Mind Soup

For twenty years, the question that governed digital marketing was simple: how do we rank on Google? Every content decision, every technical choice, every backlink chase came down to earning a higher position on a page of blue links. That world is not gone, but it is shrinking, and it's shrinking faster than most marketers have adjusted to. The way people find information is splitting in two. Half of it still runs through the search box we know. The other half now runs through a conversation with an AI, someone types a question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews, and gets a synthesized answer that may never send them to a website at all. For a brand, the terrifying and clarifying fact is this: you can rank first on Google and still be completely invisible in the answer an AI gives to the exact question your business exists to solve. This is the shift behind the alphabet soup of new acronyms, AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO, that has flooded marketing LinkedIn over...

Marketing has never been a profession where knowing everything was possible. There are too many industries, audiences, cultures, platforms, technologies, and behaviors changing at the same time. Yet there has always been a temptation in marketing to act as though we have already figured things out. We build frameworks, create best practices, develop playbooks, study case studies, and look for formulas that can be repeated. We want to know what works. But the longer I work in marketing, the more I think the most valuable quality a marketer can have is not certainty. It is curiosity. Curiosity is what makes you ask why a campaign worked instead of simply celebrating the results. It makes you question why customers behave differently in one market than another. It makes you wonder whether the strategy that worked last year still makes sense today. It makes you interested in what your audience is doing when they are not interacting with your brand. And perhaps most importantly, it keeps yo...

We are living through a strange moment in the history of communication. We have reached a point where almost anyone can produce a polished article, social media post, email, presentation, or marketing campaign in seconds. The technology is impressive, and it is changing the way we work. But as AI becomes better at producing content, I think we are going to discover that producing content was never really the difficult part. The difficult part was always having something worth saying. I have spent much of my career working in marketing and communications, where there is constant pressure to produce. There is always another campaign, another post, another newsletter, another blog, another presentation, and another idea that needs to be turned into something people can see. For years, the challenge was often finding enough time to create all of it. AI is changing that equation. It can help you move from an idea to a draft remarkably quickly. It can organize your thoughts, suggest angles, ...

Nobody really prepares you for becoming a manager. You can take leadership courses, read books about management, learn how to conduct performance reviews, delegate tasks, set goals, and run meetings. You can study every framework ever created about leadership. Then you become responsible for other people and realize that most of management has very little to do with frameworks. It is about people. It is about making decisions when you do not have all the information, giving feedback when you know it might hurt, protecting your team while still holding them accountable, and knowing when to step in and when to get out of the way. Perhaps most importantly, it is learning that being good at your job and being good at managing people are two very different things. Your job changes completely One of the biggest surprises is how quickly your definition of "work" changes. When you are an individual contributor, you are largely responsible for your own output. You can measure your pro...