The power of authenticity for marketing

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of marketing podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up+! Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up+ Podcast, where we give you guys some groovy new insights around what's happening in digital marketing. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the authentic,, the actual, the original, the bonafide Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello internet, SEO and marketing, and PPC, and social media, and PR, and all of the other people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Name all the verticals.

Crystal Carter:

Every single vertical. There's also going to be AI people as well now, doing things or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is there prompt optimization? Is that a thing now? Prompt optimization.

Crystal Carter:

AI management, content people, stuff as well. I don't know. There's lots of things, they're all of the people. The people, the people everywhere, welcome. You're all welcome here on our brand new version of our podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right, because normally we have our SERPs Up Podcast, our weekly SEO podcast. But this is our monthly bonus series, where we talk about all sorts of digital marketing topics. Which brings us to the SERPs Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can use the app we built together with Trustpilot, to help build credibility with your audience, and do things like automatically trigger service review invitations to customers, using the Trustpilot app in the Wix app marketplace.

Which ties into our topic of the day. I mean, what are the chances of that happening? I'm genuinely surprised. Okay, the truth is, I plan that out every time. I shall not lie. Because today we're talking about the power of authenticity in marketing. We're looking at why you should forget the phony baloney, and be real with your audience and true to yourself, both for business success, and so that you can tolerate yourself at night.

And to do that, one of the greatest marketers of our lifetime, the founder of SparkToro, Rand Fishkin will be by in just a few moments to share why being and how being one's true self, is the epitome of marketing Zen. So close your eyes, meditate, say a few ohms. And if that's not your thing, crank up the tunes, have a cup of chai or kick back a glass of single malt. That is, do whatever it is that is the voodoo that you do, as the SERP's Up+ Podcast helps you find your true marketing self.

I'm out of breath.

Crystal Carter:

You could have just said, be like Jenny from the block. She was like, I'm real. Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got. These are the things that you have to remember.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's so real, she dropped A-rod like it was hot.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, we're coming in, we're just straight off the bat.

Mordy Oberstein:

When you say real, I don't think A-rod... as a salty, salty Yankee fan, that man cheated. He got suspended for... we're going on another rant. I'm sorry.

Crystal Carter:

I was talking about JLo. I don't know what you're talking about. She had her and Ja Rule or something. I don't know, everyone, it's all good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. One of, I think, the greatest things that is us, is the inner depth of our personality, and our persona and who we are. So to share a bit of my personal philosophy on life, I'm somebody who thinks that philosophy and marketing are really connected. I don't want to get too mushy gushy with it, but I think there's something very deep and very powerful, almost like buried within the recesses of who we are that's entirely unique, and that's special, and that if we can tap into that part of who we are, you can do some pretty cool special marketing things.

I know I'm getting a little bit sappy. However, it's rare in a world that's filled with marketing fluff and cliches, to feel that connection. But someone I always thought who did that really, really well, someone for years, when you listened to him talk, you felt there was something real emanating from his core, and you could really grab onto it. And that has been Rand Fishkin. So who better to help us talk about the value of being authentic in your marketing, than the founder of SparkToro, Rand Fishkin. Welcome.

Rand Fishkin:

Thanks for having me, Mordy. Thanks for having me, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much for joining us. It's an absolute pleasure, honor, delight.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. I hope you caught my pithy commentary in our meeting chat about specifically, A-rod.

Mordy Oberstein:

A-rod, yes.

Rand Fishkin:

Many negative thoughts about him.

Mordy Oberstein:

I can't stand that he's part of the pre-game coverage on some of the games. It's terrible. So inauthentic, by the way.

Rand Fishkin:

I think one of the problems functionally speaking in, I'm going to say modern capitalist culture, is you were good at your job, therefore we should pay attention to you about other things. And that's just not true, right?

Crystal Carter:

Right, right.

Rand Fishkin:

Fundamentally, this is one of the values of authenticity, is that you don't listen to someone just because of what they could do for you. We were talking before the official podcast kicked off, about how you might have opinions on businesses of various sizes. And I was telling you guys that I love small businesses, and I'm not a big fan of helping big businesses. And very frequently, I get this, "But they have so much money, they could do so much." For whatever, for your career, or your company or what about M and A? And I was always like, well, sorry. If you're valued at over a billion, I'm kind of the inverse of a VC. I kind of hate unicorns. Okay, well, your valuation's too high. I don't like you anymore. You used to be cool, now you're not cool anymore. I think it's because I grew up with Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and Nirvana, and it's like the pre-sellout culture stuck.

Mordy Oberstein:

So not a Stone Temple Pilot fan, because they were considered to be like a fake grunge band. They weren't really a grunge band, in my honest opinion, but whatever.

Rand Fishkin:

Honestly, I'm okay with it. I'm fine. I think they were talented musicians, and not despicably evil people. And so if a studio whatever wants to form a... I'm like this with the Monkees too. I don't completely hate it. Whatever. You want to put together an NSYNC, you want to put together a... fine, it's none of my business.

Mordy Oberstein:

But Billy Joel? Because I saw, I saw the thread. Billy Joel, no. No Billy Joel.

Rand Fishkin:

He's not talented.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh my goodness.

Crystal Carter:

Oh man, we're dropping bombs everywhere.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we get into marketing, for a second, I'm literally from the border of Queens on Long Island. You cross the street and you're on Long Island. And there's three fundamental truths about Long Island: Bagel Boss, Adventureland and Billy Joel.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, Long Island has problems.

Crystal Carter:

They have great iced tea though. The iced tea is delicious.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, all right. I'll have to check that out.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's it. I'm moving out.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's really interesting though, that you referenced some folks from the nineties and nineties music culture. Because when we're talking about authenticity, I was also thinking in the nineties there was a lot of stuff in hip hop culture about keeping it real, keep it real here, and people being called out for not keeping it real, for being fake and being that sort of thing. And I feel like that sentiment seems to have dissipated from the general popular culture, that people are doing it for the gram and that's fine. And that people don't... there's a lot of people who, like you were saying, have terrible opinions based on nothing to do with the topic necessarily, and they spread them across everywhere. Why do you think that that shift has happened, and how do you think we can try to rectify it? Or do you think we should?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, let's see. I'm torn. I have the half of me that is the things that I value are authenticity, and transparency, and whatever you want to call it. Not selling out, keeping it real. But at the same time, it is impossible for me to begrudge, whatever, younger generations who are doing things that might not be true to themselves or their personality, but they're doing it for, whatever, social media attention and awareness, or they're doing it for their career. Because fundamentally, I think that one of the biggest shifts that's happened in our lifetimes, especially in the United States, is we've gone from a world where you could work a part-time job, and put yourself through college, and pay your rent, to a world where that is impossible.

And so when I was born, there's this classic concept of the American dream. You come from nothing, you have nothing, but economic mobility is so high in this country that over the course of even just one generation, a family can transform themselves through not even that hard work, a little bit of work and attention, into a middle class or a totally getting by family. And now that's completely not true. Almost all the wealth gain, obviously in the last 50 years, has gone to the top 10th of a percent of Americans, leaving everyone else behind. Obviously, inflation and affordability of everything has gone down.

And so now I'm kind of like, God, you know what? Maybe keeping it real is selling out. To keep it real, you have to sell out. I'm not sure that these cultural ideas that we attribute to, whatever, hip hop artists, or grunge artists, or popular music, or television, or film or whatever it is, I'm not sure that that's where it comes from. I think it comes from economics, and I think it comes from the reality of where people are. So hey, you're doing it for the Gram. Maybe you're doing it for your career. Maybe you're doing it so you can afford Goddamn healthcare. So, who am I to judge?

Mordy Oberstein:

On the opposite side though, you have the big companies, or bigger brands, or not even bigger brands, just your established companies. And I was doing some research for a landing page I was writing, and I went through a couple of hundred different landing pages. And after a while I'm like, wow, I don't think I've read anything real for the last five hours. It's all like ultimate power, unlimited, whatever. And I walked away feeling, in five years from now, I hope and I think it's going to sound like a used car sales ad, like, "Come on down to Bob's." There's nothing real there. I get people feel maybe that they have to put on that front of really driving the sale, because they're nervous they're not going to get the sale. But I think in the end you come off, just in my personal opinion, as not really connecting in a real way.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. I think what's going on is the difference between judging people harshly for their willingness to compromise the creative, artistic, human side of who they are in order to make money, versus hey, when you do that, why don't you do marketing, and sales, and copywriting, and content creation in ways that resonate with real people? And those are two different things. One is at the macro level, and one is at the micro level. And at the micro level, I think this is where authenticity still works wonders.

You can feel brands that resonate with people, even if they are... I think one of my favorite examples that I bring up regularly, is the Mars Corporation's Snickers campaign of the last 15 years. Snickers sort of had this, I think they worked with an agency, but I can't remember the agency's name, this is back in the early 2000s. They worked with an agency who uncovers through audience research, they talk to a bunch of people who buy Snickers, people who don't buy Snickers, people who eat it regular... the candy bar, for anyone who's not familiar. And they talked to a lot of people, and found that they were using Snickers as a tastier alternative to a meal replacement. Essentially it was, Snickers was almost competing more with Power Bars in people's minds, or Luna Bars, which at the time, early 2000s Power Bar was sort of, if you're a dude, you have to eat this. Luna Bar was, if you're a woman, you have to eat this. And so, of course my pantry is stacked with Luna Bars, because F the gender paradigm.

The reality was, they discovered lots of people are essentially eating Snickers in lieu of a meal or whatever. So therefore, we should position Snickers as the one candy bar that's a solution to hunger, as opposed to a reward or a treat. And the campaign was ludicrously successful. You can see even to this day, they haven't gone away from it. It's been 17 years, 18 years or something that they've been running with this. You're not you when you're hungry. Let's keep playing on that for forever. I'm not sure they should ever give it up. Because I think that that positioning is incredibly valuable. It's also authentic. For better or worse, I can't explain exactly why the combination of Snickers ingredients, which is no healthier-

Rand Fishkin:

The combination of Snickers ingredients, which is no healthier for you than anything else.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Rand Fishkin:

Right? Absolutely not. But if I eat a, I don't know, a Reese's Peanut Butter Cups or a bag of M&M's, I do not feel like, okay, I've had my calories. I'm okay. I can go on with my day. But I do feel that way with the Snickers.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, yeah, that's totally true. I mean, another similar campaign that I've seen is Marmite, which folks who've been to the UK will know about that, and Marmite is like, some people love us, some people hate us. That's just how it is. And they run with that throughout their campaigns, and they run with that for years. And in fact, it's to the point where it's like it's idiomatic. People are like, "Oh yeah, it's a bit of a Marmite kind of thing." It's a saying that people say and they know what that means, and that is extremely ingrained, authentic branding, but they're just sort of like, "That's who we are." Like, "Pick one."

Rand Fishkin:

What's tough is, and this goes back to Mordy's original point, translating the success that campaigns like this have had in plenty of consumer sectors to B2B where it's so hard, so hard in B2B to find examples of campaigns that resonate. I think part of it is how B2B is perceived, how it's bought and sold. I think part of it is the long marketing and sales cycle of B2B. Part of it is the expected professionalism. And so a lot of these companies feel like they can't play toward their brand positioning. And many of them, most of them also don't make incredibly obvious products. So you have to explain what you do and the features. Snickers does not have to be like, "What you hold in your hands is what's called a candy bar." They can dispense with all that BS. Everybody knows exactly what it is.

And the same thing is true if you, whatever, go to a waterpark or buy Marmite at the store or see a bottle of wine. Consumer products are just a known variable, known quantity. Whereas B2B, there's so much. Wix, right? Okay, Wix has to explain, "Hey, we are a CMS, but we're this kind of CMS for this kind of person. These are the features, these are the reasons you would choose us." All that kind of stuff. If you could see CMSs, whatever, at the drugstore on the counter, the way you see candy bars, Wix would probably do a very different kind of branding campaign and positioning. And so I think this goes, Mordy, to the challenge around authenticity and sales language that you're finding.

Mordy Oberstein:

If Wix were a candy bar, by the way, we would have caramel and peanuts on this for the record.

Rand Fishkin:

Caramel and peanuts. Is that a PAYDAY?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's like a PAYDAY, right? It's like a Snickers, but there's no nougat. It just... Right, yeah.

Rand Fishkin:

PAYDAY is a peanut caramel bar and yet somehow when I'm hungry, I don't want a PAYDAY.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think that it's the nougat that does it. It's definitely that. But I think also, I think sometimes with authenticity, particularly with products, I think if I see a product and they're like, "We don't do this. We do do this really, really well, but we don't do that," that there's a certain amount of confidence to that.

One of the classics examples, and I know this is a consumer product, but for instance, Domino's Pizza says, "We will get you a pizza in 30 minutes or less." That's one of the things that they say they're able to do. They don't say, "We will get you the best pizza you've ever had in your life in 30 minutes or less." They don't say that it will have everything you ever wanted in a pizza. No. They say, "This is what we can do for you, and if you would like this, we have that. That's what we can promise you. We can promise you that." And the stuff in between, you make your choices. Sometimes you want a pizza that takes longer than that. Sometimes you want to go to this artisanal place around the corner and get something that, what's the Long Island pizza place there, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

There are so many.

Crystal Carter:

So many. It's like, I don't even know where to start.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, a famous one. It’s a whole different story

Crystal Carter:

Right, precisely. But I think you mentioned value propositions, and I think it's really important to understand what is your genuine actual USP for why you started your business. There must've been some point where you thought to yourself, "You know what? Lots of people are making pizza or doing whatever it is they're doing or making whatever SaaS products they are, but it's missing something and it's missing this, and I think that I can fill that gap, and I think that being able to understand your USP is really, really important.

Rand Fishkin:

We had on the SparkToro homepage a video that was relatively expensive to make, and we worked with a professional video company and we went to a wedding venue that has sort of a hedge maze up north of Seattle.

Mordy Oberstein:

I remember that. I remember that video.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. So Casey and I went up there with a video crew and we filmed this whole thing. Took 10 hours of filming, nine hours of filming, something like that, and then lots of editing work to get it down to, I think it was about a 40-second, 45-second video, and we put it on our homepage. We were very proud of it. It was quite authentic. It even started off, Crystal, with a, I think the line was like, "I'm Rand Fishkin and I spent my career trying to return data that big tech steals and hides away to marketers who deserve to have it," which is fundamentally like, that's why we created SparkToro. I was like, pre 2016, Facebook would tell you all this data about your audience, and pre Elon Twitter would show you all this interesting information in Audience Insights.

I think they actually took it away even before he bought it, but then it started this world of like, whoa, whoa, walled gardens, let's keep people in. Don't let people out. Google hiding keyword data, all this stuff. And I was like, "That sucks." That sucks and it's dumb, and screw big tech, hate those guys. Let's return this data to people. We have a big free version that a 100,000 people use and we've got our paid version. But telling that story interestingly, I think made us resonate a little bit better with a very small group, but it hurt our conversion rate, it didn't help it.

Crystal Carter:

Interesting.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, so I think it was one of those interesting experiences. We kept the video there for a year because we were like, "Well, let's keep trying. Maybe we put it below the call to action. Maybe we keep it over here." But no, it really was, it was a detractor because it was a second call to action on the homepage from just try the product, put in your keywords or your search terms or whatever. And yeah, we finally pulled it recently, and I don't think we're going to bring it back for the V2 that we're building. So it's a tough thing, and maybe the video didn't do what it was supposed to do, maybe it wasn't resonating the way we hoped it would, but certainly I think it's a hard thing.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think a lot of businesses struggle with this. So one of the classic cases where people do all these beauty shots of their products and they do all these amazing, amazing, beautiful shots of the crème brulée in the restaurant and the hotel room all sorted out like that. If I'm somebody who's looking in the business, I'm going to TripAdvisor, I'm going to TripAdvisor, and I'm going to go and have a look at what the people who went in and took a picture on their terrible old iPhone that's got a crack on the screen, what they took a picture of and what the room actually looks like. If their holiday snaps still look okay, then I'm like, "Cool." If the restaurant still looks all right, then cool. If the reviews similarly of your fantastic, amazing SaaS product or whatever kind of product still say roughly the same kinds of things that you're promising on your website, then that's going to resonate with me.

So I think that companies invest a lot of time in making all these beauty shots and making all this beautiful copy and all of that sort of stuff, but making sure that people have something that connects with how they are interacting with it and how they are experiencing the product is really important. Like you were saying that it was distracting from actually being able to try the tool. Like with a tool like an online thing, being able to try the tool is really the bread and butter. That's the proof in the pudding as it were, to name many other food metaphors. I don't know. I could talk about pies or something or...

Mordy Oberstein:

I love pies.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, I mean, the hotels thing is really interesting. I've talked to a few hoteliers about this and the website, the photography, all of this kind of stuff. There's two fascinating things that I learned that were sort of going on there. One is pure positioning. So when you get to a website that looks and feels like small luxury hotels of the world, you get in the mindset of what you expect the price to be, what you expect the service to be like, blah, blah, blah. You probably will go to TripAdvisor and look at the reviews and dah, dah, dah, dah. But if you're visiting that area and you're that kind of consumer, the difference between a 4.1 and a 4.5 and a 4.9 out of five doesn't mean that much to you. You're probably going to choose that location anyway if it's your kind of hotel and your kind of place.

And then the second one was apparently, interestingly enough, a huge part of the visual aesthetic, design, all the website stuff is like a local ecosystem contribution. For example, I was talking to a hotelier in Puglia in Italy, the south, the heel of the boot of Italy, and the hotelier was explaining that, "Oh, well, when we make our website, of course we want to hire the best local photographers, and then they also will want to work with us when someone has a wedding here, they also work with us when someone had their engagement and they're coming here for their trip or their honeymoon or something like that. And we work with those people. We work with the florist for the flowers for the photo shoot, and then that promotes their business, which... " Like it's all this, I don't know what you want to call it, relationship building, relationship building through craft, creation of these kinds of things, versus the Holiday Inn where it is, boom, this is exactly... Like you know exactly what you're going to get the same thing over and over again.

Hilton is the same way and Marriott and Radisson and all the big brands. They have their system, but for these small local ones, again, it's that we want to show to the consumer and the potential buyer who we are and we're also trying to create relationships inside our local community with the people who, if you're a wedding photographer, we want you to recommend to your event planner that all the couples that you work with should come to our hotel, so we hire you.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's something that's interesting to me because something that you do so well, I feel like, and you're a SaaS platform, is that you come across, SparkToro comes across, all the things you guys are doing over there, Amanda, it comes across very boutique, it comes across very genuine, it comes across very connective, and it's so interesting because it's so peculiar for a SaaS platform to be able to pull that off and I'm wondering how you do that.

Rand Fishkin:

So I think that it sort of goes back to what are you allowed to do based on the design of your business. So from the building blocks level, I think this is the wonderful and terrible thing about entrepreneurship and whatever, the funding ecosystem and how capitalism has sort of evolved for entrepreneurship, especially in tech. And that is we get to be very peculiar. And peculiar is a beautiful world because to me, it has this connotation of weird, for the sake of being weird. You are doing this different thing because not just you want to stand out from the crowd in a way that gets you money, but you want to stand out from the crowd in a way that's like a Wes Anderson movie. You're sort of being particular for the sake of being particular because this is just who you are.

And one of my favorite facts about Wes Anderson movies, apparently everybody gets paid like a thousand bucks a day to work on the movie. It doesn't matter if you're Scarlett Johansson. You make the lowest rate and the same rate as all the background actors. There's no, I can't remember what they call it, scale. They call it scale in the industry. So everybody makes that money because you want to work on a Wes Anderson movie and it's super weird and the project's going to be weird, and the movie's going to look beautiful, and the plot's going to make no sense and all those kinds of things. And clearly he's built this reputation, and I think that's great. And SparkToro, we have this like, our funding structure lets us, so long as we're alive and profitable, we can really do what we want. We do not have to grow. I mean, I'd like to grow, Casey wants to grow, Amanda wants to grow, but we don't have to. We're doing a nice amount of revenue, a very nice amount of revenue per person. There's only three of us.

So we're super different from other SaaS platforms in that we just don't have the same motivation and incentive to, okay, how do we maximize revenue? We better build a sales team, we better get people on board. Like, no, we don't build the sales team not because it wouldn't be good for the business, we don't build the sales team because I don't like managing salespeople. And a ton of what you feel from SparkToro and a lot of boutiques and indie brands and indie startups is, oh, they're doing this because they like doing this and they're not doing this because they don't like doing this. And I don't think you can build competitive advantage fundamentally with something that isn't your strength and something that's not your passion. So-

Rand Fishkin:

... fundamentally with something that isn't your strength and something that's not your passion. So I'm trying to build a life, not a business that maximizes the amount of revenue it takes from customers, and that's already real. That's already a real thing. You're talking about how I decide to live my life because your work life, your business life is part of your life. The biggest reason that I hope SparkToro is successful on a bigger scale than it is now and that I hope in 10 years, it's like a company that lots of people point to and talk about is so that this fundamental idea will trickle down into the broader world of tech and entrepreneurship, that maybe you should not optimize for maximizing revenue growth and investor returns, but instead you should build something that gives you and your employees and team and customers the life that they want and the solutions that they want. And I think frankly, that's a very un-American way to live, but a really beautiful one.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a very existential way to live. It's the meaningful life versus the life.

Rand Fishkin:

I want to be clear: I also do stuff for the brand. I'm not trying to paint myself as like everything Rand does is authentic... Behind me, I have this whiteboard, I film these weekly whiteboard videos, the five-minute whiteboards for SparkToro now, and part of that is like a, "Gosh, well, I tried coming up with some other video formats and trying some other things," but you know what? I saw that the old classic resonated with people: my 17 years of doing Whiteboard Friday at Moz really stuck with folks: they missed that, they wanted it again. When I do them, they get high engagement. Okay, I'm going to give the people what they want.

And also, a five-minute whiteboard is not a terrible challenge or anything, and I enjoy the experience, so it's not completely inauthentic. But I absolutely will do things for whatever personal and professional gain. I am not against that, right? I'm not Kurt Cobain, and, "Oh my God, I'm making money. It's the end," but I have a little bit more of that in me than most venture-backed entrepreneurs.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think that comes back to the confidence of having the confidence to say, "We are going to grow in ways that are valuable to us and in ways that enrich us," because you say haven't got a sales team that's going and getting more sales, doing all of that, I think that it does give you an opportunity to be more creative, and more flexible, and to try new things. And certainly one of the things that's fundamental and to the core of Wix, and one of the things I love about our team here at Wix is that people try new things. People try new things and people will be like, "Hey, I tried a thing," and they go, "Oh, you did what?", and, "Oh, that's cool. I like that. Hey, check out this thing that this person made." We have hackathons, we have markathon with marketing things where everybody just gets together and has ideas.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it goes into the product. We can see it at least on the inside like, "Oh, that's, from that," that's from hackathon.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. I think at a larger... How many people is Wix now?

Mordy Oberstein:

5,000, something like that. I should know that. It's around 5,000.

Rand Fishkin:

I think in an environment like that, one of the biggest things I hear from folks who work in larger companies, and when I say larger, I mean 200 plus, nevermind 2,000 plus, but is, "I do work and I don't know how it contributes to the business." To the end of the day, "Customers get more value," or whatever, "Our investors make more money and my stock price goes up," or whatever, "This is valued and recognized by people in leadership," that visibility goes away really early in a company's growth cycle. I think people felt that way at Moz at 210 people when I was there, and that sucks. Fundamentally, it is terrible, I think to do work and not know how that work contributes or to feel like it doesn't contribute. When I look at people who are, I saw an old friend of Geraldine's yesterday posting on LinkedIn that it was their last day at Google. They were leaving Google after 13, 14 years.

And it was subtly written, but one of the things in there was, "For the last few years I've been working on a project that never went live, but now I'm going to a smaller company where I...", And I had this, yeah, I get it. I get that, "I'm well paid, I have a cushy job, things are going really great in my professional career, I've been promoted, whatever, but I just spent years working on a project that no one will ever know about. I'm going somewhere where my work actually contributes to society."

Mordy Oberstein:

I think it's almost divine: you want to feel like you're having an impact on something, somehow.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah. I think it can be purely capitalist, purely financial, but if it's nothing, that's just brutal. So, I think it makes a tremendous amount of sense, I'm very proud to hear, glad to hear that Wix is investing in a, "Hey, do this stuff," and then that stuff will be in the live version of the product that customers are using, and you'll be able to see how many people used it and you'll hear, "Oh man, that thing I contributed to, it turned into something real."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin:

And beautiful.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, if you're listening to this podcast, you're a marketer and you're working with a product team, I feel like it's your role as a marketer to tell the product team, "Hey, so-and-so was talking about this product that you made and they loved it." We had that today in our WhatsApp group like, "Hey, yo, some SEO was saying that they love what you all are doing." And the product people were like, "Awesome. We're having an impact. They just made our day, legit."

Crystal Carter:

It's such a big deal working as a tech SEO, tell the devs that if you asked the devs for this ticket and that ticket and that ticket and this ticket, and you saw your SEO go off the charts, tell them. Tell them that, "That work that you did helped us get 15% ROI uplift," or whatever it may be, because that will make getting the dev tickets actioned quicker the next time because they'll want to get that feedback from you.

Similarly, if you're working on a campaign and you asked for a favor from somebody in a different team to do the thing, you asked for somebody to be in this video that you were going to put on the whatever, tell them that it had an impact. It makes such a big difference and costs you nothing. Sending an email, sending a Slack message costs you nothing and can make such a big difference to the cohesion of your team, and to how these enthusiastic people are going forward as well.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, absolutely. I think a huge part of this for folks who do consulting and agency work, one of the biggest frustrations that I hear over and over again is, "We did this big deep dive on the client's website and we looked at all the problems that they need to solve, we did this audit, we presented all these findings, we tried to get approval to go make the changes and improve things, and they were like, okay, thanks for the audit, and it's two years later, nothing's happened." It's mind-blowing from an agency perspective to be like, "Gosh, but when this other client we worked with actually did the things we said, they got way more business and money, so why are you doing nothing?"

Crystal Carter:

And you sometimes never find out.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, but the answer is complicated. When you dig in, it's almost never the case that there's some, I don't know, evil mid-level manager-

Crystal Carter:

Mu-ah-ha.

Rand Fishkin:

... who's like, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to hire an agency, going to pay them money, and then I'm going to do none of the work they recommend. Mu-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha." That cartoon villain just doesn't exist, right?

Crystal Carter:

"I'm going to wait until they do the PowerPoint. I'm going to ask lots of questions. Lots of them,".

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, but I do think it pays as an agency, as a marketer who's contributing even in-house on a team, when you have that conversation about like, "Okay, well these findings, they're going to translate into these actions," and those actions are going to translate directly into, whatever, financial gain, or improvements in conversion rate, or improvements in whatever this metric is. And if that thing is not fundamentally tied to the incentives, the directives, and the goals that leadership has defined for whatever the second tier or the third tier of management that you're working with, well probably it's not going to get done. And even if is, even if it is beautifully and perfectly aligned, if they don't have the resources or if those resources have projects that are sitting with even higher priorities or those resources have capability and competence problems, many times these things won't happen.

Crystal Carter:

To bring it back to the realness, to the depths of the real, I think that this is incredibly important. We talk about realness in your marketing, authenticity in your marketing, as we're thinking about outbound communications and things like that. When you are talking to your teams and when you are talking to your stakeholders in your campaigns, being able to be a straight-shooter, being able to actually answer the questions in plain English without jargon, and to be able to address, like you said, the actual concerns that they have, the actual goals that they have, not, "I'm so smart. Look at my beautiful pie charts. I'm so clever. This is a fantastic pie chart," and it is hitting all of the best practices for all of the things that you are expected to do. It's like, "That's great: we have two people in our team and we can't do any of that."

So when you're thinking about your authenticity, when you're talking to clients about your marketing campaign, your SEO campaign, your audience research, whatever, being authentic with them, of being like, "Hey guys, what can you actually achieve? What can you actually do?", before you start the audit, "What can you actually do? How many hours do you have to do this? What kind of resources do you have to actually achieve this?", can make such a difference, and also can mean that they're more likely to tell you and be honest with you and be clear with you when they need help. When they're like, "We don't know how to do this. Can you help us?", and then maybe you get more billable hours or whatever it may be.

Rand Fishkin:

I also highly recommend to folks that before you start your audit or your deep dive, find out what the resourcing is: like, "Oh, do we have capability to do this, to do this, do this? What if I come up with suggestions that need this or this or this?", and then if the client or the team or the person, whatever, tells you, "Oh yeah, we can definitely do this. We can't do this. These things are kind in the middle," you can structure your findings that way.

You can be like, "All right, I found a lot of opportunities. Many of them sit in the, we can't fix it bucket, but I'm presenting them anyway in the hopes that someday we will be able to fix them. These sit in the maybe bucket. And these are the ones we said we could fix right away, and I prioritize them by importance," and then it's like, all right, now we're talking about action.

Crystal Carter:

Right, because you're real and they were real. You're speaking like a real human person.

Rand Fishkin:

The transparency inside organizations and the alignment between people in teams is hugely important. I fundamentally believe to my core that Elon Musk is a piece of shit, but I say that in all sincerity and in every way. But he does have this concept of people as vectors in an organization, and if you point them all in the same direction along the same lines, you get the full power of their impact. And so, simply aligning people all to go in the same direction, even in very large organizations, if the leader of that organization, the CEO themselves says, "We are all working on this. Everyone is going to get us to here. You tell me what you need to do to get there," I think there's one of the reasons, probably one of the biggest reasons why several of his companies have been very successful.

And then obviously Twitter, he's chosen very poorly which things to do, no surprise. And also, his awfulness bleeds into the attractiveness of the platform generally. But I think there's lessons to be learned even from terrible people, and this is a great one where that alignment allows SpaceX and Tesla to do things well and fast that are very hard for more complex, less transparently, "Everyone's on the same page, moving toward the same goals," organizations in the engineering and tech field.

Mordy Oberstein:

I generally pride in myself on my pivots, but I don't have one here... And I do have a slight pivot actually because I guess we were talking about tech and not being seen in the greatest light. Something I've been meaning to ask you this entire podcast is these big tech companies end up front of Congress for whatever particular reason, whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, whatever it is, TikTok most recently, I guess, and we as digital marketers sometimes sit back and laugh like, "Oh, the Congress asks the most ridiculous question to that person. They know clearly know nothing about Google or TikTok or whatever, or technology. They've never used a computer in their life. It's quite obvious," but-

Mordy Oberstein:

They've never used a computer in their life. It's quite obvious. But my dad, who also has hardly used a computer in his life, will look at that and be like, wait a second. Should I be trusting this stuff that's on my phone? You're telling me to go to the Google, to go to the Facebook. Do I trust this stuff now? Because now I saw the CEO of Facebook sitting in front of Congress. It must mean he's not trustworthy. And I wonder, going back to our previous conversation, I know we're running out of time, and so you don't have to get too deep into it, but I really just wanted to ask it. Do you think that that has an impact of when we as marketers talk to consumers or to other businesses and try to sell a product or a service? If people are looking at the web more skeptically, does it mean that we're going to end up moving to a more conversational model?

Because when they look and see that landing page, where you're writing that marketing schlock, are people going to start to see through that because they're starting to think of the webinar in a more skeptical kind of way?

Rand Fishkin:

I think on the whole, I completely disagree. I think people are more trusting today of things that they see on the web than they ever have been. And a huge part of that is because these big tech companies have made the web such a relatively safe place to go. The late nineties, the early two thousands, you could get malware, spam, stuff that would just destroy your computer and then trying to fix it in whatever early versions of Windows or like Windows 98, I remember debugging my grandfather's computer in Windows 98, Jesus Christ, oh my God, he visited the wrong internet website and clicked the wrong thing.

But today, that experience is so curated. It's so relatively safe that I actually fundamentally would say no. I think people trust the web like never before they believe it's safe to put in their credit card. They'll give you their social security number over the internet, they'll digitally sign things over to the internet, they'll sell their house on the internet. It has gotten to a really different place. Where I would say you drag Zuckerberg in front of Congress or you bring Sundar Pichai in front of Congress. And what surprises me the most is that Congress has no teeth. So Sundar Pichai, for example, when in front of Congress, I believe this was 2019, and talked about Google sending more and more traffic to the open web. Maybe it was 2020. And it was an obvious lie, provable with data. You just go out there and get it.

So I remember I wrote an article, I think on SparkToro that was like, Hey, I don't know why Congress is unwilling to hold Google CEO's feet to the fire, but I'll do it. Here you go. And I think I had a call with Lina Khan who now Biden is appointed as the head of the FTC, and she was like, okay, can you walk me through this? I'm trying to understand exactly what's going on here, but basically no action from Congress. I had a call with David Cicilline, who's the congressman in charge of the committee looking into Google, and they were like their hands are tied. There's not a lot that they can do. And so I'm going to say this also Mordy to defend, no American has ever defended Congress to my knowledge. But I will say I talk to a lot of people in government, even during the Trump administration, which you can probably tell, I obviously disliked and disagreed with most of that.

But I talked to people inside the administration. I think these are mostly appointees who were appointed for their knowledge and skills rather than political appointees. But they seemed good-natured and good-hearted doing the best that they could. They seemed smart and talented and capable. I will say one of the things that frustrates me about media is that the most ridiculous, silly, you know nothing and it's obvious, those are the quotes that make it to the top of Reddit. The ones where it's like Congress is an idiot, they know nothing about technology. And then if you listen to the hearings, you're like, oh, got it. Four hours of good questions and then 15 minutes from this one idiot. Like, all right, I see how sort of media is shaped. If you watch the whole C-SPAN thing, you're like, huh, these people are pretty savvy.

Crystal Carter:

Then one person's like, what is Finsta? And they're like, it's not a thing. No, but what is Finsta? It's fake Instagram. But how do I get to it?

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, and those are the quotes, right? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an hour of super spectacularly, good question, but it got no attention. It was kind of like a, okay, yeah, she's knowledgeable, she knows her stuff and she's asking good questions, and these are all smart things and all right, good, good, good. Fine. Ignore it. Don't air it. But how do I get to my cousin's Finsta? Like, oh, geez. Look at this, Congress are a bunch of idiots. Okay. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That conversation did not go where I thought it was. That's really interesting. To quote Bob Dylan, the Hour is getting late. It's actually not a Jimi Hendrix quote because Dylan wrote it. Hendrix covered it, but Dylan said he wrote it for Hendrix, metaphorically obviously.

Crystal Carter:

Find some way out of here.

Rand Fishkin:

I saw Bob Dylan perform maybe 20 years ago.

Mordy Oberstein:

I walked out.

Rand Fishkin:

Oh, man. I mean obviously phenomenal songwriter, singer, but geez, that guy, he can barely hold a tune.

Mordy Oberstein:

All I can say is thank God Tom Petty went on first and not Dylan.

Rand Fishkin:

I did just see Bruce Springsteen when we were in Italy in April, and holy crap, let me tell you, the E Street Band, there was not a note out of tune. There was not a beat missed. He didn't take a sip of water in a four-hour show. It was just song, song, song, song, song. No breaks, nothing. It's the most professional performance I've ever seen, and my mind was blown. I was like, oh, I guess I like Springsteen. It was great.

Mordy Oberstein:

What a thunk. I actually saw Springsteen at Giant Stadium like, this is boring. I'd rather be at Billy Joel.

Crystal Carter:

I'm a Beyonce fan. I saw her in the Renaissance tour. It was amazing. So on that note, thank you very much.

Rand Fishkin:

Beyonce is a performer, right? She's almost less a musician and more of an artist, right? She does so much.

Crystal Carter:

She's everything. She's all of it.

Rand Fishkin:

She's everything. Yeah. That's an incomparable thing. I think Springsteen and Dylan and Jelly Bowl or whoever, those people are singer-songwriter bands, right? They're a band that's going to get up and do a set and Beyonce is like Uh-huh.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of music and hitting the notes on this podcast and what we do, who might be some other marketers, thought leaders, folks out there, that our audience can check out across social media to expand their minds a little bit?

Rand Fishkin:

What a great, great question. This used to be easy. I would go to look at who I followed on Twitter. I used to follow a very small subset of people on Twitter, and of course that platform is now nearly useless. But I do follow some great folks on Mastodon. I suspect in a year I'm going to be telling you about Threads. That's probably where I'd tell you to follow people. But for right now, yeah, Mastodon is great. LinkedIn is also good too. A couple of people that I have found their work to be extraordinary, they don't post all that often, but one is Asia Orangio from DemandMaven.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, she's got a great podcast.

Rand Fishkin:

Asia's so good, so smart, so talented that we actually hired her at SparkToro. She's helping us build V 2. She's doing our audience research and helping us with wire framing and prototyping this new version that's launching soon. So obviously I think the world of her and I would recommend you follow her anywhere. She's just terrific. Let's see. I have also gotten a lot of value from following, well, okay, this is an obvious one, but I hired Amanda because I was going to say her social media presence. She's on every platform, and she's fantastic on all of them.

Crystal Carter:

She's amazing.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, she's incomparable, right? I think if you want to see what social media marketing done right looks like, you just follow her.

Crystal Carter:

She shared this great piece about her exterminator's newsletter and how her exterminator sends a newsletter and is always super valuable and how he's just like, Hey, it's mosquito time. You should get all of the water out of your back garden so that the mosquitoes don't lay eggs in the standing water in your back garden. I was like, what? So I did that this summer based on her tweets about her exterminator, and guess what? It worked. So it's fantastic. She's amazing. I met her last year and she's just as warm and wonderful and clever in person as she is online. So yeah.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, yeah. She's an incredible human being. I'm so lucky to work with her. Do you know she pitched us?

Crystal Carter:

What?

Rand Fishkin:

So Geraldine and I, we were traveling through Southern California. This is 2021, and Amanda DMed me and said, oh, well, when you come to California, let me know and we'll go out to lunch. Great. Sure. Sounds fun. It'd be fun to meet up in person. Usually people on Twitter who DM and are like, Hey, let's have lunch, I was a little bit skeptical, but you can just tell from Amanda's thing. She's so authentic. She's so a hundred percent real. So we had lunch and at the end of lunch she's like, let me tell you why I think I should be SparkToro's first employee.

Crystal Carter:

Wow, love it.

Rand Fishkin:

And it was so, so good. Her pitch was outstanding. I called Casey later that day and was like, Hey man, I think we should hire this woman. He's like, no, we're not hiring anybody. I want to keep costs slow. I'm like, okay, just take a phone call with her. And then two weeks later he calls me up, okay, let's hire her.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's awesome.

Rand Fishkin:

Yeah, just great. So those two folks, if you are in SaaS and you're scaling, I think Chris Savage and what he posts about Wistia's growth, internal dynamics, all that kind of stuff, Chris Savage, fantastic follow. He's almost exclusively on LinkedIn. In Agency world, I think what Wil Reynolds is doing with Seer Interactive is an absolute must follow. He's quite active on Mastodon and LinkedIn, and maybe he'll make it over to Threads at some point a little bit. We'll see. He and I are both like maybe we'll go over there. And then I was going to say, if you're looking for Startup World follows, so there's a guy, I like him so much that even though Geraldine and I do very little investing, we invested in this company. His name's Francisco Baptista. He is the founder of TeamSportz in the UK, and their journey has been incredibly rocky and hard and tough, but they've built an incredible product and now it's finally getting adoption and it's so cool to see this human being's will.

He was born during the Angola Civil War and moved to the UK with his dad, and he'll talk about it occasionally, be like, oh yeah, when I grew up, it was like a Tarantino movie every day. And now he has this business that is beautiful. It brings so many wonderful things to all these communities in the UK where he is participating. It's for a lot of basketball teams, soccer teams, intramural and amateur leagues. Anyway, phenomenal follow. He's almost exclusively active on LinkedIn. It sucks that we have to use the platforms now. Remember, it is just follow at so-and-so. Follow at so-and-so.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're helping me out because we're get a link to all these profiles in the show notes. Now I know where to go find them. Half of them already follow, so we're good. But thank you so much for joining us, Rand.

Rand Fishkin:

Crystal, Mordy, thank you so much for having me. Please, when you're in Seattle, drop a line. We'll see if my cocktail and cooking game is on point.

Crystal Carter:

I'll take you up on that.

Rand Fishkin:

All right, take care of yourselves friends.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.

Well, thanks for joining us on the SERPs Up plus podcast. Make sure to come back next week with a new episode of SERPs Up, a regular SEO podcast and back next month with a new SERPs up plus for more marketing talk. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO Learning at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO and marketing? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and marketing.