Gamestop shoots up 91% off a meme, L'Oreal, a $250B company, fails at Kickstarter, How VCs are using podcasts to lure founders, Can you manipulate SEO results using LinkedIn Pulse?

0:28All right, everyone. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment. So you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. Did you see what happened to the meme stocks again? GameStop and AMC. I have a good headline for this. GameStop shoots up 91 % off a meme. That was my headline here. Yeah. Yeah, go, go. It was ridiculous. So the meme started again. GameStop shot up like crazy. But unlike last time, they started going down much quicker. It was not as long-lived. But both AMC and GameStop did benefit from the whole meme trend all over again.

1:10So, Editor, if you click on my link so we can show this on YouTube, but The Roaring Kitty, so you've seen this one, right? So basically, it's basically a guy sitting and then he switches into gaming and then everything starts shooting up. Because this Roaring Kitty guy, he hadn't posted anything for years. And he's the guy that got the GameStop thing going the first time. You're telling me that's all he posted? Uh-huh. Just a dude sitting on a chair. And switches to game mode. And it switches to game mode and GameStop shot up from that one image. That's what I believe happened. Guys, feel free to fact check us, but I believe that's what happened.

1:42Because look at this one. No, from my understanding, it was Roaring Kitty that posted something that caused it. But I didn't know it was that image. 27 million views. Wow. On this image. Wow. Because this guy caused it last time, right? So if he does this, it's like, oh crap, he's back. But what else is he talking about? He's talking about games.

2:03But unlike last time, the stock didn't keep going for months and months at a time. Instead, it had a pretty... It's still net up in the last 7 to 14 days, yes? Dude, it had some really bad beats in the last few days. But is it up still? If I look at one month... it's up by double. Still a lot? Still a lot. Their market cap is$6.8 billion. So call it$3.4 billion that they're up by. That's still a shitload of money. They're still up. Keep in mind, GameStop shoots up 91%. If they're up double, that's still more than 91%. Yeah. Yeah. So still good. But if you look at the peak, it went from like$10 to, I think it peaked out somewhere like around$48.

2:49No,$60. $64.83. That's much better. It's better to be up 6x than it is to be up, yeah. I still want to buy it. But like the point here is the guy has brand equity. Okay. The second thing is the power of a meme is still pretty good. That's true. That is true power. And this is also the power of social networking. No one knows who Roaring Kitty is. Maybe someone does, but most people don't know who Roaring Kitty is. Most people don't. And this is the power of social media. 27 million views is a lot. Yeah. It's like Elon Musk boosting up Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Either way, the thing would just skyrocket and make a ton of money.

3:27He wasn't trying to make money off it. He's already rich. That's what's wrong with crypto. All these manias, it needs to get cleaned out to make it more legit. Yes, because people know a lot of this shit is fake out there. They're just like, oh yeah, let's just ride the wave. Until you start having a lot of those things washed out and then you just have legitimate businesses or coins or tokens or whatever you want to end up calling your companies, then you're going to start having people take it more serious. Speaking of legitimate companies, L 'Oreal's$250 billion company, right? They failed at Kickstarter.

4:03Did you see that? They did a Kickstarter campaign? Yeah. So basically here, I'm reading this from Sean Frank who has a company called Ridge. L 'Oreal, a$250 billion company, is running a failing Kickstarter. Weird viral marketing thing, bad scam, what is this? So basically this Kickstarter, they're trying to launch this new product that has like these uh ces awards and all this right some type of uh uh at home hair color device color sonic okay so they're trying to raise 39 000 they've got 18 backers and they only raised 2300 and this is a 250 billion dollar company wait so they already have awards for this product well that's the first or sorry with ces award for that product yeah that's the first problem in which kickstarter is meant for people who want to build stuff that's not out and doesn't have awards and it's just starting out in a small companies needing money.

4:51That's a good point. Cause look, it says L 'Oreal on the bottom left and it shows two awards on the bottom right. So that's, that's the mistake. That's a big mistake they made. Yeah. People would be like, why does L 'Oreal need money? It's a$250 billion company. Kickstarter is for people who don't have money, who need it to fund the build and they'll give things at a discount. It's like you guys just anti-marketed yourself. So like that just goes to show, even though it's a$250 billion company, you're going to have B and C players. And sometimes you have to check just like the the apple ad like you know they got backlash for it but like the the was there someone to trust but verify it goes all the way back to trust but verify dude with the l 'oreal one the biggest issue i bet people are going to face in the comments would be is this a scam because everyone would be like what does a 250 billion dollar company need yeah you know 39 000 people aren't stupid right so well no and it also costs them more than 39 000 to do that kickstarter campaign with their own employee times if that's actually them doing it i bet you they They spent more than the 39 years.

5:45Oh, for sure. And then there's this other piece over here on how VCs are using podcasts to lure in founders. And I find this interesting because that's how I got in on a couple of these angel deals a long time ago. Get the founder on and ask right after off the air. I'm like, hey, by the way, do you have a little allocation? So basically, you got Jason Calacanis, you have Ben Horowitz, you have Mark Andreessen Reid Hoffman, these people all have podcasts now I didn't know Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen have podcasts Andreessen Horowitz podcast, it's actually pretty good and then you have Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley right, BG Squared then you have the All In podcast and I think what they're doing is, one angle is you bring these people on to build a relationship and then you can figure out how you can get into their deals too because it's relationship based Dude, haven't you had VCs hit you up trying to get their portfolio companies on your podcast Yeah, yeah, yeah.

6:45Literally like two weeks ago. It's like, this company is doing like 15, 20 million in ARR. They're going to grow 40 % this year. And I'm just like, yeah. Okay, back up. What's their pitch? You're like, okay, so you finished interviewing them? Or did you not even interview? No, no, no. This is a straight up text message. Okay, so VC text message. You say, hey, Eric, can you? Yeah. Hey, Eric. You know, I have a portfolio company doing about 15 to 20 million this year. They're going to grow by 40%. I think you find a conversation really interesting, blah, blah, blah. and in my mind I'm like, no thank you.

7:15Do they actually make a direct ask? Like, hey, do you want them for your podcast? Yeah, it's a direct ask. But what I'm realizing, by the way, going back to interview podcasts, is I only want to talk to the people I want to talk to. Whenever someone's recommended themselves to me in the past, it just isn't a fun conversation. It's also like when someone interviews you on the podcast and doesn't do any research, you know what I'm saying? Eric's talking about a tweet that I put out on interviews are dead because it was really irritated. I did an interview for someone on a podcast, their podcast, and they were asking really basic questions that I've answered a lot and so many other people have answered.

7:56And the reason I was upset wasn't, you know, it's at them or anything like that. You know, I felt bad. Well, I felt bad because they're just wasting time. And I'm not talking about my time. They're wasting their time as well as mine. and they're going to do all this effort to create a podcast, but it's going to get very little views. And the reason being is people want to hear others talk about new stuff. If you're going to do podcasting, it needs to be covering new stuff that others have never talked about, whether it's you talking or interview, it has to be new stuff. And if it's not new stuff, it just doesn't do well because people are tired of the same old regurgitated information, you know, and seeing and hearing it over and over again.

8:33Yep. You have to do your research. And by the way, it doesn't take that long to do research. You can just listen to a couple of your interviews, one or two, that's research. Because then you just ask follow-up questions that the other interviewers didn't ask. That's how you do research. Yes. Or if you have friends who know the other people, like Eric's interviewed some people, he's like, hey, you know, so-and-so, what are some good questions that you would want to know from them that have never been asked? And that's a great way to also get insights on new stuff. Just ask people in your network.

9:02He's going to close some deals for you, you know what I'm saying? It is actually Nick, who is our head salesman. I'm like, yeah, it probably has a deal. I saw that. That's awesome. This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization, has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately, our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com.

9:34Again, it's single grain, grain like wheat. And we'll see you on the other side. Side note, did you know that you can manipulate SEO results using LinkedIn Pulse? No, I did not see that. So this tweet is from GoFishKrish. So he works at an agency that has fish in it. I think maybe it's his agency. So he says, here's an AI overview result. Just FYI for everyone. And it's no longer called SGE. So it used to be called search generative experience. It's now Google did a whole like conference this past Monday. It's now called AI overview results where they give you the AI result, right? So he says, here's an AI overview result where two sources are pulled from LinkedIn Pulse.

10:16This is another way people can manipulate the search results. Want to be in the top answer? Create a Pulse article because LinkedIn has a lot of strong domain authority. Yeah. So if anyone doesn't know what AI overviews look like, Like, you know, think of it as just SG is just reading. Don't pull it up on the screen. Okay. What's really cool is Searching the Land has a really good example of this is how do you clean? What is it? I couldn't see the whole query. They typed it in, but I missed it. It was something like, how do you clean fabric cushions and pillows or something like that? They'll show you a response and then they show you all the links that they're pulling the source from.

10:51It was, how do you clean a fabric sofa? All right. And then they'll end up breaking down. How do you do it? And then again, right at the bottom of it, they show you all the sources that they're pulling information from. And they're saying that the click-through rates for those sources are through the roof, but they're not actually sharing how high of a click-through rate they actually are. Which I'm curious. I'll end up finding out sooner or later because we track a lot of the sites. You know what's interesting? So I tested on perplexity. I was like, what are the best marketing agencies out there?

11:25First result, single grain. And this is the problem with LLMs, right? They will find one article and they'll cite that article as gospel and they'll just pull the results from that article, right? Because that article is a list of agencies, right? Yes. And it listed from that. And earlier today, when we did the agency owners association call, one guy that was on the call, his name is Mario. He has like a WordPress dev shop, right? And he's like, he tested all the different like Grok, Perplexity, all these things. Guess who showed up as number one? Oh, you don't even know this yet. So Syed has a WordPress agency that he partnered up with.

12:00And so he has strong domain authority, right? So he's like number one on all of those. So I see that being a potential problem. Good job, Syed, by the way. But the potential problem here is if it's only citing from one article and it's not kind of combining answers, that could be an issue because that's pretty easy to game. Yeah, no, it is. And we're seeing similar things. We've gone hit up multiple times of people saying like, oh, I found you on ChatGPT. and they recommended your agency. And I love it, don't get me wrong, but what are they actually pulling for? And I don't think you or me are the number one agency.

12:36I agree. And the reason I say that isn't to throw shade at Eric or myself, is we don't do everything. If someone's looking for an agency to run TV ads, VaynerMedia is going to be a better fit than Eric and I's agency. If someone wants an agency for SEO, Eric and I's agency is better than VaynerMedia, right? Because we specialize in that more than them running television ads. Now, does it mean that we can't run TV ads? No, we can do it. They've done more Super Bowl commercials than we have. We've done more SEO campaigns than they have. And it can go for many different things, whether it's email marketing or conversion rate optimization.

13:10Or if someone's like, oh, you're the best SEO agency out there. Or you're the best pay-per-click agency out there. But you're in the United States and we're in 36 countries. We need you for 36 countries. Well, that's not going to work. Well, our agency is in a lot of countries. We're not in 36. I think we're in 20 something at this point. But the point I'm getting at is depending on what your needs are, there's someone who's going to be the best fit for you. And it's not a simple chat GPT response. You know what it is? The best marketing agency. If it's Marketing School, that for damn sure is correct.

13:40So don't forget to leave a review and a rating towards the end of this. That's it. That's it. So go to marketingschool.io slash agency to grow your agency faster. That group is growing really quickly. By the way, we're increasing the price in increments. And Neil's going to, after we get 16 more paid signups, Neil's going to appear for one of the hangouts that we do. And those hangouts are really fun. Yeah. And then don't forget to rate, resubscribe. We have to spend time with each other to record these. We spend resources recording this. Yeah. So don't forget. And we'll catch you tomorrow. Bye.