When I was 23 years old, I sat down at my desk for my first day of work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had just accepted a job at CXL. The views from the WeWork in downtown Austin were immaculate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Peep Laja<\/a> had set me up with a laptop, access to all necessary tools, and a rundown on what had been done previously and what expectations were for the next few months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, he left. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ll see you in three months. I spend the summers in Estonia.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alright, then! <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve followed me for a while, you may have read my writing on experimentation<\/a>, bandit algorithms<\/a>, bayesian statistics<\/a>, and A\/B testing strategy<\/a>. You\u2019ve definitely heard me quote Nassim Taleb<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At 23, I didn\u2019t know any of that stuff. I was less than one year into my career, and functionally, I could barely run an A\/B test, let alone educate practitioners through the biggest blog and platform in the space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Luckily, what I lacked in experience I made up for with a voracious appetite for learning and a paradoxical blend of confidence and insecurity that led me to reach out to every expert in the industry who would talk to me. I picked up every book related to conversion rate optimization and read them fully, taking notes \u2013 books like Thinking Fast and Slow<\/a>, Don\u2019t Make Me Think<\/a>, even textbooks like Statistics for Experimenters<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Importantly, I stepped into the arena and started running A\/B tests, conducting surveys, dipping my toes into the practice, eventually becoming an experimentation leader at a Series E startup years later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s this have to do with generative AI?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Essentially, I know what it means to actually be behind, and also what it takes to catch up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And I can tell you something relieving from firsthand experience, 24 structured interviews with marketing leaders, weekly conversations with our several dozen clients as well as our team, and many \u201cbackroom\u201d conversations at meetups, conferences, and coffees:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to AI, you\u2019re probably not as behind as you think you are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But you should still lean in, as in today<\/strong>, and learn as much as you can. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s talk about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Recently, I attended Spryng \u2014 a B2B marketing conference that convened some of the sharpest operators from the fastest-growing SaaS brands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conference itself is made up mostly of table moderated discussions, with a handful of keynotes sprinkled between. Most conversations eventually veered into a question: “So\u2026how are you using AI right now?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you live too much online, you might expect these conversations to sound like parody:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe replaced the SDR team with agents. Our entire content engine runs unsupervised. I\u2019m basically retired. In fact, I\u2019m only at this conference because I\u2019m so bored and rich that I thought I\u2019d come back and share some of my learnings on invoking superintelligence for B2B marketing\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that wasn\u2019t what I heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, I heard a lot of\u2026normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some folks were using AI notetakers. Some were summarizing sales calls, uploading to NotebookLM to speed up qualitative analysis. Some were repurposing blog content into LinkedIn posts or cleaning up internal memos. Some were building micro tools and internal apps for specific use cases. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Basically, the same stuff you\u2019re probably using it for, with some marginal differences based on industry and role context. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At our agency, we\u2019ve built real workflows with AirOps \u2014 generating briefs, streamlining keyword research, optimizing UX audits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sort of figured everyone was doing this because our main competitors and frenemies are doing the same. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But when we talked about this stuff, the reaction was intrigue. Very few others were doing this stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was cathartic, because to be completely honest with you, I (and if I can speak for my co-founders as well) often feel like we\u2019re falling behind and missing out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But having these conversations, outside of the social media spotlight, made me feel calm, and interestingly, much more interested in tinkering and innovating more with AI. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Turns out, the shame-inducing feeling that \u201cyou\u2019re behind!\u201d isn\u2019t a great motivator for many. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Psychologists have had a term for this flavor of anxiety since the 1970s: Impostor Syndrome<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Originally studied by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, it\u2019s a psychological pattern where high-achievers doubt their competence and feel like frauds, despite evidence of their success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research suggests Impostor Syndrome affects 9% to 82% of people<\/a>, depending on the population studied\u200b.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In marketing? I\u2019d bet on the higher end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because marketers are uniquely exposed to the second culprit: Social Comparison Theory<\/em><\/a> \u2014 the idea, proposed by Leon Festinger in 1954, that we evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Online, those “others” aren\u2019t only your coworkers or your industry peers. They\u2019re the most extreme, most advanced, most performatively online operators (or sometimes creators who act like operators) in the world \u2014 filtered and curated by algorithms designed to stoke engagement, attention<\/a>, and scroll stopping. Think: mimetic desire<\/a> (and competition) on steroids. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What you\u2019re seeing is not a curated selection of your closest peers<\/a> and prospects, but the most salacious takes due to platform incentive<\/a>s and individual incentives to garner attention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the emerging field of Generative Engine Optimization \u2014 optimizing content for LLMs and AI search experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every day, I see hot takes and half-baked playbooks proliferating online. And for a second, the old anxiety kicks in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Wait\u2026are we missing something here?”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But when you dig in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of these tactics are either:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not to mention the tools themselves are changing so rapidly that the \u201cplaybook\u201d last year doesn\u2019t resemble the \u201cplaybook\u201d this year. It\u2019s the wild west, we\u2019re all tinkering, using a mixture<\/a> of aggregate data, first party data, heuristics and first principles, and experimentation. Intellectual honesty isn\u2019t prevalent on social media, but it\u2019s probably what you want from your organic growth vendor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s not to say this isn\u2019t an interesting field. It is. It\u2019s probably the most interesting thing to happen in SEO<\/a> in my lifetime, and I\u2019m spending the vast majority of my time working on various angles of it<\/a>, from attribution, to strategic inputs and research, to altering our approach to deliverables to better fit emerging organic surface areas like ChatGPT search and Perplexity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019m not going to ask you to comment \u201cgive me that template!\u201d on a LinkedIn post promising the silver bullet secrets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to be clear: this isn’t an excuse for stagnation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tobi’s memo at Shopify<\/a> is right. AI will<\/em> change the way we work. The best marketers are already learning, tinkering, and experimenting at the edges of what’s possible. There\u2019s massive alpha in being both functionally capable and theoretically knowledgeable about these tools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve read the memo already. If not, do so. The most important line, I think, is this one: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUsing AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by\u2026using it a lot.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The call to arms here is to a) calm down and start to simply ignore hyperbolic takes and b) learn by doing, lean in hard, and know that you\u2019re probably on the cutting edge like everyone else who is taking this path. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Honestly, have some fun with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have an internal Slack channel where we collectively share cool workflows, Custom GPTs, use cases with the team. I went to a dinner the other night, and we all shared the coolest thing we recently did with AI (mine was a fitness coach that actually visualized what I would look like if I followed the plan for 12 weeks. Talk about motivation!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I highly recommend, if possible, grabbing a coffee or joining a meetup and talking to your peers informally about what’s going on in the space. Higher signal of information. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This should be fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Want more insights like this?\u00a0Subscribe to our\u00a0<\/a>Field\u00a0<\/a>Notes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was 23 years old, I sat down at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[184,25],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-field-notes","8":"category-seo"},"yoast_head":"\nSocial Media Isn\u2019t Real Life<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why Do We Feel Behind?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Great AI SEO Scramble (aka GEO, AIO, AEO…Whatever)<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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You’re Probably Not Behind \u2014 You’re Just Online Too Much<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n