by William Walsh | Feb 28, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 2/28/24 in MarTech
When he was a kid, Scott Gillum dreamt of running a business. He made his dream come true with a company focused on work/life balance.
MarTech columnist Scott Gillum runs his business Carbon Design from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He knew from a very young age that running a business was what he wanted to do. He just wasn’t sure what that meant. That led him on a circuitous path to learning a lot about business and marketing, and then having to unlearn some of it.
Q: How far back does the business thing go?
A: As a kid, I always dreamed of having my own company. I would wake up and remember having these very vivid dreams that I built a hotel or restaurant. I’d tell my mom about it, and she’s like, “You know, you should be an architect. You always think about building things.”
And so I always knew I was going to do something in business. So here’s my strategy in high school to figure out what I was going to do with my life: I was reading the Fortune 500 and I saw that most of the CEOs in the top 200 companies had their JDs.
And I thought, “Well, that’s it. If I want to get to the top with a company, I should go to law school because they all have their JDs.” So my college career was designed to get on the path to going to law school. I was a political science and economics major and I did two internships at law firms and realized, “Oh my god. I hate this.” So I got a bit smarter and realized what I really like is business, and it isn’t the law.
Got around to figuring out how I could go to grad school and get my MBA and get somebody to pay for it and that sent me on the path to where we are today.
Q: I can’t remember any of my dreams from high school, but I’m pretty sure they did not involve starting a business. What attracted you to it?
A: What I liked about it was the problem-solving, figuring things out was the appeal of it.
It wasn’t until I was 52 that I started a business of my own. With two kids in private schools or private universities. So the worst time to do it, but that’s when the opportunity was there, right? And the two years after starting the business were the hardest years of my life.
Part of the reason for that is that If you’ve been in a certain type of workplace for 30 years you’re accustomed to having a paycheck every week. You’re accustomed to understanding how you’re going to pay your taxes. How you’re going to get your insurance, right? All these things just happen. And you’ve been conditioned that way. It took two years of being an entrepreneur to figure out how to unwind that mental model of how I should think about making an income and a living. Figuring out there’s a different way that you can make a living.
That’s maybe the hardest part of being an entrepreneur. There are different ways that you can find insurance. You can figure out how to pay your taxes. But there’s a big hurdle for people trying to leave where they are working for someone else. In the current environment, where you’ve got a home, you got a mortgage payment, you got kids in college, to flip that upside down and become an entrepreneur, it’s very, very difficult.
Q: What do you like about marketing?
A: I like trying to figure out why things don’t work. And so when I founded Carbon Design, I founded it because of two things that don’t work right. The original idea for it was backward in terms of starting a business. I focused on the people and not the clients.
While I was working, I saw this next generation, the millennials, come in, and I came to the realization that their work styles are very different. And not in a bad way.
For example, I was doing a big rebranding project for a client. We just finished one phase and I was looking for the creative director and he was gone. We’re going to the next phase, and he was down backpacking through South America. And bells started going off in my head.
Q: Like that sounded pretty cool?
A: Yeah, I thought about the experiences I had when I was in management consulting. We would lose people when they became most productive. When they got five, six, seven years of experience under their belts, they would get married, and then have a family, and then we would lose really talented associates. They would try to come and work part-time, but they never felt like they could balance work life. They’re always feeling either like they were disappointing the client or disappointing themselves as a mother or father or whatever it is.
So the founding of Carbon Design was built around the idea that people really need a different way to work. They need to put their lives first and get that straightened out, then the work will come, and it’ll be really good. If you don’t have your life right, the work is going to suffer. And that’s the foundation of the company.
We’re on demand. We’re remote. We’re all freelance contractors. And you make your own time. You do work where you want. All we care about is your deliverables. Good quality work on time, it’s all we care about. So I started the company backwards with that. I figured if I get a good core base of people, then we’ll get clients and we’ll do really great work and we’ll retain them and get referred.
So the first question was really why aren’t people engaged in work anymore? If you looked at the Gallup poll before COVID, work engagement has never been above 32% in 20 years. I wanted to know if we can find a way to get people engaged again.
Q: That’s the first thing that didn’t work. What’s the second?
A: The second question relates to B2B marketing. There’s been all this investment in technology in data and insights, but performance hasn’t improved. Why? Why are we not improving performance? That got us on another journey, and we developed some proprietary, performance-based marketing tools. They allow us to understand people as individuals and to look at the softer side of sales and marketing. Because, if our job as marketers is to get somebody to take action, we have to understand their motivations and beliefs.
So we do a lot of psychographics. We use AI personality profiling tools. We know preferences in terms of content. We know preferences in terms of visualization. We’re starting to take in the people component, not just the title or a role. You add that in, you start to get better performance.
Q: What are you looking forward to in terms of marketing?
A: I’m glad you asked. We’re on our third version of an AI tool. And this one, I think, is really exciting and fun. We are using an AI tool called Cassidy. It’s a business development assistant and a project manager assistant.
The nice thing about this tool versus some other tools is that other tools are always prompt-driven. And the output was only as good as your prompting, and who has time to figure out what the right prompts are?
With Cassidy, you feed it knowledge. It sits on top of our Google Suite, on top of the knowledge and extracting the knowledge out of our drives. And it also reads our website, it picks up our tonality, our brand voice. So for me, what’s very exciting is that we are a business that operates with no overhead.
The way our organization is built, we’re very flat. We can scale up quickly and scale down, and we don’t have any overhead. What we try to do is we price efficiently, and we try to get most of the fees that we collect to our freelancers. So we have a model that means you make a lot of money working for us.
Now we have an assistant to aid people coming to work with us. We plug them into our G Suite, and they know where to find this proposal or this project, We’re super excited about it.
by William Walsh | Feb 17, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 2/15/24 in MarTech
In the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey, the astronauts come to the frightening realization that Hal, the AI supercomputer, runs every aspect of the space station.
A discrepancy between the ground computer and Hal begins the process of the astronauts believing that Hal may be going rogue. When they ask Hal why there may be a difference between the two computer systems Hal responds, “It’s a human error, as it also is…”
Our first experience with AI began in late 2019 when we began experimenting with an IBM Watson application. We used an AI tool to profile the personalities of buyers to help a client narrow down the 17 personas that came from the product marketing group to 4 actionable personas.
From there, we built a business on the tool which we call personality based marketing. The enabling AI tools we use, Crystal Knows and xiQ, can quickly determine the personality of an individual using DISC segmentation.
Our second experience was right when Chat GPT 4.0 was launched and we added Jasper to help us with content and image generation. We used the tools to help generate content for websites and images to give our creatives a head start.
Honestly, we have had mixed results. The tool being prompt driven, made it challenging to get the output we desired. And given everything else going on in our business we really didn’t have the time to continue to learn and perfect the prompts. Plus,with each new release of the tool, brought a whole new set of best practices on prompting.
This has now led us to the third round of experimentation with an AI platform called Cassidy. The new tool is potentially a game changer for us and possibly the beginning of a modern day Hal. Unlike previous tools, Cassidy will learn about us on its own.
It has read our website, and it is integrated into our G-Suite, Chrome browser and Slack application. It will understand and communicate in our brand voice, act as an assistant, and execute its own workflows. For an organization like us, a fast efficient agency with little to no overhead, this can be a true game changer.
The future of AI is bright but it’s also going to be bumpy. We know there will be shortcomings in this new wave of technology. For example, based on what we have now observed using the first generation tools, we know that biases exist in the tools.
The second generation taught us that the output is only as good as the input. The age old saying of “garbage in, garbage out” is still true despite how smart the technology may be.
In fact, many believe that ChatGPT 4.0 is getting worse, not better, as it becomes more widely distributed. A discussion thread on Open AI Developer Forum from November entitled “ChatGPT is Getting Worse and Worse Every Day” includes 182 comments, all of them in agreement that things are, in fact, getting worse with each release.
Developers point to increasing error rates, low retention of previous commands and outputs, and general lack of support. Even going so far as to say the ChatGPT 3.5 performed better than the most current release of 4.0. So we can, for now, put aside our concerns that Hal is going to be taking control of the ship.
Be that as it may, we have built Business Development and Project Manager assistants with a knowledge base created by integrating our proposal and project drives. These AI assistants will be able to help our team increase efficiency and one day, automate the proposal writing process.
It’s also integrated into my Chrome browser so it’s reading my email, attending meetings, and archiving and indexing the websites I’m visiting. Perhaps someday soon, it will begin drafting and responding to my emails…on its own.
Until that day, it will require our time to shape it into what we want (or need) it to be. And that’s the point, we will make AI into what it will be, and many have done so already. And, even though we have moved from “machine learning” to machines that learn, it is a good reminder that “Artificial Intelligence” is actually better described as artificial human intelligence.
A technology built by humans, and trained on what humans have made, will not be perfect…just like its creators.
And in case you’re wondering, this post is 100% human generated.
by William Walsh | Jan 23, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 1/19/24 in MarTech
Maybe one step in the right direction would be ensuring that AI content generators properly cite their sources.
“Students in Europe are just now writing research papers versus students in the U.K. and U.S. who start writing them in high school.”
This comment was made by a British professor to my son who is a graduate student in Italy. The professor went on to say that, as a result, he and other professors, are more lenient when it comes to plagiarism.
The point of view the professor expressed seemed similar to the current state of AI content generators. We are at the beginning of what will be a long road of generative AI tools producing content. There are lessons to be learned on how to use them correctly.
Last month, I wrote an article for MarTech that ended up appearing on a digital agency’s website, presented at first glance as their own content (it has since been removed). The article was based on research our firm conducted on the best in class social media practices of over 40 companies. For some reason, the website claimed that the article had been written by an AI bot, but also referenced MarTech as the site where it was first published.
Plagiarism and AI detection
As new AI tools are being rolled out, and “rolled in” to existing tools, the discussion is focused on how to regulate the content they generate. There are now numerous AI content detector tools that can be used to determine if content was created by AI, and if it was plagiarized. Consider this a public service announcement for marketers, college students and apparently, college presidents.
OpenAI and Microsoft are now being sued by the New York Times for training its AI machines using Times content. The issue is that Open AI and Microsoft used copyrighted content owned by the Times, without paying for the rights to use it. Many believe that the output of this lawsuit could decide the fate of AI.
The key point in this argument is that of input versus output. The argument for Open AI and Microsoft is the copyrighted material is being used for learning purposes (for their tools). This is something that proponents argue has been done for hundreds of years with humans. Attorneys are a great example. Trained on case history in law school, their written arguments are based on precedent.
Where things change is in the output. If the output of the tools produces content that has been lifted from New York Times articles verbatim, or without citing the source, then you have issues with copyright infringement and/or plagiarism.
Just cite your sources
Our firm invested in, and conducted the research, but the digital agency received the benefit of the insights without properly crediting the source, ostensibly using an AI bot to lift passages from my original article. Any new technology ushers in a time of uncertainty and unknown change. AI tools are disruptive and the ethical issues around their use, see the writers strike as more evidence, are complex.
But maybe, in some ways, it’s not that complicated after all. If we consider AI tools to be, in a sense, a “digital” student consuming vast amounts of content to become knowledgeable and useful, then maybe the issue of how to manage AI generated content isn’t that difficult.
If you prompt an AI tool to source the information it is using, it will return and answer within seconds, confirming it can track back to the original information it used to create the output.
As with the OpenAI/Microsoft case, this comes down to the output, and even more specifically, the user. If, like new students, the users are naive, and/or lackadaisical, you will limit the effectiveness of the tools and your team, and potentially, invite someone from the legal department to come for a visit.
On the other hand, if users are trained and treat the output of the tools like any other article or research paper they would write for high school or college, a huge productivity increase is possible. Simply prompting it to include the sources of the content used does the trick.
Perhaps, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Giving credit where credit is due has always been right, no matter what the situation…or technology.
by William Walsh | Jan 3, 2024 | 2024
By Naheed Somji
Carbon Design Social Media Strategist
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
A lawyer friend of mine listened to the “marketing guy” drone on and on about how it’s each partners’ responsibility to drum up new business for the firm. He mentioned tactics like attending events, networking, and posting on LinkedIn.
My lawyer friend was not convinced. I believe her exact quote was, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
And she is right. When your main focus is settling cases, meeting billable targets, and helping clients, marketing is the last thing on your mind. “I went to law school, not business school!” she exclaimed. Fair enough.
Except… that marketing guy was kind of right.
At Carbon Design, we worked with a top global law firm to help answer a question about LinkedIn usage amongst employees. We analyzed the LinkedIn activity of over 600 partners, specifically measuring post engagement and number of followers (connections) against a list of top performers in the organization.
The results were eye-opening.
We wrote a proprietary formula to calculate a Social Media Score to indicate who has the greatest social media value, aka who is providing the most value by posting about the firm. We found a direct correlation between the most active LinkedIn users and the top billers.
Does posting on LinkedIn all day make you a better lawyer? Of course not. But those who were active on LinkedIn were establishing themselves as thought leaders, and gaining recognition for it. Thus creating the feedback loop. A partner would share their/the firm’s successes on LinkedIn, get cheered on by friends and colleagues, and get noticed by other companies. Over time, a network is built and leads are turned into clients and cases are won so the partner has more successes to share on LinkedIn.
There are two variables needed to make the feedback loop work: content and conversation. The firm provided the content — expertly written articles, blogs, videos — and the partner focused on engaging with their network. If one of these pieces aren’t in place, the marketing effort fails.
If you’re a lawyer reading this, work with your marketing and business development teams to create a content plan for you. This plan should be a checklist of what is required to write an article or record a video. You have two responsibilities: fill out the form that provides the context to the marketing team, and commit to the process and to sharing and engaging with the content when it’s published.
If you’re a marketer or communicator reading this, your job is to create a template where the subject matter expert can give you the information you need in 10 questions or less. You can take their input, the images, and video files, and craft a story that’s relevant for your audience. Keep your SME in the loop on the timeline — remember, endless reviews are where content goes to die, so be clear about the needs and commitment.
If you need help with any of the above, find us on LinkedIn (with the rest of the top performers).
