Category: Books

Episode 202

One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, Heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel’s lectures

People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn’t mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.”

Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel – I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me  to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don’t get what he’s saying.

Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT – when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity.

If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them – and this has given rise to a whole field – prompt engineering.

Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models – the brains behind Generative AI.

In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O’Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let’s go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor.

 

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:28 Welcome Mike

00:11:27 Expressing all that’s needed for a GPT to produce good response

00:20:24 Using AI context window

00:34:48 PSA

00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data

00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT

00:47:52 Training GPT for writing

 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

GWF Hegel

Marketing Memetics, with Mike Taylor – Funnel Reboot

Mike on Twitter

Mike on Linkedin

Mike’s LinkedIn courses

Mike’s Udemy courses

Microsoft GitHub

McDonald’s

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Episode 201

While our guest wasn’t the one who invented content marketing, by founding the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience.

These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He’s showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He’s urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur.

This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they’ve acquired and

The next criteria – content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time – be it in increments of hours or years.

Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content.

This isn’t exactly a typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.

So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi.

Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:41 Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea
00:11:21 Content mktg’s more than a wrapper
00:20:27 Audience vs community
00:23:11 PSA
00:23:52 Thinking of offers for your audience
00:31:13 Having media calendars
00:36:11 Business model may incorporate web3
00:45:34 About CEX & Joe’s book

People/Products mentioned in the show:

The Content Entrepreneur book

Content Entrepreneur Expo

Joe’s LinkedIn profile

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Episode 198

A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  

 

But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 

 

Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?

 

We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

 

Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 

 

Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 

 

His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.

 

Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.

 

This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let’s head there now to meet Bob Moore.

 

Timestamps / Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken

00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope

00:26:13 PSA

00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices

00:31:38 Pooling together data

00:55:06 Contacting Bob

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ecosystem-Led Growth book

Bob on X

Bob on LinkedIn 

Bob is formerly Co-founder of Stitch Data

Bob is currently CEO at Crossbeam

Metcalfe’s Law

 

 

 

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Episode 191

Do you wish there was a blueprint for architecting all your company’s content? You’ve come to the right place because a super-well researched book has just come out, from someone whose name is synonymous with Content marketing. 

Our guest is a marketing leader who helps companies combine technology and digital media to produce great content marketing. Many Fortune 500 brands have sought him out for his strategic guidance. 

He himself says this was an improbable outcome, as a guy who moved from Texas to LA to start a career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. But LA had its own plans for him, specifically in senior marketing roles with SaaS companies, including a content management solution firm where he was CMO.  

In 2010 he joined  Joe Pulizzi, previous show guest who had just founded The Content Marketing Institute as its Chief Strategy Advisor. He played a pivotal role in making it the premier content marketing education organization through its acquisition by UBM in 2016 and right up to the present. He and Joe still put out This Old Marketing, a podcast which is downloaded more than a half-a-million times every year in 150 countries.

He also provides training programs and certification courses through The Content Advisory. 

Beyond all the enterprise work he does, he still rolls up his sleeves to support various startups , serving supporting roles  at DivvyHQ and BrandLens. He is the best-selling author with four best-selling books on marketing and today we’re talking about his 2023 book: Content Marketing Strategy. 

We’re headed now to talk with Robert Rose. 

 

Timestamps/Chapters

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:50 – Welcome Robert

00:04:48 – How having a strategy produces better content

00:28:31 – PSA

00:29:08 – 3 pillars of the Content marketing model

00:34:43 – Org structures at odds with Content Strategy

00:37:22 – Content dept shouldn’t be treated as vending machine

00:39:44 – Content’s container vs content itself

00:45:02 – Infusing content with storylike progression

00:48:23 – Points of view for creating content

00:49:49 – Measuring content’s value

01:00:37 – Getting the book/contacting Robert

People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show

Robert Rose – YouTube

PNR This Old Marketing

The Content Advisory

Content Marketing Strategy book

Leo Tolstoy

Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

You may want to hear the related Funnel Reboot podcast with Robert’s friend Joe Pulizzi

 

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