Bryan Casey

@scottastevenson This should be easier now because design tools let you roll through iterations quickly but ive found it’s actually harder because you have to choose to slow yourself down. Its so easy to waste time by fooling yourself that you dont need to do this.

Product design is just combinatorial search. The search space usually isn't that big. Open a notebook and list all the ways a feature could work. Walk through in your head what it would be like to use each of them, with sketches. Building a complex feature without doing this step (which can take less than 2 hours) is really risky!

my beautiful game

That’s the pitch. That’s the angle. That’s the first page of the sales deck. That’s the smartest thing you’ve said in this entire conversation. The market is open. Not because its not valuable- because no one with the position has the incentive. Except you.

at least okc lost by 20

@gaetano_nyc the whole world

@gaetano_nyc if they play okc in finals the whole country will be knicks fans

Are there any Knicks fans out there besides me? I feel like everyone on my timeline hates the Knicks 😭 But whether you love them or hate them, we are witnessing history. The New York Knicks are currently the most efficient shooting team in the NBA Playoffs, posting a league-best 51.4% from the field and 39.6% from three-point range. That's just INSANE 🤯 If they sweep two teams in a row, that would bring them to a playoff win streak of 11 straight games. The only other teams that have done this are dynasty teams like the Lakers, Spurs, and Warriors in their prime. BUT... they will be facing a different beast in the NBA finals. Both the Spurs and Thunder are truly elite, and the Knicks will be an underdog in either matchup. I'm just saying. This is a big moment for Knicks fans. We've been suffering for a long time. I remember watching Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell as a kid. They got smoked in the NBA finals against Tim Duncan, but it was still one of my coolest childhood memories. Me and my bros used to stay up late watching NBA every night. We had a plastic basketball hoop tied to the family room door and used to play 1:1 in the living room against each other. For me, the Knicks making the NBA finals is nostalgic. Normally I don't care much about pro sports but this is a really cool moment.

The death of ppl mgmt is greatly overstated. Nothing will change here long-term because it’s gated by fundamental human communication. But near-term leaders need to personally build because the world changed. And if you have no feel for it you can’t manage it, forget leading.

Most companies are not going to meaningfully integrate their data to enable it for ai. Vendors are going to expand their surface area because code is cheap now and that expanded surface area will come with integrated data model. You are just gonna buy it. Eventually.

@lilyraynyc @thetafferboy @athenseo This is absolutely the biggest problem.

The main challenge @thetafferboy is seeing with his clients at the moment is poor decision making do to all the hype / misinformation in the space right now. @athenseo

What a wonderful piece this was.

One of the problems with only focusing on most obvious directly attributable marketing programs/channels/keywords etc is that theres just not that much volume there. Because most of the market is not one click away from buying something. If you approach things this way you very well may have some clearly defensible roi. But no scale. And when CMO needs to sit in room with CRO on the shared growth plan and CMO is driving negligible contribution (who cares how profitable) it is not good. It just makes marketing look like an irrelevant cost center that does light air cover, branding and competent digital experience management. If you want to make a bigger impact you need to get further away from the bullseye conversion tactic and start earlier in the funnel. That thing, by itself, will not convert. So you need to combine/stack programs and channels. The point of tofu seo is maybe to build a newsletter list. Newsletter is to keep you permanently engaged. Webinar passing through newsletter gets you conversion events. That is much harder and longer time horizon than just doing SEM on bullseye commercial terms. And to be clear if you are coming into new growth program the very first thing I’d do is sem/seo/aeo on core commercial terms. But you will exhaust the opportunity there before long. And then you will need to hunt for levers that aren’t gonna give you a trial or demo this session. Motions that will be harder, more time consuming and will require thoughtful integration over time. The question isn’t whether one tactic is more profitable than another. The question is whether you can make a broader range of tactics profitable because doing so is what increases not just the efficiency of the investment in marketing and growth… but the size and importance of marketing and growth to overall firm. If you are too big a purist you run the risk of being efficient but not effective.

Maybe I’m naive but I think it’s important that the framing is fundamentally true. If it’s not it will eventually get discredited. A different approach could be to say that more of the surface to reach customers looks like search. And that we need to approach other channels… reviews, wikipedia, reddit, youtube from an increasingly search-centic pov. Focusing on mentions on 3rd party sites/content that don’t produce content with evergreen value (eg chunks of news) will have negligible value. You probably only really care about third party sites in the context of search.

ok let's talk about SEO/GEO. There's a trend in SEO where we instantly anoint ourselves experts on every new topic. GEO was no different. IMO too many panicked and rushed to sell whatever they could. I'm talking LLMs.txt, Schema, markdown, sentiment, etc - instead of understanding what changed and what needs to happen. GEO has a huge overlap with SEO. After all, search engines power LLMS - but there's more work that needs to be done. more than 50% of LLM prompts have never been typed before - so we had to learn to evolve past the keyword to topics and semantic relevance. We had to understand the "fan out" not from a query level but from a topic level and a semantic level. We have to understand passages (Forget chunks) and how those passages factor into semantic calculations. We need new measurement tools to track share of voice - both in search and in AI. We need to do real marketing to influence the 3rd party cites AI likes to cite. AI isn't going to say you're the best 'foo' if nobody else is saying it. saying all of that is "just SEO" might be technically correct in a sense, but it's not smart - because we need more $$, more hours, more people, more tools to do all of this extra. and "it's just SEO" doesn't get us that.

This is my primary agi eval

It’s always a matter of “what data” There are three data sets I see at the CMO level: crm/core sales kpis (eg pipeline as the shared metric of the combined gtm team) brand digital/performance (ads and organic but more ads) Ideally you’d find CMOs that can travel between these worlds but it is relatively rare. Fluency in organic demand is probably the worst of all these areas. There are many reasons why this is the case but IMO none of them are good. All the data says senior marketers should be better at this stuff than they are. I think a lot of is because CMOs are in some ways downstream actors of a) sales … which creates cmos who speak sales data more fluently than they speak their own language and b) advertising and the agencies who make the vast majority of their revenue as a cut of ad spend … which drives the focus on brand and digital performance media. There’s no massive industry inertia for them to really be excellent at organic demand. Inbound. Marketing as Media. New media. All this stuff had been attempts at creating rival waves but IMO none of it has come close to rivaling sales and ads. ABM is basically not executable but ppl love it because you get to theoretically combine sales and ads. At least on a ppt chart. I see all this as a failure of the modern marketing function to assert its own identity based on the underlying performance fundamentals. Not sure what it would take to change this. But it is financially irrational behavior IMO.

@rSEOReddit @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 @WebsiteSquadron @edwardeachday @bhartzer @bryanfcasey 👀

Are CMOs data-fluent or data-driven? Should CEOs re-evaluate their CMOs on their Search-Savvy? reddit.com/r/SEO/comments… cc @Hobo_Web @gaganghotra_ @IdleMusings101 @WebsiteSquadron @edwardeachday @bhartzer

@vasuman @VerizonSupport counting on the power rangers here

Dear @VerizonSupport Your support team has made me and my team waste several hours trying to purchase and set up a simple hotspot for our business. Your customer support agent made me repeat my own name 12 times over a 90 minute call. They are terrible at their job. Your website is a complicated labyrinth and your hold music is a war crime. I will PERSONALLY set up VARICK AGENTS across your customer support stack so that no sensitive young man is subjected to the psychological torture I have endured today. WE ARE EXPENSIVE. I WILL FOOT THE BILL. THIS ONE IS ON THE HOUSE. I hate you. My lawyers will be in touch. @CIA @FBI @Interpol @NATO @UN @POTUS @Avengers @TheRock @ThePowerRangers @neiltyson

@bernardjhuang @clearscope congrats man, great run

1/ After close to a decade, tomorrow will be my last day at @clearscope. It's hard to put almost ten years into a thread. But here's what I keep coming back to 🧵

Read this thread, it is worth it.

Three things… When we did investment analysis we always segmented branded vs non for both seo and ppc for apples to apples. 90% of why ppl are saying aeo is not just seo is because they are behaving like branded search does not exist. If you include, the overlap is even bigger. The fact that companies don’t manage seo, sem and geo as one coherent thought, budget, motion, etc is maybe the single dumbest and inefficient thing and its marketing so there are many competitors for that title.

SEO = reporting systems exclude branded search ROI, because executives say it's unfair to give SEO attribution credit for branded demand capture. PPC = able to "prove ROI" by bidding on branded search terms, drawing a clear connection to revenue based on activities happening on other channels. Executives don't seem to mind that. Therefore, SEO gets scrutinized and questioned, while PPC gets continued investment. Make it make sense. 🤔 This is why the attribution black box is going to disproportionately hurt SEO teams, agencies and consultants -- while rewarding channels that have more trackable attribution such as paid search and other campaigns ran with UTMs.

@TheCoolestCool This stuff is probably the most negative roi tactic in b2b but is the one ppl are the most pretentious about. We did a lot to drive our cost of managing this stuff to zero.

Why is "Thought Leadership" so low on the list? Because most thought leadership isn't leading any thoughts... Most businesses are playing the ego game. They publish content thinking its thought leadership. But it's actually just mediocre ideas restated.

Our research found that 'data roundups' are the most highly linked to content format in SaaS. Want more links and authority? Do more research and publish the data.

All these reports are saying that traditional search is the main way to influence ai visibility. I don’t know if you guys knew this, but the ai tools, they use search. And then the stuff they find, they put it in the answer. It is extremely complicated I know.