What’s up old man? It has been a bit. I wanted to write to let you know it has been hard lately. The anniversary of your death came and went without much fanfare. Mom was in a rehab facility at the time. She’s back in the hospital with another case of pneumonia. The doctors seem to have trouble stabilizing her oxygen but she’s been durable. I’m hopefully we’ll get her home.
I wanted to talk to you about business though. Remember that story you told me about the late night call at the florist shop and that time you told that a lady thanked you profusely for helping her late at night and you told her, “Listen lady I only care about your money,” and that was how you knew it was time to get out of the florist business.
I was feeling like that near the end of last year. The holidays perked me up, but then we entered our slow season and I could feel the motivation draining away. Then something weird happened. I decided to see what new technology could do for me. Remember how you put me on the building and marketing of Fuller and d’Albert’s website? That was a big mistake. An English major right out of college tasked to work on a website. I still called computers word processors and put my hand through several printers trying to print off last minute essays.
Even with my low tolerance for technology I did some good marketing moves. Price Grabber would’ve worked if I was more restrained. Doing AdWords at a penny a click was something I should have pushed harder. And creating a Facebook profile in 2005 would have been revolutionary if I had used it probably. The problem was a didn’t know anything. I’ve always secretly wanted to go back. See what my current knowledge could do in that enviroment.
In some ways I do have a chance again. That is what has me excited about this year. There is a new emerging technology. People call it AI but it is more like VI. It doesn’t have sustained consciousness and therefore isn’t a true artificial intelligence.
I was a little reluctant at first. I felt that using it would be giving a part of myself away, but I wanted to get a task done. I wanted to build an FAQ page for our website and my web skills have only degraded since 2005. I am bad at it. Very bad, but get this. From struggling to build the FAQ page I ended up doing backend coding yesterday to solve a problem. It was the menu spacing on our mobile website.
That isn’t important. Back to the FAQ page. I used the AI to help me build it. To get the categories and then I constructed the wording. It was a bit of a team effort, but doing that I learned it can be used in walkthrough mode. Then I asked it, “If I were you and you were me then how would you use me,” and despite that causing some confusing syntax I got the answer that I was using it all wrong.
I went into the back of the website, added meta titles and descriptions, alt text, schema, and a whole mess of other things. It has been really exciting and fun. I’ve been using it mostly for strategy. I went to an AI workshop and the first thing they had us do was create a target marketing persona. This has been revolutionary. I then used them to guide the strategy. I found out Google had de-prioritized AdWords so I switched off of that to something called PMax. It is a completely different strategy but it feeds the LSA and our improving organic search. We also have a good blog posting rhythm.
As an English major I spend a lot of time yelling at the AI to remove em-dashes and phrases like, “It just happened.” It can be frustrating. It has no concept of time and spotty memory, and it loves to use the same vague, meaningless, and cold phrases over and over again, but I am refining it.
My two biggest accomplishments with it are building a Business Coach OS and what I call a Business Sous Chef (I named him Hector after the Trojan Warrior). It is both exhilarating and frightening what the technology can do.
What it has done so far is make me better at what I already do. It has gotten me back in the business and finally looking forward again. This morning I woke up, looked at a small problem, and was suddenly deep in a task before I even realized it. It has made the business fun again, but I am frustrated by the need for patience. I have no idea if any of this work will be meaningful.
We have to get to the other end of the year to find that out. Anyway, that is what I’ve been doing. Hope you’re keeping busy wherever you are. I really needed to have this talk and I’m sure I’ll be in touch again soon. Well, I guess we’ll be seeing you. Bye.
David Huzzard Writes 