Communities as the new SEO, Airbnb's customer service fiasco, Elon takes 'likes' private, & more

0:00Guys, this is why communities are the new SEO. So we had Kevin Indig here. He's done a lot of FCO for big companies. So Kevin Indig here says the rise of communities. Not only has Reddit gained crazy amount of visibility on Google now at the level of Amazon.com. Wow, that's huge. Since the hidden gems update in May 2023. Quote unquote, small communities have also sprouted from search soil too. So if you look at this graph over here in the blue, this is community.shopify.com. Look, it's just shot up into the right, right? and then the left side is just kind of organic i think organic monthly traffic and then black is community.hubspot.com look at its hockey stick growth right zapier not as good but it's still moving up and i think we're going to see more and more of this because if i'm thinking about you know um best flowers for example do i want to go to like an affiliate site or do i want to look at what other people are actually saying probably the second one dude is it me or did we discuss this on the last podcast recording no because this was uh no we must have june no i didn't see this till later but maybe no i'm telling you we must have i'm like 99 but i think it's worth calling this one out again i totally agree with you by the way did you hear about the airbnb fiasco the customer service fiasco no i was curious on that i saw that on the sheet that you ended up putting out all right i'm going to share my screen over here so this guy brandon high um says hotels is greater than Airbnb, a horror story.

1:25And it has this little melty face. So it's 2.30 AM in London, flight delayed three hours. It's raining. I message our hosts that we're going to miss the check-in window. There's a fee. Weird since it's self-check-in, but okay. We get to the Airbnb and the lockbox doesn't work. Rain, rain. I message the host to escalate. The host says, too bad. You missed your check-in window. Okay. But what about our whole conversation about us coming in late. We change our lockbox code after the check-in window, says the host. But what about our convo? Crickets. Okay. Suspect. Malicious or fraudulent? I'm not going to read the whole thing here, by the way.

2:00I'm just going to get to the point. So remember, it's 2.30 AM. So in desperation, we get a last minute room in a nearby hotel. Meanwhile, I check with the host on when we can get in the next day. No response, despite answering my other questions. Malicious or fraudulent? At this point, I get in touch with Airbnb help. So they say, okay. So he says, I have a simple ask. Please refund me. Please cover my last minute hotel costs. Please investigate if this is fraud. Their response is classic. I can contact the host and ask if they're willing to refund you. Keep in mind, this guy's like already panicking, right?

2:30This guy's staying in probably a crappy hotel last minute. It's not a good experience. After all this, it's at their discretion. I asked about air cover. Isn't this what the big announcement was about? Sorry, it's against policy. Wasn't air cover supposed to cover policy? Main thing is this, right? It manager will call you in an hour it well it's now 3 a.m um sorry i need to hang up now because this is being escalated so basically what's happened here is he get keeps getting moved up and up um the chain and um nothing's covered and they're basically saying we're not going to refund you and basically it seems like like he's done like a couple other updates over here after 18 hours of disputes they they agreed to host technically has has to let us stay right um so here's the thing this post itself my main point is this tweet how many views does it have oh 54 million views yep the power of one bad story is 54 negative 54 million negative impressions it's not good for airbnb and this just on x you know it must have spread on the news you know radio and all these other places and journalists must have picked it up but that's so bad did any like the founder anyone respond um i'm checking i was just thinking if Brian Chesky responded.

3:42He should respond to these things. He, Airbnb, most of more people start sharing negative stories in here. So this guy, Timothy says, my Airbnb host dumped my reservation after I landed on a holiday. No other hotels available. Turned out to be a fake listing. I had to sleep outside with family for a night. They also refused to compensate me a penny. Okay, that sounds kind of a stretch, but still Airbnb came in and says, hey, Timothy, we came across your tweet. I want to make sure everything's okay. So the point is here, if if someone is i don't know this has been escalated a couple times someone should have jumped in sooner to do something about it before this it got to this right that's so bad it was funny the other day i was on x and i saw a complaint on united airlines so there was and it's an old video and it was about uh but it resurfaced because there was also in the thread there was a newer video right and the video was a asian dude who's a doctor yeah got pulled out of the seat got bloody sued him because they needed to put people in uh the seat for their own agents to get them to the next uh location yeah so he got kicked off he got kicked off so that way their flight attendant it wasn't his fault and pilot etc it wasn't his fault he's like but i paid for a ticket i have to see patients tomorrow why should i lose my seat they're like well, you're randomly selected, which isn't cool.

5:08You guys have so many planes. Go hire a private plane. You guys are massive companies. That's just terrible experience. And then the other one I saw, I think this was on Delta. There was this dude. He booked some seats for his family and his older kids or son. The older son couldn't end up making it, but he still had the ticket. He paid for it. And he had a younger child and they're like, oh, we're giving away that seat. He's like, but why? I paid for it. And he's like, I'm going to use it. They're like, no, your kid's really young for takeoff and landing. They need to be on your lap. He's like, sounds good.

5:40So for takeoff and landing, they'll be on my lap when they're, when it's not takeoff and landing, they'll sit in a car seat, uh, in that seat. Right. So then he's just like, but I paid for it. Why should you have the right? A, he doesn't get a refund B they're just give away his seat. That's not cool. That was a terrible experience. And they're just like, well, if you don't do this, we're going to arrest you and your wife and how does that feel it's like you you can't talk to people like that right and these are people saying like what is a fence what is not a fence and i'm not trying to be offensive here but if you're not a lawyer and you don't specialize in the law you shouldn't make threats to other people uh if you're going to arrest them and the family uh and their kids are going to be all alone like that's not cool yep but that was just terrible service and i believe that one was delta i could be wrong but i think that was on delta it's just terrible experience but these things go viral and then you start seeing the executives and ceo being like oh sorry you know should have never happened different policies but what's funny is with the united airlines one the ceo first came out and was like oh that person was being disturbing and stuff like that.

6:56And later the CEO apologized and be like, Oh yeah, I was wrong. He didn't do anything right. He didn't do anything wrong. We're trying to fix our policies and adjust. Yeah, no crap. You pay for a ticket and people fly on these airlines because they have meetings, you know, events, family events, whatever it may be an important things in their life. It's not cool knowing that you book a ticket on a plane. It doesn't matter what their terms of services is, but it's not cool that you pay for a ticket you got to get somewhere and oh by the way if they want they can just kick you off if you didn't do anything wrong by the way i mean continuing on the customer service um that's track that we're on right now because customer service is marketing at the end of the day if you don't have good customer service you get negative marketing right so got to make sure you get that right and everything comes down to people again but have you heard about the starbucks turnaround story uh no but really quickly when was the Airbnb story?

7:52When did it exactly come out? I'm curious to see if it affected their stock price. June 9th. June 9th? Let's see. It's gone up? No, no, no. I can't find. 6th, 7th, 8th. No, it didn't affect their stock price. It went up those days. It didn't affect their stock price. But still, I don't like Airbnb. I don't stay in Airbnbs. I have stayed in the past, like the cleaning, you don't always get the check-in that they promised. It's just not as organized as a hotel room. I mean, when I was in my twenties, I loved Airbnb. Now I love hotels because everything's done for you. So it's just more convenient that way.

8:39It just depends on the phase of your life. I got to take a minute to tell you about the agency owners association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well.

9:14And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency and we'll see you inside. Did you see that all likes now on Twitter or X are now private and there's been a massive increase in likes after they were made private? Here, let me show you the graph real quick. I'm assuming you haven't seen this. i saw that uh the white combinator guy paul graham responded to it but i saw it what what wait okay so 78 millions on this one uh what did paul graham say uh it was it was pretty neutral he was like curious i don't i don't remember the text dude i'm like jet lagged that's okay neil's almost neil neil it's actually like 3 a.m or something like that or 4 a.m for him right now because he just landed so i'm gonna carry the rest of this guys.

10:09Um, so, so, um, Elon here, so massive increase in likes after they made private. So like a 10 % increase, but keep in mind, there's like what, um, hundreds of millions of likes happening per day, 10 % of very large lift. And the reason why this matters is because likes before we're public. And so if Neil likes something that was maybe not that maybe didn't fit the Overton window, maybe it was something really offensive. Uh, PR might cite him. Someone might call him out and try to cancel him for liking that, right? And so people were afraid to like things. And now, because the algorithm, it looks at what you like, and then it tries to serve you more content that's related to that.

10:45So now people aren't afraid to like anymore. And that's actually beneficial for the user. And it's actually more beneficial for the platform at the end of the day because the platform is for users, right? So some things you have to take into account. And I think this is, I think for the most part, I think probably 90 plus percent of what Elon has helped ship since he took over X has been good stuff. Yeah. So Paul Graham, what he said, and I misread it the first time because I was also jet lag when I read it. I've been in Europe for almost two weeks and I had never adapted to the time zone. Because Neil doesn't listen to me.

11:16Everyone get time shifter, the app. I haven't had real jet lag for like four or five years. My problem is I'm working both time zones. I was working like 16 hour days. That sounds like a Neil problem. Yeah. So Paul Graham said, instant 10 % increase in likes, a large number of people must have different opinions than they dare to express to move the total number of likes by that much. Which is so true. I mean, it's true. Like, I am, yeah, I am legit liking a lot more things now. I don't know about you. I mean, you use Twitter quite a bit, right? Yeah. But also, I used to like whatever I liked, whether it was visible or not.

11:53I already have enough haters. I just like whatever I like. You didn't use it a lot. Now you're using it a lot more. Yeah, but since they made the change, I haven't, it hasn't changed how I like. Yeah. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site.

12:22So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside.

12:50Funny enough, speaking about marketing and SEO, have you noticed a trend like it's getting overplayed out? it doesn't work as well as it used to, but everyone just says, yeah, they're just saying like, oh, look at this AI. We now have this AI. And I'm like, your AI is not really AI and it sucks. You're just saying this. Before people used to do this to increase their stock price. I remember you mentioned one time there was analysis of how many times the company mentioned AI in their quarterly earnings. Yeah, yeah. It was a ridiculous number. But yeah, people are now just using it for everything and they're hoping that it helps them with their marketing.

13:25but I do think one company has gotten it right and their stock increased by more than$200 billion in market cap. This was for Apple when they did their AI announcements. They did it really well. They did it really well, but I think the big difference with how Apple uses AI, a lot of people in the marketing try to say they do all this stuff with AI that's cool and snazzy so that way they can get just more PR from it. Apple doesn't go for the cool and sexy. They go for the practical. They use AI in a way that really helps people. For example, when you take a picture of a document with your phone, usually your phone creates a shadow for a portion of the document or all of the document.

14:07Apple's AI can detect that and just remove the shadow so that way when you send someone the document, it looks better. That's useful, practical AI, but they're doing that in many, many more ways. And I think that's what more companies need to do. Focus on the practical, the boring, the ugly versus like check out this cool feature that you'll never use. Yep. I cringe. So it's funny because for the YPO Global Marketing Summit that I'm doing next year, my co-champion really wants to harp on the AIs. But everyone's been talking about AI since like late 2023, right? And it's the same stuff over – especially marketing, generative AI, generative AI, generative.

14:51It's like at a certain point – by the way, when COVID first started, people like went crazy on that train, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, right? People milked the train, the trend until it was dead. I think you got to – if you're going to try to jump on a trend, you got to jump in early. But when you jump in later, you kind of look like an idiot, right? And then if you're going to do it, so for example, Apple is coming in later, but they're coming in with practical announcements. So for example, Siri is going to be a lot more useful now. Oh, when you want to ask about the weather or like add something to your calendar, because Siri is kind of stupid right now still, right?

15:24But when you ask, it's going to be like an agent for you, like an assistant for you. And they're not even talking about all the buzz. In fact, I think when they tried to look at the number of times they said AI, in that presentation, there was nothing around AI in the first hour. And then in the second hour, it's not even artificial intelligence. It's Apple intelligence. Yeah, I love that. Make sure you go to marketingschool.io slash agency. That's right. That's right. See, even when Neil's jet lag, he remembers it. All right. That's it for everyone. Please don't forget to rate, read, and subscribe as well.

15:59And we'll catch you later. Thank you.