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

Guys, this is why communities are the new SEO. So we had Kevin Indig here, who's— he's done a lot of SEO 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. And 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 this 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 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—

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 says hotels greater than Airbnb, a horror story. And it has this little melty face. So it's 2:30 AM in London, flight delayed 3 hours, it's raining. I message our host 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. I'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? This 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 ask about air cover. Isn't this what the big announcement was about? Sorry, it's against policy. Wasn't air cover supposed to COVID policy? Main thing is this, right? It continues to go on and on. Okay, the manager will call you in an hour. Well, it's now 3:00 AM. Sorry, I need to hang up now because this is being escalated. So basically what's happened here is he keeps getting moved up and up the chain and nothing's covered. And they're basically saying, we're not going to refund you. And basically it seems like he's done a couple other updates over here. After 18 hours of disputes, they agreed. The host technically has to let us stay, right? So here's the thing. This post itself, my main point is this tweet, how many views does it have?

Whoa, 54 million views.

Yep. The power of one bad story is 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?

I'm checking. I was just thinking if Brian Chesky responded, he should respond to these things. He Airbnb. Oh, 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 someone is, I don't know, this has been escalated a couple of times. Someone should have jumped in sooner to do something about it before 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, but it resurfaced because there was also in the thread, there was a newer video, right? And the video was an Asian dude who's a doctor. Yeah, got pulled out of his seat, got bloody, sued them 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 attendants—

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. Go— you 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. So for takeoff and landing, they'll be on my lap. When it's not takeoff and landing, they'll sit in a car seat 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 can't talk to people like that, right? And these are people saying like, what is offense? What is not an offense? 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 of if you're going to arrest them and the family. 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 was 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. And later the CEO apologized and be like, oh yeah, I was wrong. He didn't do anything right. Uh, he didn't do anything wrong. We're trying to fix our policies and adjust. Yeah, no crap. You paid for a ticket and people fly on these airlines because they have meetings, you know, events, family events, whatever it may be, and 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, this 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 you got to make sure you get that right. And everything comes down to people again. But have you heard about the Starbucks turnaround story?

No, but really quickly, when was the Airbnb story? Like when did it exactly come out? Because I'm curious to see if it affected their stock price.

June 9th.

June 9th? Let's see.

Looks like it's gone up. No, no, no.

I can't find 6th, 7th, 8th. No, no, it didn't affect their stock price.

It went up those days.

Yeah, it didn't affect their stock price. Yeah, but still, I don't like Airbnb. I don't stay in Airbnbs. I have stayed in them in the past. Like, the cleaning, you don't always get the check-in that they promise. It's just not as organized as a hotel room.

I, I mean, when I was in my 20s, I loved Airbnb. Now I love hotels because everything's done for you. So it's just more convenient that way. It 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 Aliyan, he says, The ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced 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. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/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/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. The Y Combinator guy, Paul Graham, responded to it, but I saw it.

What did— wait, okay, so 78 million's on this one. What did Paul Graham say?

It was pretty neutral. He was curious. I don't remember the text, dude. I'm jet-lagged.

That's okay. Neil's almost— Neil, it's actually like 3:00 AM or something like that, or 4:00 AM for him right now because he just landed. So I'm going to carry the rest of this, guys. So Elon here, so massive increase in likes after they made private. So like a 10% increase. But keep in mind, there's like what, hundreds of millions of likes happening per day. 10% is a very large lift. And the reason why this matters is because likes before were public. And so if Neil liked something that was maybe not— that maybe didn't fit the Overton window, maybe it was something really offensive, 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, like it looks at what you like and then it tries to serve you more content that's related to that. So 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's for users, right? So some things you have to take into account. And I think this is— I think for the most part, I, I think probably 90+% 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-lagged when I read it. I've been in Europe for almost 2 weeks and I never adapted to Because Neil doesn't listen to me.

Everyone, get Timeshifter, the app. I haven't had real jet lag for like 4 or 5 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. 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'm, 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. Well, I already have enough haters. I just like whatever I like.

Yeah, but then 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. I want to 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. So 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.

Funny enough, speaking about marketing and SEO, have you noticed the 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, and 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. But 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 their marketing try to say they do all this stuff with AI that's cool and snazzy so then 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. Apple'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 my— 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. It's like, At a certain point, it's all— 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's 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's kind of stupid right now still, right?

Yeah.

But when you ask it, 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 no— 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/agency.

That's right. That's right. See, even with Neil's jet lag, he remembers it.

All right.

That's it for everyone. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe as well. And we'll catch you later.