bye.