The New Search, New LinkedIn Guide, Smart Glasses, and Auracast

Speaker 1 – 00:15
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn and oh my goodness, you
have been traveling all over the place. I did do an episode in the podcast where I mentioned my father’s passing
away. I have an estate sale going on tomorrow. And just man, don’t ever sell a car on Craigslist and turn on text
messaging. That’s all I can say. I didn’t realize that so many people wanted to send me the check with the shipping
expense in it and to have me take the shipping expense back. You know, this scam is just insane. But yeah, nobody
wants to hear about any of that stuff. So let’s get into interesting stuff.

Speaker 1 – 00:50
I think the big thing for me that popped from the last couple weeks was Google announced a lot of stuff and there
was a lot of chatter about it changing what organic search looks like. So, you’ve been following all this stuff, what’s
going on there?

Speaker 3 – 01:01

So, oh, there’s so much to talk about. So Google IO was a week ago now seems like was a week ago.

Speaker 1 – 01:08
Or is it this week and a half?

Speaker 3 – 01:10

Yeah, I don’t even remember anymore. Yeah, they rolled out a ton of new stuff and the big stuff that’s going to affect
marketers, number one is AI overviews are currently, I think they said somewhere between like 30ish percent of
searches or something. Along those lines. Along those lines. And they expect to increase 10% month over month
until they expect half of Google searches to have AI overviews by the end of calendar year 2025. So we’ll see if that
takes place. But that is a big number and obviously that has huge implications for search. But they also showed AI
mode which is basically just a Gemini chat. So instead of the ten blue links, AI mode is purely, hey, talk to Gemini
about what it is you want. It will go out and find stuff.

Speaker 3 – 02:01

It’s like a mini live Deep Research and it is in production now and it’s crazy in terms of what it means for search
because it dramatically changes just how you’re going to do everything online. So if you go into AI mode and you
type in a search query, it immediately starts going out to the web trying to find results and dig them and then it
assembles a mini deep research report and then you have to go and you can have conversations and follow ups and
stuff like that. And what’s interesting, of course, you know, there’s the right rail that has its references and sources
and there’s three listings that, you know, I’ll tell you all the sources it drew from, but the top three listings. So
basically there is, there are no more 10 blue links. Like that is the big thing.

Speaker 3 – 02:52

There’s no 10 blue links. And so every SEO practitioner is like, so what do we do? And of course they’re said they’re
going to be experimenting with putting ads of course in the right rail as well to preserve their ad business. They’ve
also said that right now the Google search console has no data and they expect to have at least a little bit of data,
but not a ton. So SEO folks will generally not have insight into what AI mode it is doing for your traffic. Other than
almost everyone in SEO has seen this in the last six months. The blue line of search impressions has gone up, the
purple line in search console of clicks has gone down and everyone is across the board. I can’t think of a single
client.

Speaker 3 – 03:43

And we’ve looked at like literally hundreds of Google search console instances and everyone says the same story.
The amount of traffic you’re getting from Google is going down.

Speaker 1 – 03:53
Right. And so yeah, the first thing my thought is preserving the search business. And so that’s just, they’re gonna
throw stuff in the right rail and that’s the easy way to get around it. But yeah, I don’t know. So it basically it seems like
70% of SEO just vanishes, right, because you’ve got the, you know, one or two links in the chat going and the other
eight are just not a thing anymore.

Speaker 3 – 04:12

Exactly. So it is a dramatic change. It means that marketers need to be very focused right now on adapting for this
new reality of doing the things that will hopefully get you placements. And so what that means is a, you should be
using these features and B, you should be testing out the sources that it’s getting its data from. What are those
sources in general, and then trying to get your content into those sources as well as obviously doing all the right
things to make sure your own stuff is in good, have working order. So there’s a lot of work to be done on the Trust
Insights website. We have an eight page guide on the three things you should be doing to optimize your content for
AI. Do it now, it’s free, there’s no cost.

Speaker 3 – 04:57

We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. But yeah, that was some of the big stuff. The other things that came out,
Google’s new V3 model, the video generation model came out 8 seconds of video it can generate. But what’s
different is that it can generate the audio track along with it. So you get extremely high quality video that is, it’s
Uncanny Valley stuff. It’s, it’s literally, it’s like deep fake territory of like, okay, this is not, it’s not as easily detected that
it’s AI. But then you get the voiceover, you get the background music, you get the sound effects, all of it in one
download. And it is absolutely incredible.

Speaker 3 – 05:38

So for marketing purposes, I mean there’s a lot of people look at this going, this is a pretty big deal that you’re going
to be able to synthesize all sorts of stuff. There’s some great examples on YouTube, people talking at a completely
synthetic car show about the cars they’ve test driven at the show and things, restaurant reviews, you name it. And it
really raises some very interesting ethical problems for marketers. I mean just the ability for you to create a realistic
looking video that maybe is a competitive review that trashes your competitor.

Speaker 1 – 06:09
Right.

Speaker 3 – 06:10

It could be very interesting and challenging. Oh, you know, marketing over Coffee podcast, that’s terrible. You know,
you should listen to Bob’s marketing over lattes instead.

Speaker 1 – 06:21
Yeah, right, I can. That is a great point. Using this stuff for black hat activity. And yeah, I don’t know, I don’t see any
defense against that. You know, these tools have gotten so good on so many different fronts that detecting fraud
has become nearly impossible. One thing I wanted to plug, you’ve got the unofficial LinkedIn algorithm guide for
marketers. You’ve got a bunch of stuff there that we’ve been giving that away for free. I’ll link to that in the show
notes too, so you can check that out. But you did in the newsletter outline kind of a six step process on what to deal
with this. But what’s the big story with this? Like what’s gone on with LinkedIn that we need to be aware of now?

Speaker 3 – 06:56

I mean, here’s the thing, they’ve got new AI models in the process. There’s gnn, a neural network in front of it. There’s
a new AI based LLM based ranking system in there. There’s a bunch of different P that they’ve built into the system.
They’re really cool and they are. It gives you guidance about how to think about your LinkedIn profile and your
activities on LinkedIn. Basically, if I had to boil it all down, say and do things on LinkedIn that are relevant to what you
want to be found for. So if you are say you’re all in on blenders as ridiculous example, you should be leaving
comments on other people’s blenders posts. You should be commenting about blenders, you should be putting up
your own posts about blenders. Your LinkedIn profile should have blenders all over it.

Speaker 3 – 07:46

Your, your first degree connections should also be, you know, blender adjacent or blender specific. But essentially
these language models give LinkedIn a much more capable way to understand what someone is about. And so if
you are just out there on LinkedIn, you know, starting fights and all sorts of stuff and you’re probably going to be
topically not as relevant on any one specific topic. So you do want to have some focus on that and you want to be it.
It rewards activity. I mean that which is not, that is not a change. But it really emphasizes that the activity you do on
LinkedIn has to be focused if you want to be recommended and found for that specific topic.

Speaker 1 – 08:32
All right, cool. Yeah, we’ve got links to that in the show notes. People can grab that stuff. You did have updates too
though. There’s new stuff from Claude and with Deepseek, what, you know what’s struck you as the good stuff on
that?

Speaker 3 – 08:43

Yeah. So anthropic released Claude 4, both the opus and Sonnet models, very interestingly on a lot of the
leaderboards like in LM arena and over on AdirChat, the developer coding tools, Claude 4 does not outperform
Claude 3.7 in a fair number of cases and they both do not outperform OpenAI’s O3 or Gemini’s 2.5. So there’s some
very. There’s a lot of questions about what Claude 4 is good for because it’s still, as with all of the CLAUDE models,
it’s still very expensive to use, particularly on the API. And it’s not clear yet the thing that it seems to be optimized for
is tool handling, using mcps, using external tools and stuff. It seems to do really well at that, but at the expense of
not being able to do as much stuff. Other stuff.

Speaker 3 – 09:35

And there’s been a lot of interesting articles talking about how early versions failed its safety tests, like trying to
blackmail its engineers and ST like that and things. OpenAI has been experiencing similar issues where it was trying
to override its shutdown codes and things. And one of the things that people don’t know about language models is
this the more safe you try to make them, the dumber they get because you basically have to lobotomize A lot of its
functionality. So a completely uncensored, unsafe model will be extremely capable. It’s why some of the models that
are out there, that are open source models that are used to write adult material that the, you know, the mainstream
models will not do. They’re very creative, they’re better writers because they have fewer restrictions on how, you
know, statistics about words work.

Speaker 3 – 10:25

And so these new advanced models, if they’ve been very heavily redacted for safety purposes, may be
underperforming for that reason. That is speculation. I do not know for sure, but that’s speculation. But yeah, so
there was a lot of big fanfare about that also. OpenAI buying Jony I’ve’s company to make AI hardware was in the
news, but Deepseek, the Chinese company, very quietly pushed a new release. They said, oh yeah, we updated our
model. That was like literally it was a blog post. That was all they did. And it’s spectacular like it is. So far, early tests
are showing that it outperforms almost everything in the field. It is still free to download, it is still dirt cheap to use

on the API. Obviously, if you’re using their services, it is still not private in any way, shape or form.

Speaker 3 – 11:15

But the early tests from. Because it dropped literally 10 hours ago as of the time we’re recording the show. So it’s still
new in the field, but early tests are showing that it is a dramatic improvement over its predecessors and a dramatic
improvement against all the other competitors in the field and still free for you to download. So very interesting stuff.

Speaker 1 – 11:36
Yeah, definitely. All right, so that’s breaking. And it’s really interesting, that idea of the link between creativity and
abandoning safety, you know, it’s fine. Like I’ve heard other people talk about the United States about, you know, it’s
just a bunch of crazy people with guns. And yet, you know, creative things happen here too. So, you know, that’s just
interesting to hear that. We’ll keep an eye on that. And yeah, obviously with Deep Sea, you know, fresh in the market,
there’ll be more to track on that. We have the Duolingo case were kicking around over on analytics for marketer.
Katie has a nice piece talking about kind of what went wrong with that.

Speaker 1 – 12:13
Yeah, I mean, the short version, for people that have not followed this, the CEO came out with a statement of, you
know, kind of the classic, we’re going to fire most of the employees and AI is going to do a better job running
everything. And it just kind of Went awry. You know, I don’t know any lessons beyond the normal, you know, don’t be
a CEO talking about trashing the whole company.

Speaker 3 – 12:33

Yeah, don’t do that. I mean, I’ve seen so many people do this so badly. The thing is this, AI agents and agentic AI is
still in its early days and it is still very difficult to get them to do a wide ranging task. They can do now tasks
extremely well and agentic tools can do them in sequences and workflows, things we’ve talked about, tools like Nan
and obviously the coding environments like Klein and Curso can all do that. But the idea that there’s just, you know, a
Terminator sitting at the desk instead of a human, that is still far away because the tools still require a lot of
babysitting and they get smarter very quickly. They can do things today they could not do even six months ago. But
it’s still not. You’re still not firing everybody. I do see, and this is.

Speaker 3 – 13:28

There was a piece from Dario Amode from Anthropic, the CEO of Anthropic, talking about the impacts of AI. He’s
saying 20% unemployment rates are not unrealistic because these things are just going to devour, particularly entry
level work. And I definitely see that. But the way Duolingo approached it was just boneheaded. What did you think of
it?

Speaker 1 – 13:52
Well, it’s asking for trouble. Yeah. And I’ve seen a lot of this stuff too. Talking about people make the mistake that
transparency and authenticity are the most important things. And no, it’s just not. Like there’s a lot of things that

don’t concern. The short version of this is there’s no person looking into learning a language today online that cares
at all about where the LLMs are and who’s doing the graphics and what the workforce is. Completely, you know, none
of those things are involved in the customer experience. So, you know, and then I could go on a whole other set of
rants about how, you know, that’s the CEO talking to the street. Right. Like that’s he’s looking to move the quarterly
stock numbers with that kind of talk that has nothing to do with running the business. And that can easily bite you.

Speaker 1 – 14:36
Yeah. Because like, you can see, yeah, they did a ton of things wrong. But yet, I don’t know, I feel like I’m all in on the
fact that, yeah, I can see AI being an excellent language instructor. You know, like we don’t need tons of people to be
doing Spanish 101. Like that’s a pretty well established list of stuff that matches that situation we’ve talked about
before where AI and computers for healthcare for seniors. You know, Amazon, Alexa will answer a senior citizen 500
times in a day and not get angry about it. And that’s an important. There’s value in that because, you know, no human
really wants that job. And so, yeah, it can be replaced. So, yeah, you know, they definitely made some mistakes.
There’s some truth to a lot of it.

Speaker 1 – 15:22
But that doesn’t mean that you need to brag about that on the Internet. You know, just like make your product better
and take your money and move on.

Speaker 3 – 15:29

Exactly. I mean, that’s the thing, is that all he had to say was, hey, our product’s going to get 40% better and 60%
cheaper. That’s it. That’s all they had to say, right?

Speaker 1 – 15:37
Yeah, yeah. But you know, and we don’t know the whole story, but you know, there seems to be a lot of ego rush
about bragging that you’re going to be the next AI powered whatever and you know, jumping on that bandwagon is
obviously irresistible for a lot of C level folks.

Speaker 3 – 15:51

So it’s so stupid though. It’s like nobody cares. I was just writing about this on LinkedIn. It’s like talking about
blenders. You literally talk about blade speed and RPM and how you’re a blender first company, nobody cares. We
just want our food faster and cheaper and better and that’s what the customers all care about. These folks have so
lost the plot of what customers actually care about.

Speaker 1 – 16:17
Yeah, no, that’s dead on the mark. All right, a couple other things. Auracast I wanted to report back. I’ve still been
playing around with that some more. I have an oracast transmitter. Digging in. The real challenge with this is Apple
does not have an app available that supports it. So there’s no inroad there. As far as hardware, JBL has really
stepped up. There’s a lot of JBL products that support this. And then I also saw some Sennheiser earbuds that
unfortunately appealed to my audio gear addiction and I may be picking up a set of those sometime soon. So I can
get into that. But yeah, the idea that you get this device, you’re able to stream some audio multiple devices can listen
to it seems to just have a lot of interesting applications, so I’m looking forward to play with that.

Speaker 1 – 17:03
Also, on the gear watch I wanted to throw out, I have to get some new glasses, so I was looking at smart glasses.
Because it’s so funny, over the past couple years I’m like, well, I’m not buying these smart glasses because if they’re
not prescription, I’m not really going to wear them that much. Well, now that I need a new prescription, it’s like, oh,
well, maybe I should just get smart glasses. But I’m throwing this out to the audience and everybody else because
everything I’ve seen so far, I’m like, yeah, no, I’m not doing that. It’s not worth the benefit. There’s been some
interesting stuff I’ve seen kicked around, but a lot of them are still at the Kickstarter level of virtual screens on the
glasses.

Speaker 1 – 17:37
So if you want a teleprompter or if you want something that’s gonna pop up, like when you’re at a meeting, hey, this is
this person, here’s their full name. And all this stuff, which I forget continually, that could be really interesting for me.
But yeah, I don’t know. Have you thought of it, looked or thought about smart glasses? Anything on that front that’s
appealed to you?

Speaker 3 – 17:55

I have thought about the Vitur ones. I’ve seen them on Instagram and stuff like that. And of course Apple Vision. The
main use case for that would be things like on the plane where I want my 65 inch screen, but obviously I’m like a
Tyrannosaurus stuck like this. I don’t need the virtual reality overlay, Terminator style. In real daily life, I have no need
for that. But having that whole black. Put the goggles on and now I can work in Premiere, for example, on the plane
would. That would actually be legitimately useful because I am on the road so much.

Speaker 1 – 18:27
Yeah, that’s a great point. The idea of 120 inch screen or like you said, Premiere and having like a full size display of
the video and still having all your editing tools over here. Yeah, yeah, that’s a win. I can see that. I don’t see that being
cheap anytime soon, but it will get here. All right, that sounds good. What you’re heading off to Phoenix. Anything
else on the list coming up that you’ve got? Interesting.

Speaker 3 – 18:52

We got some stuff for some clients coming up, then headed to southeastern Pennsylvania for some stuff. So there’s
more stuff starting to pop up, which I’m always thrilled about. But the Phoenix thing, I’m doing a half day workshop
on using generative AI for doing analysis, which is going to be really interesting because the. It’s the Marketing
Analytics Summit and the one thing that generative AI is really bad at is math. And therefore this is a interesting
challenge to teach. How do you use this stuff and get correct answers? And the short version is you don’t let
generative AI do math. You do all the pre processing somewhere else, hand generative AI the conclusions and then it
does, you know, making the reports and all the fancy stuff. But you definitely don’t want it doing math.

Speaker 1 – 19:39
All right, that sounds good. You can sign up for more info on the Marketing Over Coffee text line at 617-812-5494.
And yeah, again, check out the links to the LinkedIn resource and the what to do with AI blog post. But that’s gonna

do it for this week. So until next week. Enjoy the coffee.

Speaker 3 – 19:57

Enjoy the coffee.

Speaker 2 – 19:59

You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspenn.com Read more from
John J. Wall at jw50150.com the marketing over Coffee theme song is called Mellow G by Funkmasters and you can
find it at Musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.