RAG, Politics, Dual GPS, and Road Trips!

Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast

In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Now with less gall bladder and more random…

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Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite

Firsthand account of using AI in healthcare

Using RAG lock for post surgical recovery

Mixing business with politics and surviving

9:58 – 10:40 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

Salesforce Shopping Index says soft holiday season

Temu and getting your own project manufactured

Dual GPS

17:14 – 18:38 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Yelp vs. Google

John complains about companies that market projectors and earbuds poorly

Event Best Practices and John’s super secret Profs B2B schedule

MAICON and INBOUND coming up for Chris

Join us over in AfM

Sign up for the text line: 1-617-812-5494

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Machine Generated Transcript

00:00
John Wall
Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix studio.

00:17
John Wall
Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall.

00:21
Christopher Penn
I’m Christopher Penn.

00:22
John Wall
Last week, were joking that you got a bad taco, which was why you weren’t around, and it ended up being way more than a bad taco. So what the hell went down?

00:33
Christopher Penn
It turns out that, my gallbladder died. Literally. My surgeon said it had totally necrotized, and was a dead organ inside me. And what I thought was a bad taco was, in fact, the first stages of septic shock. So had I left it untreated, I would just have died in about, in less than a week, which. Dying in a hotel room alone in Los Angeles. Not, not the end of the story that I want now. If I’m going to go out, I want to go out big. So, or at least. At least hilarious. Funny. And that. That is neither of those, but that’s. Yeah, that was found. So Friday morning, I rolled into surgery. They, removed it all. They said it was, you know, it was much worse than anyone thought. And, and now I’m on the road to recovery.

01:18
John Wall
That is amazing. Yeah, it’s amazing you’ve rebounded, because I, you know, I said it’s like, look, if you want to skip this week and sleep it off, but it’s amazing how they turned you right around over the weekend, and you were back in the office on Tuesday doing your thing.

01:31
Christopher Penn
Yeah, well, so laparoscopic surgery is like that, and it’s interesting. We’re doing a couple things. One, on Friday, I knew I was going to have to try, you know, recount the tale of what I thought was happening. So I fired up chat GPT, and I told it like, you’re a doctor. You’re going to ask me a bunch of questions, and I’m going to build an intake list so that I can just hand it to the doctor, because, like, as the pain got worse, it got progressively harder to think straight and stuff. So I would just, I was just foaming throughout the rambling, answering its questions, you know, repeating myself over and over again. And, and what it did was it consolidated all and put together this really awesome list. So, you know, when I rolled into the ER, I was not really coherent.

02:10
Christopher Penn
And the doctor was like, so tell me what’s happening. I just hand him the phone. He’s like, read, and he goes through his and, you know, both at urgent care and the ER, the doctor’s like, wow, are you like, in healthcare? Are you a doctor? Like, this is really thorough, really comprehensive. Like, if I have, I’ve been able to speak properly, I would have said, no, I work in AI. And you’re looking at what generative AI can do to make a bunch of relatively incoherent information coherent and correct.

02:36
John Wall
Yeah, that’s amazing, because you said AI and medical that you wanted to talk about because of this and that. Yeah, that’s fascinating. I was wondering, how did you get over and just handing the phone worked? Because that’s a whole other thing. It’s like, okay, you can get this great thing, but there’s no printers around anywhere.

02:50
Christopher Penn
Exactly. I could have actually turned on voice mode, just had it read it aloud too. And then the second thing was on Saturday when I came home. Because laparoscopic surgery is outpatient, typically they kept me overnight for observation because of the severity of it. I went into notebook LM, which is Google’s free research tool, and it’s called a rag locked system. What this means is that it will only answer questions of data you give it, so it will not make things up. It’ll just say, hey, you didn’t provide that information, so I can’t answer it. And I loaded like 40 different papers on post surgical recovery, this, that, all these different studies. And I said, okay, let’s come up with what should I be doing to accelerate recovery as fast as possible?

03:32
Christopher Penn
One of those things was a paper from NIH through pubMed, which is as credible as you’re going to get, saying the use of vitamin C, about 1500 milligrams spaced out in doses throughout the day, has collagenic effects, which means that skin wounds and tissues tend to heal faster, not with like one big dose all at once, but smaller doses spaced out throughout the day because of the nature of the way the ascorbic acid works, so. But you always have to take it with food because it can upset your stomach and things like that. So I paired it with psyllium husk fiber to slow it down through the digestive system. And then essentially I’ve been taking that. And at least in the systematic reviews that were in the papers, that accelerates wound healing by up to 40%.

04:23
John Wall
Wow, that’s amazing. Well, I can use that. This weekend I had a couple mishaps. I was doing some construction on a doorway and lost a piece of a knuckle. And even worse, I was reaching for the blender and hit a knife on the knife rack on the way back. Oh, that was majorly painful. So. All right, well, so there we go. A little extra vitamin C. I will do the same thing here.

04:44
Christopher Penn
Yes. We have to put up the disclaimer that we are not qualified medical professionals. We cannot give medical advice. Marketing over coffee is a marketing podcast. Please consult your health qualified healthcare provider for advice specific to your situation.

04:58
John Wall
I know the list for today is like, we are not doctors, we are not lawyers, and we are not politicians. So, you know, bear that in mind with all of these topics that we go through on the rundown, because it’s all over the place today. Let’s get that one off the table, too. You had mentioned talking about, politics and business, so there’s been a lot.

05:18
Christopher Penn
Of discussion about this lately. You know, different companies, getting involved in politics, sending out things and stuff. What’s your take on that? On whether a company should get involved?

05:27
John Wall
I had a big discussion with that over in spin sucks. We were talking with Ginny Dietrich about that. She’s put a lot of time, and, of course, she has politicians in the family, related in the family, so she follows that. One of the big points that she had was like, unless your business is in the public realm, unless your business touches something that is politically related, then there’s just no upside to doing it, because you’re basically, unfortunately, in today’s climate, you’re making half the country angry regardless of which way you go. And so you’re risking your business. So unless it’s something that is, especially if you’re a large company that lives quarter by quarter and pleasing your stockholders. Yeah, absolutely not.

06:07
John Wall
So then you get into this weird area of, okay, you’re a smaller company, privately held, or whatever your deal is that you don’t care about shareholders. Do you burn half the business because you want to make a stance on something. And that’s definitely the company’s right. But there’s also this weird thing of, yeah, you know, if you’re okay with half the customers saying, we’re out of here, that’s great. But. So, yeah, it’s. It’s, you know, like the. Unfortunately, the mess that is politics is spreading itself into other realms now is really the take I have on that. But, yeah. What made it brought it to the top of the list for you?

06:42
Christopher Penn
Oh, I mean, just, you know, every. Every. Everybody and their cousin having something to say about it. It’s interesting because I see it as one of those things where it’s values based. So if your company’s values, because every company’s got them on the values in the mission state and stuff like that on the website, if you have values and you get into discussions about political things, those values have to come into play in some fashion. So I’ll give you a real simple example. I personally and our company trust insights, by extension, are very invested in things like data. Data, factual truth, objective data, as much as possible given reality, I think.

07:20
Christopher Penn
So in terms of things like political arguments and debates, if you have a person or a position or a party or whatever, that is strongly invested in wrong data, like objectively wrong data, like, oh, the sky is red. Like, no, it’s this wavelength of light which is generally accepted to be blue, then, yeah, we’re probably not going to agree with that. And what’s interesting is that with those values, those might not be very good customers to begin with. So if you have somebody who’s like, I don’t believe in data, I believe in my way is the right way. Well, when I tell you that your analytics is saying this is, you’re doing it the wrong way, you’re not going to be happy with me, you’re not going to find value in my services, because you want things to be different than reality.

08:11
Christopher Penn
And as a result, you’re going to last maybe a month or two as a client. You won’t make changes that make sense, that adhere to the data, and as a result, you’re probably going to be a bad customer.

08:24
John Wall
Jeff? Yeah, that’s definitely. We see there’s a certain segment of the population that it doesn’t matter if they’re angry at us because we know they’re never going to be our customer. They’re not going to, they’re not following the data story. They have other things that they want to believe, and they’re going to run with that. And even we see that with a lot of entrepreneurs, too. It’s not even a political thing. We see a lot of. Yeah, and it makes sense. It’s like, okay, you kind of have to be a little bit crazy to risk everything on some kind of startup venture. And so, yeah, that’s great that you’re bold and a risk taker, but that may also mean that you have some other weird personality issues that are troublesome.

09:00
Christopher Penn
So, yeah, where you see this really play out and you’re starting to see it, you know, in this, both this election and in business is when you start getting real goldfish bubbles. Goldfish bowl bubbles. You see, like a lot of there’s a good chunk of the Silicon Valley tech bros in this sort of bubble and they keep getting further and further away from reality on like literally everything. Making products, you know, that, you know, making solutions for things, problems people don’t have or not considering in the slightest what the consequences of what they’re doing is. It’s kind of alarming when you talk, particularly in AI where people are like, oh yeah, we got an AI that’s going to take away 95% of jobs, but how are people going to then buy from you?

09:52
John Wall
Maybe that’s, yeah, I’ve got some other stats on buying stuff we’ll jump into. Before we do that though, we just want to take a second. We want to thank Wix Studio for their support of marketing over coffee. Digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less. When you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team one canvas. Reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites, create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Times up, but the list keeps going. Step into Wix Studio to see more.

10:34
John Wall
Head on over to Wix Studio.com to check it out and we thank them for their support of the show. Yeah, so its funny you mentioned shopping Salesforce shopping index, their marketing site has a whole bunch of reports that theyre doing quarterly now saying that the holiday season is going to be on the soft side, which, yeah, imagine that people been getting gouged on food for 25% over the past year. Theyre going to buy less plastic at Christmas time, I think is the punchline to that. One thing that was interesting with that was the stat they were saying that they’re expecting half of shoppers to take advantage of chinese shopping sites, which that struck me as high also as making an ugly holiday season. Some of the stuff that gets sold there is just, you know, I mean some of it is legit.

11:18
John Wall
It’s the same stuff coming off the factory lines that you pay three x for. But then, you know, a lot of those hairdryer slash car charger slash tire inflators, some of that stuff is pretty, it’s not suspect. It’s just like it arrives broken. It’s like some of that stuff we get at the local hardware big box. What are your thoughts on the holiday season? Is there anything you’re keeping in mind or working towards on that, I can.

11:43
Christopher Penn
Definitely see the team use of the world selling the appropriately discounted products. There’s a reason that’s 75% less than the competitor. But honestly, if you look around, you spend 15 minutes just picking up various objects in your home and looking where it was made. Like, yeah, a lot of stuff is not made where you live, unless you happen to live in, like, Shenzhen, which case it’s kind of one of those things where you have to evaluate vendors, and this is true of everything. You have to evaluate vendors based on their individual levels of quality control. One of the things I think is really interesting is there’s a lot of fab houses now in Shenzhen and the entire Guangdong province that do custom work. Like, if you got the cash, you can have a product made to your specifications.

12:38
Christopher Penn
And I think there’s a boutique market there. So, for example, I was looking at rode makes, the wireless go transmitters, and they sell a microphone converter, which is a $29 piece of plastic. That’s all it is to stick the thing into it. Like, I could do that with a popsicle stick at a piece of tape. Guys, I don’t need to pay $29 for that. But I was thinking, wouldn’t it have been nice if that had, like, a power bank in it, you know, so you could just pop it right in and just have a USB C male connector. Well, I could go to any one of these distributors on Alibaba and say, hey, here’s the spec. Here’s what I want to make. Can you make this? How much will it cost me?

13:17
Christopher Penn
And then if I wanted to, I could start my own business selling this particular product that was made to my specifications. One of the things that this, that generative AI allows us to do that is different today, and this is for every marketer, is, you can say, okay, I want to do this. Walk me through the steps of designing this thing. What do I need to do so that I can approach a manufacturer onshore, offshore, nearshore, it doesn’t matter, and say, how do I make this thing happen? And you may find, as many companies have, that. That one little solution that you wanted and you had custom made. Suddenly people like, where do I get that? You’re like, well, I mean, I had it made. Like, can you make me one?

14:03
Christopher Penn
Like, sure, it’s going to cost you, like, $89, and then suddenly you’re selling them on Etsy or whatever. I. And I think marketers in particular should be on the lookout for this in their own companies. To say, like, what problems are we solving today that other people might want to buy?

14:20
John Wall
Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on with that. And I’ve kind of been surprised that the 3d printing, you know, revolution is still kind of not moving as quick as it can. But I see a lot of things, just like what you mentioned where there’s kind of like, okay, I need a bracket to get this to that or whatever, and you can find a 3d diagram out there and just have it done. And then, yeah, this leads into, I went down a whole rat hole over the past two weeks about dual gps, which is something that I had never gone into. The impetus was I ran the Falmouth road race a couple weeks ago and my apple Watch just completely let me down. The GPS added a mile.

14:56
John Wall
It said I was, it looked like I was a Wolverine on speed the way I was like, you know, running five circles around a block before I continued. And so as I dug into it, I found out, well, there’s a lot of pollution that week because of the canadian fires and then running through trees in branched over areas. That affects GPS. Well, the biggest thing in the past three or four years is that there are now like five different networks that have GPS satellites.

15:22
John Wall
You know, back in the nineties when I had my first gps, and you were like waiting five minutes for it to get a lock and actually tell you where you were, now there’s tons of satellites up there, but the big thing is just in the past year and a half, they have a chipset that does dual gps that will actually grab more than one of these networks and get, you know, significantly better accuracy and if you’re, you know, really interested in that. So iPhone 15 was the first one that has this dual mode GPS and the newest ultra watch, which is like $800 right now. And they’re like, there’s no way I’m going to do that. And so Garmin, if you’re into running at all, Garmin has a ton of running watches that are great.

15:58
John Wall
I, but then Koros is the third brand, which is a chinese brand, where they have this model of, they just kind of scrape off the best features that they can afford to squeeze in there for $200. And its a $200 watch and its like, yeah, you dont have to spend 500 with Garmin and you dont have to spend 900 with Apple for $200. You can get this. And sure enough, its telling me which side of the street im on. Its that good as far as lying it in. But yeah, all that to run down and get more accurate tracking of where I’m at. And this idea that, yeah, there is a space in that market for we’re going to grab the low cost technologies and bundle them all up and make it work.

16:38
Christopher Penn
Preston dual gps chips are probably also in very heavy demand right now because in the Ukraine war, obviously both sides are trying to jam each other and they’re all using drones to do all kinds of crazy stuff. I saw a video the other day of a ukrainian drone, commercial drone, that was equipped with Thermite charger to drop thermite on russian positions, which very innovative use, but obviously partly is controlled by a person with a controller and goggles, but also partly by GPS. And so anything that has better gps accuracy is a win for whoever’s using it.

17:13
John Wall
We do have to take a second. We want to thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts. You’ll get ten answers. Rates will rise or fall, inflation’s up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 38,000 businesses have future proof their business with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There’s one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting. You’re peering into the future with actionable data. When you’re closing the books in days, not weeks, you’re spending less time looking backward and more time on what’s next.

18:00
John Wall
We have a number of customers who use Netsuite and it is that one source of truth that’s just so much easier to take action on your data when it’s all within one system. You’re not having to worry about integration, synchronization, extract, transform, load. You just go and you get answers. You can move forward. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO’s guide to AI and machine [e-mail]. Coffee the guy is free to [e-mail]. Coffee that’s Netsuite.com. C o F F e e again, netsuite.com coffee. And we thank Netsuite for their support of the show Yelp versus Google. Just something that we’re keeping an eye on is the fact that they are suing Google because of local results. So that’s interesting to see. I dont know. Yelp has a tough reputation in the food service industry. I dont know if thats changed though.

18:54
John Wall
I do as a disclaimer, Im basing that on about four years ago worth of stuff when I did some heavy research into that. So I dont know if its changed different. So watching those two fight it out will be interesting and see where that goes. I had a thing on products that I wanted to throw out there, another gear watch thing. Nebula has a new laser projector theyve just come out with. Theyve had their 4k laser projector that’s like up around the 15 or $1,700 price point. They came out with an SE version which you can get for about $1,000. But it’s just weird in that I can’t get a clear answer as to whether it’s better than the previous model. Like yes, it’s a little bit cheaper, but then the more expensive one is brighter.

19:34
John Wall
And I’ve just run into this more than once. The other one was with Jabra earbuds. They have this whole line of like you can get the three, the five, the seven, the ultra, the sport, all these things and you can never get a clear answer as far as, well, which one should I buy for this? So having that stuff, if I get to the bottom of the projector thing, I will talk about that next week because I’m not really up for buying a new projector. But unfortunately, sometimes the siren call of world class picture just kind of grabs me. We have a ton of travel coming up I wanted to throw out, though. I had a article on event best practices, you know, getting prepped. And so what I’ve got for that is I’m going to give this on the show.

20:15
John Wall
I’m not even going to publish this and I’m going to pull out of the transcript. But if you’re going to marketing profs b two b, I have both your session and then Katie will be after you, Andy Crestadina will be there, Ashley Zecman. So that’s my day one. If you, if you want to save yourself a lot of scheduling hassle and dealing through the pile. We also have John Miller on day two who we haven’t heard from in a while. So I want to get that. And Rand Fishkin will be there Thursday afternoon in the late session. So that’s the, oh, and Nancy Harhut is also talking about some new data stuff. I always love catching her as far as what she’s watching and running with there. So that’s the profs b two b rundown.

20:54
John Wall
If you’re going to be there, definitely drop us a line. I would love to catch up with you. And then you’ve got Macon is next week, too. Anything else big on that you want to throw?

21:04
Christopher Penn
So I’ll be doing a talk on open models and why they’re a good idea. The way I have it planned right now is a bunch of slides and then a quick walkthrough. How do you get started with this stuff? There’s some been some really cool new tools that have come out recently that make it easier to get started. Still not easy, but it’s easier, which I think is going to be a lot of fun. And then immediately after that I head to Philadelphia for lab Products association and immediately after that I go to inbounda and I speak at inbound. I’m going to be doing my data driven AI powered customer journey talk. That’s going to be a 90 minutes talk slash workshop.

21:37
Christopher Penn
So I’m going to do a race through of the material in about 30 minutes and spend 60 minutes basically doing demos and showing like how do you actually do this stuff where you can take your data out of these different systems, put it into generative AI and get reasonably credible answers from the systems? So it’s going to be a packed schedule. September, I think I have a total of five days in the office. Yeah, five days minus the day I was in surgery.

22:06
John Wall
Yeah, no, you’ve been on the run and it’s not going to stop. So there’s plenty happening there. Inbound is another good one, too. If you’re going to be over at inbound, go ahead and drop this line. You swing on over to the analytics for marketers Slack group. I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can join that or. Yes, sign up for the marketing over coffee text line at 617-812-5494 because I’ll be sending stuff live and around there and we can even, it has subgroups. I can do a on site group if you want to trade some stuff. That would be fun.

22:32
Christopher Penn
PSA according to PMC forecasts this coming week, the week of Macon is going to be the largest surge of COVID for the summer and then it should start to wind down. But essentially the odds are right now one in 30 people is actively contagious around you. So if you’re at an event with 1000 people, 33 of those people are actively contagious. If you’re at inbound, which is like 10,000 people, 300 of those people are going to be actively transmitting disease. Please take care of your health. Wear a mask to get the new booster. That’s out, so that you will have, some durable immunity. Boosters require two weeks in advance, so if you’re going to inbound, get your booster now.

23:11
John Wall
That sounds good. Good PSA. Yeah. Did do not get sick over the business traveling fall. That’s just such a horrible thing. You don’t want to get wrapped up in that. All right, that’s good. That’ll do it for this week, then. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.

23:24
Christopher Penn
Enjoy the coffee. You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at Christopherspen. Read more from John J. Wall at JW 5150 dot the marketing over coffee theme song is called Melogy by funk masters, and you can find it at musicalley from Mevio. Or follow the link in our show notes.

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