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Recorded: Wednesday 12 July 2023 | Published: Friday 21 July 2023
The excitement - and in some cases, overexcitement - around AI is starting to get pushback. It’s the classic journey transformative technologies go through. Negative sentiment, legal disputes, privacy legislation and perhaps just plain old overwhelm are starting to kick in.
One way to look at this is as an opportunity. If you were worried you were falling behind (like most Gen X and Boomers are) on AI tools, then now’s your chance to catch up (ie whilst others are wasting mental cycles highlighting the problems).
But it’s important to understand value versus junk.
To illustrate this, I’ve been curious about how many companies are viewing AI tools (we can just focus on ChatGPT for now as our example) as a way to generate low value output (eg content, answers, processes, thoughts).
I refer to this as ‘proactive mediocrity’. It’s when people deliberately spend time using tools to generate junk content that adds no value to society.
To highlight how easy this is, consider this page that we’ve put together: Get the Most Out of HubSpot for a New User
When you first look through the page you could be fooled into thinking it is a useful resource. But it’s actually just junk. Packaged up nicely. ‘Lipstick on a pig’ as we used to say.
That’s because all the content was generated by ChatGPT using a few plugins. Here’s the ChatGPT thread if you are interested. The ChatGPT thread is from a month ago, so the plugins I used at the time are likely out of date by now (there will be much better ones now), but you’ll get the idea.
It was generated in a few minutes just by scouring the web (in this case a few HubSpot KB articles).
But have a read through the page - it’s pretty useless. I call this ‘proactive mediocrity’, and sadly we’re seeing a deluge of it appearing. And even worse, as this content propagates out it just feeds the AI machine for the next cycle.
(BTW we deliberately blocked that page from Google - we don’t want that appearing in the search results)
In case you are interested, every image on that page was created by AI as well - we use Midjourney for everything these days #NeverUseAStockImageAgain
The opposite of this is ‘proactive excellence’, and it’s the opportunity that all content marketers should be chasing/embracing. Imagine if that same page, with its beautiful design, had amazing content - that was actually of value to society. What a difference that would make.
Here’s the takeaway: in a growing swamp of mediocre content, aim high and produce excellent content. And then put the effort into packaging it well.
Just floating this idea - if you’ve had HubSpot in place at your company for a few years now, would you be interested in a re-onboarding ‘experience’.
Basically we review your portal, and then take you and your team through training for how we onboard clients these days (a lot has changed in the last few years). Some of the stuff you’d already know, but you might be surprised at how many new tools and features there are in HubSpot now.
A quick example, if you’re still using the Workflow tool the same way you did 2 years ago, then there’s tons of opportunity for you to improve.
We’re thinking this might be a half day training session for you and your team. We’d need access to your portal beforehand in order to prepare, and then we spend a half day on a Zoom, Teams of Meet session with you all.
Sound useful? Let us know - just hit reply to our show notes email and we’ll be in touch.
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
These appear on filters for Lists, Workflows, Campaigns and Forms (possibly more), basically anywhere you see Advance Filters as an option:
It’s the little things!
This is something that we often get asked.
Why? Conventional wisdom versus Latest testing…
Conventional wisdom (seen in countless blog posts over the years) recommends you remove ‘any distractions’ such as navigation menus, footer menus, popups, etc on landing pages. The thinking being that we just want the visitor to do one thing: usually fill out a form, and we don’t want to distract them with anything else.
Whilst this might be a good starting point, the effectiveness of this approach will likely depend on the specific situation, audience and buyer intent.
For example, one counter to this approach (from me personally) is that when I’m visiting a link on mobile (eg in Twitter or Threads or LinkedIn etc) I’m often interested in learning more about the company. I’m not yet ready to sign up (although sometimes I am). So when the site blocks easy access to a menu I find it frustrating. And if I’ve opened it in a social app it’s usually using the in-app browser, so I can’t even manually edit the URL. At which point I’ll usually just give up.
So, what to do? Simple: test and measure
Try a version with and without ‘distractions’. View bounce rates and conversion rates. Also measure the activity of visitors who do get to browse around further - they may not convert right away, but they may end up being a better type of conversion later. HubSpot of course allows you to easily measure all of these scenarios so you can decide on the best approach for you landing page.
BTW you might find you have a mix on your site - some landing pages are distraction free, others fully functional.
This would indicate the best way forward and what is helping you drive conversion without causing users to get annoyed.
Example of a page without the navigation, as people have navigated here to view this property and learn more:
Vs the homepage:
Company property: Total Revenue (from HubSpot KB)
(not to be confused with Annual Revenue)
Handy!
A handy feature - you can copy workflow actions from one workflow to another.
Available from the actions menu (on the action):
This will copy over the action, and will attempt to copy any specific properties or other object details in the action.
However this won’t work for some items eg if your source action refers to the new ‘Available data’ sources (currently in Beta). When the object data can’t be copied you’ll see error messages like this (which is totally understandable):
HubSpot’s content assistant is now out in public beta - where I expect it will stay for a while, it’s probably one of those things that is always in beta…
It’s handy, and pretty much table stakes now for platforms to incorporate this kind of functionality.
Note the privacy related considerations that you are agreeing to when you enable it.
BTW did you notice that you can use the Content Assistant in Inbox Conversations as well? You’ll need to opt in to it specifically in your Betas area.
We’ve been gradually moving all our sites from WordPress to HubSpot CMS over the past few years.
We’re down to our last 10 or so sites. However, some of these sites have years worth of comments - which we consider valuable.
One blocker that we’ve run into is that HubSpot’s importer won’t import comments from WordPress. I was surprised by this, because I was sure it used to… I checked with HubSpot Support and they confirmed that comments aren’t imported.
This is a showstopper for our remaining sites and for a few clients who we were hoping to move over to HubSpot.
As a personal example, for my personal blog - which I started writing in 2004 - I have a few thousand comments that have been added over the years. I don’t want to lose them:
And one of my wife’s sites has more than 20,000 comments - which we don’t want to lose.
And hence, it is on our wishlist!
From Paul:
Tips and Insights. Tangible and Measurable approach to HubSpot. Step Process- real life client examples. Excellent for getting a guide and an unbiased view of the HubSpot ecosystem.
Prompt: Wide shot of a happy professional woman in early 30s, working in a modern office, creating a sense of happiness and satisfaction, with a purple substance blowing up all around, in the style of intricate compositions, zbrush, biomorphic forms, molecular, emek golan, luminous color palette, innovating techniques, spiral group, surreal photography, purple and blue gradient lighting
Look carefully and you’ll spot some issues with the hands, and the back of the laptop (Midjourney has combined it with the look of a monitor stand).
See more examples on our XEN Create Midjourney page - includes a bunch of prompts we’ve found, created or tested.
BTW you can follow our daily prompt updates on the XEN Create LinkedIn page. Use this as inspiration for what is possible.
As I write this, Threads (the new social platform from Meta) has just passed 100M users. In 5 days. Interesting times.
I’m really enjoying the freedom of a fresh start. I have hardly any followers on Threads and thus don’t feel at all constrained in what I share.
This might seem odd (for a marketer to say) but for me there’s a pressure on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram - due to me having been on them right from the start and being part of communities that I’m no longer really involved in (eg for the first 20 years of my career I was heavily involved in the Microsoft community, and as such most of my connections on Twitter and LinkedIn are from those days). Whilst logically this probably seems strange, personally it has been a (perceived) constraint for me. Let’s see how Threads goes - I suspect it will be my main channel.
It’s early days though, and if there’s a common sentiment I’m seeing it’s that: everyone loves how kind, polite and positive the place is so far. But there is an underlying dread of what it will become once all the rage, clickbait (and marketers!) turn up. I share this fear. The mute button will likely be getting a big workout in coming weeks. The app is basic so far and will improve quickly. I won’t bother mentioning any specific features here, because by the time you read this, they’ll likely be there (hello Follower tab).
What’s your thoughts on Threads so far?
If you feel inclined you can follow me here.
Word of the week: Pronoia
Pronoia describes a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia believes that the world around them conspires to do them good.
I found this webinar useful as a reminder of a few things:
Blair Enns - in case you aren’t aware - is the guy behind Win Without Pitching. I’ve read his book many times. He co-hosts a podcast with another favourite of ours David C Baker.
Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).
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HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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