Meta vs. Microsoft vs. Google: The arms race, How Teams crushed Slack, Apple's secret org, & more

I want you to talk about the Meta, Microsoft, and Google's arms race.

I'm really curious about that.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

That's a good one. That's a good one. All right. So this tweet was from my buddy Anthony Pompliano, and he talks about— so the tweet here says, and we'll pull this up on YouTube, go subscribe on YouTube. So the Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet arms race. This, the amount of money this chart is showing right now being spent by Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet is breathtaking. A true arms race. So this is capital expenditures. You can see it just going higher and higher. Whoa. Like, so by the way, on the left, side of this graph over here, the capital expenditures is about $17 billion. I have to assume that's billion. And then on the right, you go all the way to the right side, it's Q1 of 2024, it's $118 billion. So Q3 of 2014, so this is over 10 years. So it went from $17 billion a year to $118 billion a year.

That's crazy.

It just goes to show that we said that, okay, yeah, OpenAI is slowing down a little bit. These guys aren't slowing down their capital expenditures. A big chunk's going into AI, among other things. But, you know, when you're big, you don't want to lose your lead.

Yeah, that's true. You don't want to end up losing your— and also their stocks minus today, but they're pretty high up. And you're talking about companies that are worth like $2, $3 trillion. What are they else going to do with their money other than reinvest?

They have to keep pushing, otherwise they'll become irrelevant. And by the way, like in the book How to Be Rich, they talk about Montgomery Ward. Do you remember Montgomery Ward? The store, it's like a Sears. Yeah. And I was like, Montgomery Ward was like, they had private jets and all that stuff. It was like a big company back then, right?

Really?

Gone. Yeah. It's like, you can lose it all very quickly if you don't pay attention. And by the way, speaking of, you know, this little graph over here. So it says, this is from Andrew Gazdecki. Startup founders, the best product wins. That's a quote. Microsoft, the best distribution wins. So you look at this graph over here, Microsoft Teams versus Slack. You can see Slack is kind of just flatlines over here with their user growth. And then daily active users, There's $75 million for Microsoft Teams, right? And it's bundled into Microsoft, yeah, but Microsoft to this point, it has distribution.

You know what's funny? We get tons of invites for interviews and you do too. I don't know what you see. I see more invites for people to do calls on Teams than anything else.

Really? Yeah, I, now that I think about it, yeah.

Yeah, more than Zoom. And a lot of corporations that we work with that want us to plug into their systems, they're mainly on Teams over Slack.

And nobody minds because you just log in from your Chrome browser.

And you just—

I don't need to download a new app. I just click on the thing and I just— yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's fine. Like, it's fine. Like, distribution matters more, and a lot more people are realizing that. This is why you see billionaires creating content now, because they want distribution.

Dude, totally. And it's funny because people talk about, oh, you need the best product wins. The best product doesn't always win. If you look at Teams and Slack and you ask most people, most people would tell you they prefer Slack over Teams, but What Microsoft has that Slack didn't is as good as distribution.

Yep. By the way, we're talking about distribution, we're talking about social here a little bit, I think. So I want to talk about why you should go wide and narrow with your social content. So I remember we talked about Alex Garcia. So I forgot the name, but I was like, oh, it's this Alex Garcia that's talking about why you should go wide and narrow with your content. So what this means is Top of funnel when it comes to social, you can go very wide. You can have more general or broad content, right? That's more discovery for people to find your brand. And so for example, when I'm interviewing these people and they're talking about relationships, for example, and that gets a lot of views, that's an introduction to me. And it's funny because when I go to like a family gathering, people recognize like, oh my God, Eric, I've seen your reels and all that, right? Like that's top of funnel. You go very wide with your content. You also have to go narrow too. So we talk about middle of funnel, we talk about bottom of the funnel. This is content where you more so talk about potential case studies that you have or talk more about your business. But the whole idea here, because I didn't really think about applying the funnels through to like organic social content, is it's not just I'm going to talk about marketing. It's I'll go wide on some topics and then if I want people to understand more about me, I'll have some topics that are more talking about my business or case studies and things like that or sharing stories around my business. So I think, you know, Alex bringing this up, he has a newsletter called Marketing Examined. I thought it was well explained.

I got hit up by Darshan from YPO yesterday.

Guess who gave him your number?

Oh, you did. And then the first thing he texted me, he was like, did you see that content that someone posted about you and your clothes on Instagram? And I was like, yeah, I saw it. Someone sent it to me.

I saw it late in the game, but I think it had like 60,000 or 70,000 likes.

Yeah.

You said, I don't wear that many nice things.

Yeah. And he was, that's wide content that appealed to everyone. But what's funny is we did an analysis. I've forgotten how many social profiles I posted about it on X on people who are selling stuff online. And we did an experiment. We found that people who post beginner content that's more broad and applicable to everyone, it actually generates the most views and most followers. And when we were surveying people on what caused them to actually purchase, the beginner content got people to learn about the influencer and it made them follow the influencer. The advanced content got them to convert into a customer.

Bingo.

Yeah.

There you go. See, that's why we should talk about relationships. We should talk about, you know, politics.

Let's go. Let's start with your relationships, Eric. Let's start this off.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

What do you want to start talking about with your relationships?

Guys, if you want to hear us talk about our relationships, politics, and things like that, leave us— tweet at us, tweet at us, tweet at me more so because Neil doesn't respond to you on Twitter.

And I don't have tons to discuss on those topics. You have a more entertaining life, let's just say.

Yeah, I mean, you know, if you guys want it, just go ahead and tweet at us and we'll see what we can do. 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. 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 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. I wanna talk about the secret organization that Steve Jobs created in Apple. Do you know about this organization?

Never heard about it until now.

Okay, so, all right. Big companies move slowly, but Steve Jobs had a unique way of making sure Apple operated as quickly as a startup.

His secret?

It's a group called the 100. The 100 was an elite group of Apple employees chosen by Jobs himself. It wasn't the 100 most senior people necessarily. It was the top 100 people who could get things done. As Jobs put it, my job is to work with the top 100 people. That doesn't mean they're all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors. So when a good idea comes, my job is to get the ideas moving among that group of 100 people. The main event for the top 100 was an annual offsite meeting with Jobs and the 100 members of his elite group. Major product initiatives would be announced to the group, like the iPod, and the members of the group would then go back within the organization to push the initiative forward. The agenda for the 2011 meeting of the top 100 recently became public thanks to a lawsuit. These meetings and their agendas were always treated with the utmost secrecy and security. The meeting rooms were even checked for secret listening devices. So here's a little portion of the 2011, and we can react to this. So it says, 2011 strategy, Steve Jobs. Who are we? Headcount. Wait, when did he die?

It's been a while, dude.

2010? Because he couldn't be alive here.

Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs death.

2011. Oh crap.

Well, this is right before he died then.

October 5th, 2011.

Okay. So who are we? Headcount, average age, VP count, senior promotions last year, percent new membership at this meeting. What do we do? Pie chart of units, product lines, same charts with tablets. Post-PC era, Apple's the first company to get here. Post-PC products are now 66% of our revenues. And then, yeah, so I guess they talk about a lot of strategic initiatives here. I think my lesson here is to really find out who are the people that actually get things done in your company, because there are people that just make things happen, right? And just bring them on for key strategic initiatives and give them authority to create change in their divisions. This tweet is from Sieva, who we met at one of the dinners, the tall dude. Um, do you remember? Uh-uh. We had that dinner at that like apartment. Um, and there's a tall dude sitting next to you.

Marina del Rey or one of those places. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was Cieva that was sitting next to you. He tweeted this, but I think this is really interesting.

He works with Devin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's like the top 100. It's like, yeah, this makes a lot. And you probably do this to an extent. Um, but it hasn't been formalized.

It hasn't been formalized. I have one person in every department that I know to go to to get stuff done.

That you really like. Yeah.

I like everyone, but—

Yes, but you like these people a little more. Yeah, because they get—

they can get whatever I want done and done quick.

Yeah. And they're not always a leader of that department, by the way, to clarify.

A lot of times they're second or third in command, but I know if I tell them, I can get it done that day or within an hour or like super, super fast.

But wouldn't it be cool if you did something like this every year? There's this elite group that— and then you do like a little mastermind with that group. That's kind of cool.

I think we're a little small. When we get bigger in size, I think it would make sense.

You have 1,000 people right now?

Yeah. Top 50?

Uh, it's—

we're growing too fast in headcount and we're doing too many things at the same time where I don't want to distract people with anything more.

I don't know if this distracts people because he uses this to push more initiatives throughout the entire company.

But we already have our initiatives and I have the people working on them and I just need them to get it done and nothing else.

All right, that's fine.

But I do think this will be useful once we go through our of stuff that we want to accomplish over the next 2 years. We technically have a list of stuff that I want done by our 10-year mark.

I think this is genius just to have this group because also like it motivates other people to want to join this group as well. Um, and I think ultimately what happens at the end of the day is you need people in an organization and you want the best people that can push things forward. And this, this group sets the example. It sets the tone for the rest of the company. Um, and so it should be motivating and it also will expose the ones that are jealous. And then those are the ones that you just, you know, unfortunately have to move on from.

Or if they're not happy, they should figure out how to execute faster so they're included in that group.

Yep. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode.

NerdWallet reports $151 million in revenue, but SEO headwinds. I think we should start with that and then let's go over what you and I will think, or what you and I think will happen with the SEO industry in the future.

First of all, I still think the SEO industry is insufferable. But this tweet is from ViperChill. So personal finance giant NerdWallet revealed revenues of $151 million for Q2, up 5% year over year. So basically, SEO— NerdWallet is saying, hey, even though we did $151 million in revenue for Q2, there are headwinds in the SEO industry. So they mentioned organic search headwinds, traffic headwinds 10 times in the report and suggest Google search results have some kinks to be worked out. I'll get back to the search traffic, but first some highlights. So monthly unique users grew 7% year on year, they have 22 million registered users. Let's look at the revenue real quick. Insurance business grew revenue 196% year on year, credit card revenue of $46 million down 10%, loans revenue down 6%. They saw a net loss of $9.4 million, right? And by the way, just so everyone knows here, NerdWallet, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they're mostly affiliate. So, you know, they have, you know, they make money off credit cards, loans, and all that. They're trying to push a lot of them—

Are direct deals. It's not just affiliate, standard affiliate model.

A lot of them are specific deals with specific We should talk about that more because once you do really well as an affiliate, you get the direct deals.

Yeah, like I know people who are buying leads from them for $4 or $5 million a month, or they were when the mortgage industry was really picking up. Like just straight up, they're like, our budget is $5 million a month. Yeah, send me whatever you can.

Look, I think a lot of these sites, look, searches get— we talk about, they talk about, okay, search traffic pressures and headwinds are mentioned. So at the end of the day though, search is just getting tougher. And there's actually a related tweet to this where Gaetano talks about link building just not working. And everyone's commenting that link building isn't working as well as it used to work. So I just think, you know, and this post from Gaetano over here. So this is why link building is basically dead when it comes to SEO. So Gaetano says this, he says, over the past few months, I have tested 5 different link building service providers and the results have been wishy-washy. I think it's a combination of the following problems. One, targeted links acquisition has gotten way harder. The golden era of link building might very well be over. 2, links are less effective than they used to be. Now, they still work to an extent, but you need to get way more links at higher quality to be successful. 3, link providers mostly just want to get paid. They will pitch you mostly low-quality stuff so they can say, wow, we got you 5 links this month. But as an SEO, you must really be asking yourself, does a backlink like this actually matter? And then 4, here's the last point, and we can react to this. Digital PR companies suck. They're expensive and annoying to work with. Most SEO managers would rather just build links. Working on PR requires a collaboration with brand and comms teams, which is a huge headache for SEO. Just adds layers of complexity that we don't want to deal with. And then all these people respond and they're like, basically they're agreeing.

You can build a good digital PR team. He is right though, you need to communicate and interact with them.

It's a pain in the butt.

It is a pain. We do it. It is a lot of work and it's expensive on the man hours.

Yeah. This guy Devin over here responds. He says, I haven't seen a direct impact from backlinks in like 6 to 12 months, to be honest. I paid over $70K in backlinks over time, so I have my freelancer preferences.

Wow.

That's a lot. They bought 10 link inserts at $80 a pop from the freelancer I use, and the page hasn't moved in 30 days. So that goes back to what we're saying, SEO is getting harder. And we're not saying don't do link building, it still works.

You need links, you actually can't do it.

It works for our clients, it works for your clients.

But the thing that people forget about link building is they believe that you just buy links and your rankings skyrocket. That's no longer the case, it hasn't been for many years. It's links in combination with many other factors. If the algorithms aren't as reliant on links as they used to be, but if you have the other factors and you don't have links, we're not seeing rankings do that well.

Yep. All right guys, so that's it for today's episode. marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's our little community. In fact, Neil, do you want to come to the next session next week? Are you in town next week?

Depending what time I'm driving home, but yeah.

All right, we'll figure it out. So this is when Neil and I will jump in every now and then, every month or so, and we'll have guest speakers and all that. And you have an entire community of people all trying to grow. We're talking, we're talking 7, 8-figure agency owners, 6 figures as well. And yeah, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow. Bye.