The Thursday Show: A designer's arrest reopens the transparency debate. Plus: How to help the chatbots find you

20:33Fred Nicolaus:So forgive this indulgence. If you write an article, it has to have sort of an explosive headline in order to catch people's attention. Otherwise, they don't pay any attention. So you write the kind of dramatic headline, which in this case, I think, was like the incredible shrinking home or something like that. But then people only read the headline and only react to that. And there's a huge swarm of negative attention. I thought this was a great article that very seriously explored this topic of what effect GLP ones will have on the home. And it will have an effect. But all the comments on Architectural Digest Instagram were just like, no, this isn't happening.

21:04Fred Nicolaus:This is ridiculous. Like, come on, like, this isn't a thing. And I don't know. I was sort of surprised by that commentary. I do think it is a thing. I absolutely think it's a thing, and I completely agree with you. Credit to Elise Moody, this was a really interesting piece, and it went into a lot of different facets of this story. And Newsflash, yes, clickbait that everyone got so angry about is actually what media needs today to get people to read the article. And so, yes, you got to do what you got to do. But also, this is a massive transformation that is going on in the country. And so everybody is going to be writing and talking about, hey, what are the impacts of everyone suddenly losing 30, 40, 50 pounds going to mean?

21:50And their appetite is changing and the clothes that they're no longer wearing, everything is changing. So, I mean, there's a lot to get into in this story.

21:58Fred Nicolaus:There is. And I think, you know, the stats are pretty wild. As some studies say, it's like one in eight people in the US are taking GLPs. People say it's going to be much more in the years ahead as the, you know, pills get cheaper and more accessible. So, you know, this is changing the country in a variety of ways. I think sometimes people's skepticism around the issue is like, you know, maybe they think of GLPs as being something, again, just for the affluent, which is really no longer true at this point. But there's also sort of the element of like, well, really, are homes going to change? Are people going to totally tear down their home and rebuild it just because they've been, you know, that's because they lost 20 pounds?

22:31Fred Nicolaus:And of course, the answer is no. But these changes happen subtly over time. You know, as Elise pointed out in her story, and if you go back to the Victorian age, people were smaller and lighter. So furniture is smaller. I have an ancient like farm table in my dining room and we have to lift it up on risers because my giant knees are like conking into it all the time. Like this stuff matters. It takes time, but this stuff matters. And, you know, we should get into the piece a little bit. But, you know, Elise was talking about how, you know, people, because they've lost weight, they're more excited about getting dressed up.

22:59Fred Nicolaus:So the closets are getting bigger. There's, of course, the phenomenon of what is this going to do to the kitchen? People say it's going to shrink the size of refrigerators and shrink the size of the kitchen overall. I personally am like a little more skeptical of that. But there's a lot of different ways I think this will show up. It's just going to take time. What to you from the article seemed like, oh, this is most likely to happen? So, A, fantastic that people are feeling better about themselves and they're buying a bunch of new clothes. And so the closet needs to expand because they're feeling great about themselves.

23:28Love that. The fact that they also want to have a little mini fridge in their closet so they can take their GLP-1 and also have a little oat milk in there for their cappuccino machine that they want to have nearby. Hey, I love that lifestyle. Great idea. I want to get that in my closet. it. Interestingly, what a lot of designers wrote to me and Shirley Parks, who's a designer from the Bay Area who just wrote to me right before we came on air, she said, honestly, the only change that I see in clients is that they seem happier and up for more home improvements. It just seems to be making people feel better about themselves.

24:02I did have a lot of designers who said to me, look, the truth is that it does change how you feel about wanting to have big meals. And so maybe you don't need that giant kitchen that you once had. Maybe the kitchen can be sized down and you're spending more time in your living room or you're spending more time in other spaces. We'll see what the impact of all of that is. But it definitely, this transformation, which has only just begun, is going to be massive. And you and I were talking before we came on air. I believe that GLP-1s are as transformational as whatever is going to happen with artificial intelligence.

24:44Almost everyone in the country, at one point or another, is going to be on some version of these drugs, in part because we're finding that they also address blood pressure, And they also address a whole range of health conditions that people have been struggling with. So we're going to be seeing this more and more. And of course, it's going to change some part of the home because that's how we express how we want to live. So I don't think that Christopher Peacock has to worry in the short term about kitchens no longer being the place where people want to spend money. But I do think that we are going to see behavioral changes.

25:21And listen, maybe just a lot of people feel better about themselves. Wouldn't that be a wonderful outcome?

25:27Fred Nicolaus:Yeah, it was interesting. In the story, a designer mentioned how I think it was her client. It was like they just wanted a nicer living room because they felt better about themselves. So they wanted to entertain more. So they wanted to have more people over. You know, so, you know, I don't know if that's going to become, you know, the number one impact of this. But that was an interesting little example. You know, the kitchen thing I'm a little skeptical of simply just because I don't know that there's a direct relationship between the size of the kitchen and the meals that you eat. You know, I've had some pretty big meals out of some pretty small kitchens.

25:54Fred Nicolaus:And I don't necessarily know there's a one to one correlation there. But I do think, you know, the and the article talked about this, but I think people will invest more in like gyms and they're working out more. They're like, you know, using their bodies more athletically. We've talked about this ad nauseum on the podcast, but I think, you know, this ties into the whole wellness boom. It's definitely a factor in that as well. So, yeah, I don't, you know, to respond to the commenters on Elise's article, like, yeah, no one's tearing down their homes because they took GLP ones. But this will have an effect, and I think it will continue to have an effect.

26:24Fred Nicolaus:And in 10 years, I think we'll look back and say, of course. Yes, absolutely. And I should point out that Susanna from Chango, friend of the show, she was quoted in the article and she talked about how, yes, lots of little fridges in bathrooms because guess what? A lot of clients just have a lot of cosmetics apparently and some other peptides that apparently they're taking. that needs... We didn't get to peptides yet. Yeah. It's a whole other podcast. Right, but I mean, so, right. If nothing else, lots of mini fridges. And I'm all for a mini fridge all around. Sure, that sounds great. We'll check in with this again in the future.

27:01But calm down, everyone. Don't get so upset about the whole issue, is how I feel. All right, that's it for the news, but there's plenty more to check out on businessofhome.com, including the latest industry hires and why so many furniture stores are shutting down. We'll be back in a minute, but first, a quick break.

27:23After launching in late 2024, June Lalloy quickly gained steam, with seasoned designers adopting their extensive collection of rugs, furniture, lighting, decor, and more. From the same family behind Lalloy Rugs, June Lalloy is backed by decades of trade expertise, combined with the fresh perspective of a young brand. And it's the best of both worlds. Nimble design and a knowledgeable team that brings it to life. And by extension, brings your projects to life. Join the team that's already beloved by designers and design studios alike. Sign up for a trade account at juneleloy.com. That's J-O-O-N-L-O-L-O-I dot com.

28:13and we're back i'm joined now by digital marketer ian lurie ian thanks so much for joining me dennis thanks for inviting me well i'm glad to have you on the show i know that you were a you were a source on fred's recent article about whether ai can find you and i want to i want to talk about that piece and get into all the details but first let's talk a little bit about the work that you do and have been doing for some time. A long time. I didn't want to date you there, Ian. You know, it's okay. It's going to happen somewhere along the way. I started in digital marketing in 1995. I actually launched an internet marketing agency, digital marketing agency called Portent, which I sold in 2017.

28:59In between, spent a lot of time on search, certainly search engine optimization, and discoverability in search. I've seen things go from AOL, as we were talking about right before we started, and CD-ROMs up to where we're at now. And it's quite a ride. It's fun. I still love doing it. Well, and I'm eager to hear your perspective on what has really changed and perhaps what hasn't changed as much as people might think with all of the new technology that is being thrust upon us. So we got people comfortable with SEO and people felt that they were investing in keywords and building out their website so that Google at one point really could find them.

29:50And that seemed to lead to great success. Yes? I would say occasional success, not great success. Okay. It led to a certain segment of people trying to game the system. and the folks who game the system would usually see short-term gains of one or more years, but then eventually see those gains go away. And you saw another segment of people who understood, I think, that we're still marketing to humans and humans have questions and you provide good answers to those questions. You will ultimately come out on top. And I know that can be a frustrating journey because you do see people who are gaming the system who may be doing better than you.

30:32But if we can talk about what hasn't changed, there are still humans at the opposite end of the wire, right? And you're trying to get them to find you more compelling than other people and other offerings. But AI and chatbots have changed one thing, which is that people are now asking more complete questions and those questions are increasingly helping them perform a task. So as opposed to in traditional search where you would just search for bicycles, now you might search for, or not search for, you might enter a prompt like, I am five foot 10. I like to ride on a mix of different pavements and gravel.

31:14What's the best bike for me? That's the big change is people are looking more for solutions and comparisons than they're just looking for a response to a specific keyword. And then what's actually happening in that process that is different than what was happening when you just went into your Google toolbar? So it's a two-step process. The first one is the AI looks to see whether in what's called its language model, this collection of all the stuff that it has already gathered, whatever your opinions are on how it gathers it, that pre-built collection to see if it has an answer for you. If it does have an answer for you there, then it just provides the answer.

31:57And it may or may not cite its sources. It may or may not do something else. If it feels that your question is one that requires additional research or requires more current information, so maybe the question you ask, like, what's the best bicycle for me, that probably requires more current information than just looking at a six-month-old language model, then it does something called retrieval augmented generation or RAG. It actually goes to a search engine, usually Bing or Google, does a search, pulls in current information, and uses that to supplement whatever the language model response is.

32:33So it's really a two-step process. ChatGPT is pulling from Bing, we think. It's switched back and forth. So it was pulling from Bing, then it did Google, now it's doing Bing again. Gemini obviously is using Google. And in fact, Google uses Gemini, right? Because you'll see the AI results appearing at the top of a Google search result. Perplexity has their own separate technology, and I'm not sure what search engines they're pulling from. Interesting. Okay. Yes. And so to that point, Gemini has suddenly been folded into Google search and it'll give you your initial answer. And then if you want to sort of drill down, you can.

33:09And that seems to be what changed so much traffic being driven to websites and all of this dislocation that the industry has experienced. Yes? That's right. You don't have to click through to a website anymore. The answer is right there. And this is especially true on Google, where you're seeing the number of search results where you don't have to click, where the answer is right there on the page, jumping up from 10 to 20 to 30 to I think now 60 % of search results have some kind of zero-click content where you don't have to leave the page. So there's an AI overview, which is that overview at the top that's generated by some form of AI, where there's something else on the page where you get all the information you need without clicking.

33:56And when did your clients first start calling you freaking out about that? When did that alarm start to ring? So that actually predates AI because Google started having something called the answer box. Okay. And the answer box would appear at the top of the search result page long before anyone was talking about AI in its current state. And there were fewer clicks because of it. So people started freaking out about it back then, or if they weren't, I was. And I was saying, you know, we need to change our strategies. but certainly, you know, the moment chat GPT showed up and people started using it, I started hearing from more and more clients.

34:35Yeah. Okay. This is a problem. You know, what do we do? How do we show up? Number one on chat GPT is something a lot of people brought up. And if we do, how do we measure the success that that's driving for us? Well, and is that, is that even possible right now? Have we, have we figured that out? We will never figure that out. So this is what's really interesting to me is we've gone back to the kind of marketing attribution that we were doing when I started, which is you track how often you are mentioned, which we can keep track of to some extent in ChatGPT and Gemini. And then we track independently how well our business is performing.

35:14And we draw correlations between the two. That's called lift-based measurement. And it's what we were doing way back in the year when I was first doing marketing and it was all direct mail and print and things like that, you would run your advertising campaign and you would see what happened overall to the performance of the business. That's increasingly what you're going to see. And you can measure clicks to some extent, like you can track traffic from chat TPT, but that's such a tiny slice of the impact on user behavior that I don't consider it a good measure of whether success in AI is really helping your business.

35:53You don't see a good measure of that? Not a good direct measure. We do have to use lift-based measurement, like I was describing. You can't just look at ChatGPT and say, I generated this many clicks, and they generated this many leads, which led to this much revenue. Because those clicks are such a tiny percentage of the number of people who see you in ChatGPT and change their behavior and decide that they're going to pick up the phone or send you a note or something else. Well, but in a way, doesn't that go back to, I mean, what was the, what was the old joke about marketing? Oh, half of my marketing budget is working.

36:32I just don't know which half, right? I mean, hasn't it been forever thus that we don't really know what's driving the business at the end of the day, right? If you've got some great salespeople that get the leads, chances are that has just as much, if not more to do with the success of the marketing than anything else, right? I mean. Yeah. And the marketing makes those leads easier to convert. And the sales team ensures that the good leads you're generating are converted. So the two go very much hand in hand. And I think in some ways, SEO has done us all a disservice because it has changed the way that we look at marketing.

37:11We now consider marketing to be this directly 100 % measurable thing that it's never really been. And with AI chatbots coming increasingly on the scene, it's going to be less and less. It is going to be more and more. I know half my marketing budget is helping me. I just don't know which half. That's the saying you were describing. That's going to become true again. We're really heading back into that time. I came up in the industry. I used to own a small advertising agency and most of our clients were furniture stores or sort of local retailers. And so they were advertising in the New York Times back in the day.

37:48The New York Times used to have a home section every Thursday. And you sort of hoped an ad would come out on Thursday. You sort of hoped that Saturday the stores would be busy. But how on earth could you really measure the success of all of that? That's where we would look at the performance of the business on that Saturday, right? So we took out an ad on Thursday. This Saturday, we did 50 % more revenue than we did the previous Saturday. day, we know the ad had something to do with that. You can't attribute it perfectly. That's not unless you include a coupon or something in the ad, right? So then you can say people are coming in with this.

38:22There's no way to do direct attribution. And that's going to be true now too. You're going to have to say, well, we start, you know, you will have to monitor AI and say, we started being a cited source for this particular prompt. And then a week later, we started to see more leads flowing or we started to see higher revenue. It is going to require that kind of monitoring and we're going to have to use that lift-based measurement. We're watching whether there's a lift in revenue after some particular event has happened. We're being cited, we're appearing, we got a special offer out there or something like that.

38:58So we've started to refer to geo versus seo and and tell me what what does geo mean and and and how how is it different and how is it the same i'm gonna offend a lot of people here here we go geo was a term that i think people came out with because they wanted to sell a distinct set of services and make it sound like it was a whole brand new thing that no one has ever seen before i'm sorry i'm gonna make people Well, I agree. There are new aspects about what we now call geo and I've given up. I call it geo now as well. Okay. You've given in. Okay. I've given in. Uh, I think the better term for all of this is something that Mike King from my full rank, a phrase that he uses, which is relevance engineering.

39:46Um, but I think SEO geo is what people are used to. Um, geo is ensuring that the content on your site is easily consumed, cited, and delivered by AI. SEO is all the things that if you don't do them, you won't rank in search engines, but you also won't see any lift in GEO. So if you want to think of it as an iceberg, below the water is all of SEO. And then above the water is that tip, which is GEO. And the tip is what most people are paying attention to right now, but all that other stuff is really important. And if you aren't doing it, then GEO isn't going to help you. So that goes back to the idea that the foundation that you were building with SEO is not suddenly wrong and all - That's right.

40:38Right. That's all important, but now GEO is looking for it. So tell me more about that tip. So what is it that GEO is looking for now that's slightly different? Right. So where SEO is all about technical discoverability and sort of general relevance of content, GEO gets a little bit more, it focuses more on questions and prompts than keywords. And it focuses more on solving people's problems and helping them complete tasks than it does on those individual keywords. So where I know almost nothing about interior design, so I'm just gonna go to a piece of furniture. How did you get on this show? Wait, what?

41:17Yeah, I know, right? What happened? What happened? But let's say I'm shopping for a couch and I have a certain set of needs for that couch. In traditional SEO, I would want to rank for couch, maybe lounger, maybe TV couch. I would just look at those and think, all right, maybe those are terms people use to find the couch that Ian needs, which is a couch to put in front of his television. Okay, great. With Geo, you want to make sure instead that people can find you when they ask a question like, where do I find a really great couch to watch television in a room of X number of feet by X number of feet?

42:02right? So there's a different structure of information on the page where with SEO, it was just about repeating keywords, certain number of times with GEO. You also need to make sure that the content on the page is really focused on answering a specific question. You need to make sure that the content on the page is easily broken down into individual ideas. So each paragraph on a page, if you're really thinking about geo should really be one concept, one answer. So if it's about, you know, this is the best couch for watching TV, then there should be a paragraph about the attributes of the couch that make it great for watching TV.

42:39There should be another paragraph about why it's a really comfy couch or number of paragraphs, whatever. What you don't want is one massive wall of text that has all those things together. Other things you can do with Geo that get a little bit nerdier, there are specific technical aspects to a page that aren't as important for SEO, but are important for GEO. Ways you tag content on the page, the way you code the page, the way you use headings on the page. So where heading structure was sort of important for SEO, the correct ordering of headings, level one, level two, level three is actually quite important for GEO.

43:18And then there's some evidence, it's not conclusive yet, but there's some evidence that there are certain kinds of hidden markup you put on the page, something called schema. that if you do it correctly, it will improve the odds that you're going to show up as an answer to a specific question or as the way to perform a specific task in response to an AI prompt. So does this mean people out there should be running to find somebody who is positioning themselves as an expert in making your website findable to LLMs? No. Once again, I'm going to make a bunch of people angry. Um, you, you, you want to find people who are, who are, who talk about it, right?

44:03You want to find people who, but you want to find people who are good at what I would call earned media or discoverability. You want to find people who have a good understanding of SEO and GEO. And by the way, a good understanding of audience and audience research and how marketing works. And people just good old fashioned talking to people, good old fashioned talkative marketers. You know, see, this is where I sound all curmudgeonly and I don't mean to. There's some really cool technical aspects to SEO and GEO. You want someone with a very sound grasp of both. Because in the absence of good SEO, you can't do good GEO.

44:42And part of good SEO and GEO is an understanding of audience. It's even more important now with GEO because people are entering these questions, these prompts, and those prompts are slightly different for every single person. So you need someone who's good at almost instinctively figuring out, this is the typical way people are going to ask this question. You can do all the research you want. I have all these nerdy tools I use to research prompts and see what people are asking. But the truth is, ultimately, someone has to be able to make the gut call that, yeah, this audience, these people are going to ask the question this way.

45:18So you need someone who's aware of SEO and GEO. You need someone who's aware of the audience. And beyond what you can control, so beyond however you might program your website or the things that you do on social, things like PR or some people seem to have put it out there that, hey, you know what you need to do is get on some podcasts where you can be talking and there can be a transcript about you talking about the work that you do. and that's going to help the LLMs find you more easily. So PR is important. Citations are important, I think is the better way to put it. Okay. Being part of a genuine discussion on a topic, being on a podcast like this one, sure, but it's better if there's a transcript, as you said, because the first modality for most of these technologies is still text, not audio or video.

46:18Being cited by someone else in a discussion on, say, Reddit, don't go to Reddit and just immediately start trying to spam Reddit. Create that thread. It doesn't work. Oh, that Ian Lurie, he's great. Hugely embarrassing if you try it, and I will deny any culpability. But being cited someplace like Reddit or on a third-party publication or someplace like that, that's really powerful, compelling stuff. And remember, I talked about the language model, these pre-built models. A lot of those models are measuring adjacency. How often are you mentioned in conjunction with a topic or a subject? So, you know, those citations increase the number of times you are mentioned in close proximity to a subject.

47:04Therefore, citations are pretty important. So to the PR point, I mean, there, again, depends what your budget is and how you think about marketing. but it sounds like PR or someone who can help get you on shows or get you written up in articles, these citations, that sounds maybe worthwhile. Or just help out. Just help out. If you know places where people gather and ask questions about the thing that you provide, going there and answering those questions in a really forthright, helpful way will start to get you some of the momentum. If you answer a bunch of questions that a journalist has about AI, maybe a podcaster comes to you and asks whether you'd like to be on the podcast.

47:49And maybe that person found you because you've answered tons and tons of questions out there, but from people who ask about AI and SEO. I didn't set out to do it that way. I really didn't. That's kind of how you get the ball rolling though. So I would encourage folks who don't feel they have the budget. If you can take just a few minutes a day to find people who have questions and answer those questions for them online, you'll find that that starts to give you some of that lift. Obviously, having a professional PR person is even better. There's nothing quite as good at getting you visibility and getting you those third-party mentions.

48:25And as far as the efforts that people are making on social, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, in? Is all of that, I mean, from what I've seen in my LLM search results, yes, it seems like they search all of that. Yes, they do. And this thing called multimodality, so making sure that you are also on YouTube, you have the videos. If you're comfortable doing video, we were talking about that before. Ian and I are working through that ourselves. Yes, yes, we are. I struggle. I struggle, Okay. But if for no other reason than if you look on Google at an AI overview result, that AI generated result, you'll notice that YouTube videos are starting to appear.

49:09So being in YouTube gives you that additional modality. It's another way for the AI to find you and have you appear. Also, some people are more comfortable just talking into a microphone than they are writing. So if you find that you enjoy working in video more than writing, do that and then transcribe it. And if you haven't been doing this and you're just showing up to all of this conversation, is there an urgency in this moment or is this ever evolving and don't panic, but also start doing some of what we've been discussing? I would never recommend panic. Things have changed. So, you know, we're, I was just talking about this, right?

49:56Things have changed so much in the last 30 years. You can always do good marketing for a great product or service. So if you have a great product or service, you need to do marketing, but you've got the foundation. So look at what you can accomplish now, do what you can accomplish now. So sure, learn as much of this as you want to and can. Keep working at it. But the main thing is, you know, keep doing whatever it is you've been doing. Try to make yourself aware of how GEO is now working. And then just pick the easiest things on that list, the things that you find the easiest and do those. And then you can always work your way down and dive deeper into other stuff or hire a professional.

50:38I will leave myself out of that, so I'm not just pitching myself. but you can always go and hire a professional, right? And have them do more of it. So I would not advise panic. Things are changing too fast and they always will be. And does the person who's out there right now, who is uploading as much information about themselves to chat and to Claude and the others, it's putting their website on there so that I can be sure at least it's shared all of that information. has that been proven to be worthwhile and meaningful? Yeah, I mean, and this is where SEO matters too, right? Having a basically discoverable website is probably half the battle.

51:22So, you know, doing that part of the work doesn't just help you with geo, right? It's worth doing because it helps you across every possible channel online. Those are the first steps to all of this. Coming back to how on earth we can track all of this, how can we tell that these efforts are working? Should we be checking the LLMs on the regular to see if they know more about us? You can check them yourself. Keep in mind that you may not be using the same prompt that other people are using. In fact, there's almost no chance that you are. Almost everyone uses a slightly different one. There are tools out there, some of which are ruinously expensive, some of which are less so, that can track your overall visibility in AI results.

52:17Personally, I would start by creating a list of the questions you think people ask about you. And you can do that by either just brainstorming or, and this is better, writing down some of the questions people ask about you. And then go to chat, GBT, and Gemini and occasionally type those questions in and see what shows up. If you want to get more scientific, you can start looking at tools like Gumshoe or WayK or Profound or one of the other technologies out there. But that's a big investment of time and money, and I'm just not sure you need to do that yet. But do be systematic about it. Pick a set of questions.

52:57Track them consistently. Don't take a ton of time on it. This is that panicking thing. The more you look, the crazier it'll drive you. So, you know, try not to obsess about it. But if you want to look periodically and keep track, that's great. You know, there are people like me to look at it obsessively and keep track of every little facet of your results if you really need to. Well, to that point and how closely you do look at it, what is your sense of where all of this is going and what's ultimately going to happen? This is definitely going towards people using AI to complete tasks and solve problems as opposed to to sort of curate lists of things.

53:39So increasingly, and I'm not sure this is a good thing, people are using AI just to find a solution to a problem or to perform a task, right? Go find me four flights from Seattle to New York. I need them to be nonstop. I need them all next week. Give me links to purchase them all and their prices, right? And it's just going to give me that answer. No clicking, no needing it. So that's the big change, right? Is people are using AI, not just to find things, but to do things. Well, and that seems to be what dislodged so much of traditional media. So cycling monthly used to be the place you'd go to get that answer about the flat tire on your bike, right?

54:22But suddenly all that traffic wasn't coming to them anymore because this was answering and answering the question in such detail and right and taking you through the process. So now for cycling monthly, the trick is to make sure that they are listed as one of the places that we got that information. And you want that to happen a few times so that in the back of our minds, we start to associate cycling monthly with useful answers to these questions. So that eventually I don't even bother with AI, I just go straight to cycling monthly. That's really the ultimate goal now of digital marketing. Well, so to that point, and so So thinking about being a design firm and what you're trying to say about yourself, a designer sent me a note recently said, oh, they couldn't, they didn't show up in LLM search at all.

55:08I quickly found them when I went on ChatGPT and Claude. And to your point, probably using a different prompt, but what's the language or how should they be talking about themselves that pleases the models most? Wow. Here's the answer in one sentence. No, there is no one sentence answer. See, you don't need to hire Ian. He's going to tell you right now. He's just going to tell you right now. Don't hire me because I don't have a good answer. No, the true answer is you got to ask yourself, what do you want to be known for? Don't think about pleasing the LLM. Think about the thing you're best at that you want to be known for.

55:51And then talk the heck out of that. Right? I always tell people, teach the heck out of everything. Pick something that you're going to teach a lot and teach it a lot. The more you can be known for teaching it clearly and for explaining yourself clearly, that can be your brand differentiator. I'm sure lots of people talk about certain basic principles of interior design, but not many people talk about it the way that you're going to talk about it. So really nailing that and getting really good at that and good at answering those questions really effectively, that's what's going to get you visibility in LLMs.

56:29And don't think of it as getting in front of 100 ,000 people. So to your example, going on an LLM and looking and not finding yourself isn't necessarily cause for panic the way maybe going on a search engine and searching for a Seattle interior designer and not finding yourself there would be a cause for panic. Really, what you want to do is you want to appear to the 10 people who are most likely to to give you a call. And that may be the upside of all of this utter chaos is that we're coming back from this world where getting in front of the most people for the highest volume keyword is not quite as important as it used to be.

57:09Getting in front of just the right people is what's important. And in some ways, it's easier to market to that because you can just go teach the heck out of everything. Look to the fundamentals, right? A good, fast site that's discoverable where you talk about your approach, what you provide, and then you help people learn how to do, you know, how to better use your service. If you do those basic things, those fundamental things, you've won half the battle, like I said. Do the basics. Good lesson. Ian, you've taught us so much. I'm grateful. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Dennis.

57:49And we're back. We're getting to the end of the show here. But before we go, we'd like to take a second to highlight anything going on in the industry that might have caught our eye.

57:57Fred Nicolaus:Trevor caught your eye. Tea Magazine caught my eye, Dennis. That's the New York Times' style magazine, which you may not think of as being like a big shelter publication. But a lot of designers have told me, like, they want to be in tea. Because, you know, while it's great to be an architectural digest and how it's beautiful, like the clients are reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. they're getting a T magazine and they're seeing designers work and you know many people have told me it is really a feather in their cap to be in this magazine and they do by the way a beautiful job of whenever they do a home project it's great for that.

58:26Fred Nicolaus:Now T has had this longtime editor Hanyu Yanagihara who's also a novelist she always hosts the big party at Salone or Milan Design Week and so she's a very known quantity in the design industry of course we know Tom Delavan the the interiors editor there too but there's a new editor-in-chief Jody Kwan who comes from New York Magazine, someone who's really associated with being a great visual editor. And I'm really interested to see what she does with the shelter coverage, because I think as much as we always talk about AD and how it's beautiful and all that stuff, I do think this is a big part of the shelter media landscape, and I'm really curious to see if it changes at all.

58:59Fred Nicolaus:I don't know. Have you heard anything on the mean streets about what's going on at T, Dennis? Well, I think there's a lot of excitement around it. And I think to the Times credit, they have brought a lot of advertising into that publication over the years, and home is a huge part of that, particularly around Milan and other trade shows. So I think in the home space, it's definitely one to watch, and to your point, designers know that their clients read that magazine, so it's definitely an important one. Yeah, maybe we can get her on the show at some point. All right, what kind of try this week, Dennis?

59:32A couple things caught my eye. One was the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a story about RH dialing back their plans for a big project that we had talked about way back when, this Walnut Creek project, that they were going to do a big sprawling gallery, and it was going to have a restaurant, and there was a lot going on there. And so apparently they're dialing it back, changing plans, and many are wondering, myself included, is this one of the signs of them looking for ways to cut back on expenses? And slow down a little bit. They need to build back the coffers. And so this isn't surprising, but it was a big project that they had talked about in the past.

1:00:19And we'll have to see if there are other locations that maybe they changed their thinking about in the short term. They need to raise some cash at RH, no question.

1:00:28Fred Nicolaus:I used to take swimming lessons in Walnut Creek, so that's my contribution to the conversation. But I agree with your analysis. You know, they spent big on the European expansion, and now maybe it's time to cut back and, you know, see what happens. Anyway, was there something else? The other thing – so I'm going to add two more things real quick. So one was – and I was trying to figure out a way to talk about this, but I've been tracking quite closely the Miller-Knoll share story after the departure of the CEO. And it's been interesting prior to today's big market pullback. Shares of Miller-Knoll were actually breaking out to a new 52-week high.

1:01:02And part of me wonders, and this is just me wondering, is there some story brewing with maybe some of those brands, if not all of those brands, in the Miller Knoll stable? We'll have to see. But a great deal of interest in the shares of that stock in recent weeks. So definitely keep an eye on that. I'm always struck when a new 52-week high gets reached in a story that otherwise seemed rather murky. So keep an eye on Miller Knoll. Hopefully we'll find some way to talk about it in the near future. I was over at Holly Hunt the other day, which is just what made me think of it, which leads me to my final caught my eye, which is, yes, I was over at Holly Hunt in part because I wanted to see what was going on at the D &D building.

1:01:44And part of what was going on was the new restaurant opening up on the 14th floor. That's right. Another story. And I just happened to be there on the day when they were having their first friends and family lunch and sharing some meals with everyone and inviting everyone up. There was a there was a happy hour. that I was part of in the afternoon, and met the women behind the restaurant, mother-daughter team, and got to taste some of the food, drink some of the wine, and raise a glass. At a time of great uncertainty at the T &D building, it felt interesting to be celebrating the opening of a new restaurant.

1:02:21But they've got a lot to offer, including a little membership club that they've got for$75 a month. You can get regular coffee and wine whenever you want. So I don't know. I might have to spend some more time there in the future. We'll see. Let's expense it, Dennis. Absolutely. I'm sure my overlords would appreciate that. All right. That's all the time we have today. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to keep up with the latest news, browse job listings, or take a workshop, visit us online at businessofhome.com. If you want to get in touch with the show, write to us at podcast at businessofhome.com.

1:02:55This episode was produced by Fred Nikolaos and Caroline Burke and edited by Michael Castaneda. I'm Dennis Scully. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back with you on Monday.