Why organic social rivals SEO today, Virality vs. revenue, 'Stop Asian Hate' questioned, & more

This reel was talking about why organic social rivals SEO today, and I see the merit with that because SEO well one piece of it is SEO is really demand fulfillment. So there's a lot of people searching for like red shoes or whatever, right? But to me, a lot of what's going on now is like who's top of mind because okay think about it when people reach out to agencies sometimes sometimes people are just like dude who's a good agency for this right? Sometimes just being top of mind is helpful, and I I see that as a benefit of reels and TikToks and shorts. You're just constantly being top of mind. You just keep seeing you over and over, and eventually maybe someone might have talked to. before, or maybe someone's in the market for it, or someone mentioned you before. It's just everything kind of connects at that moment. And I told you at that YPO Longevity Summit, 3 or 4 people came up to me and a lot of it was like watching Shorts. Some of it's long form, but I think there's— I think organic social is catching up and I do think it's one of the bigger opportunities today.

I agree with you. I don't know if it is better than SEO or worse.

Yeah, I don't think it's better or worse. I think it's just—

Yeah, I think it all goes in ebbs and flows. And the reason for it is sometimes the social algorithms really help you out and sometimes Sometimes they don't, but it does help keep you top of mind. And I found that when I was doing SEO over the years, most people originally found out about me through a Google search, and that's how I stayed top of mind. And then eventually social media, and then emails, and then speaking at conferences, and the list goes on and on and on. But I do think even being in press just helps you stay top of mind. But at the end of the day, I learned this one the hard way. in which being top of mind doesn't mean that you're going to end up generating a ton of revenue. And this was like a big ego blow because when I created my ad agency, NP Digital, 6, 7 years ago, I was like, oh, we got all this traffic, we're going to do so well. And I think the first year we got to around $5 million. I think the second year was $15 or $18 million or something like that.

I thought you went $5, $10.

No, it wasn't 10, it was 18. I know we didn't do 10 the second year.

Yeah.

10 was just NPD, then we also had the SEO—

Oh, the 10 is the approximate value of your brand right now.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it was 18 the second year.

Yeah.

And I thought that, oh, I got all this website traffic, I'm top of mind, everyone knows me for SEO, I'm going to clean up. And dude, the thing I learned really quickly And it was rightfully so for all these potential customers. They're like, well, we don't care about you, Neil Patel. We care about the person working on our account. And if you can show me enough— if you can't show me case studies in our space of the results you produce, and you can't show me the people who are going to be working on my account and their qualifications, why would I hire you? Because I don't want to risk my job on you. And what it quickly taught me is being top of mind is great, but being top of mind and generating all this awareness doesn't mean you're going to generate crap in revenue.

Well, I think for larger enterprise deals, being top of mind, but known for doing good work, you're still, you know, in a sense, you're trying to stay top of mind. I'm not talking about social in this case, but it's like, this concept matters across the board is what we're saying.

Yes, but speaking of being top of mind, do you remember that girl who created that video that says, I'm looking for a guy in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes?

Yeah.

Right? So she ended up producing a video or a song with David Guetta.

David Guetta.

Guetta, my bad.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. And the song was called Man in Finance. I checked it out today. It only has 900,000 views.

Yeah, I mean, some of this stuff, it doesn't go, like, that was kind of her moment. And by the way, like, this kind of relates to the Hak Tua girl, right? Do you know what I'm talking about?

I know what you're talking about, but I think the Hak Tua girl will make way more cash than the girl in finance. Sure, so if you think about that song with the girl in finance, She then had some follow-up videos. And in one of them, she's doing money signs, like she's printing money and, you know, for the haters. And good for her. I don't know why people were hating on her. Her song was catchy.

Yeah.

I watched it quite a few times. But the point I'm getting at is just because you have fame, or even whether it's for 10 seconds or 10 minutes or 10 months or 10 years, it doesn't mean that you're going to end up turning that into revenue and you got to figure out how. And a great example of this is I was talking to a buddy who deals with Cardi B. So Cardi B had vodka-infused whipped cream. All right, so whipped cream—

That's nasty. Yeah.

Whipped cream, or maybe I'm saying the opposite. It was whipped cream that vodka was infused into, right? So it was like vodka-flavored whipped cream.

Vodka-infused whipped cream.

Yeah, I think that's right. So it was just vodka-flavored whipped cream and she barely made any money on that.

Yep.

Does she have a captivating audience? Yes. Bad product, bad offering, terrible way to monetize. And if you have something catchy, like a song, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make money if you don't know how to monetize.

Yep. So, I mean, you mentioned the word offer. Everyone should go read Alex's book. It's 99 cents, right? $100 Million Offers. I think people still today, like my team goes, what do you think about this offer? Consulting, what do you think of this free audit? I'm like, dude, everyone does that stuff. Like, what? That's not a good offer, right? It's one, the offer's got to be relevant. It's gotta be such a no-brainer that they'd be stupid not to take it. By the way, dude, there's one I wanted to finish off on here.

So you remember the Stop Asian Hate stuff that happened during COVID You're talking about like the Asian lady in San Francisco that got beat up or something?

Yeah, like there's like random, like Asian people getting beat up. Um, some, some lady got pushed into the BART like train and died.

Um, so a lot of stuff like that happened, right?

So, you know, the thing here is like, you know, was Stop Asian Hate actually fake marketing? And by the way, guys, I'm yellow person saying this right now.

Okay.

I'm, I'm Asian. Neil's also Asian as well. Um, so this This guy who's also Asian tweeted this. He's like, I'm trending right now on Reddit. His name's Kang Min Jae Lee. Okay, Kang Min Lee, he's Korean. So, I'm trending right now on Reddit in one of the largest subreddits with over 8 million users. The thousands of comments completely agree with me. Here are some true stories of Asian friends and families brutalized but ignored because it didn't fit the narrative. Let me just preface this, guys. So, was Stop Asian Hate fake marketing? We're not here to get into the race or anything like that. I just want to talk about the, the media that's controlling this, right? So he asked this question and this got 30,000 upvotes on Reddit. Stop Asian Hate died overnight because people started asking, wait, who's attacking Asians? And they, they didn't like having to answer to that. Do you understand what I'm saying?

You're saying the media didn't like answering who was attacking when people are asking that question?

When people started to ask questions, okay. the media didn't like having to answer to that. So the press coverage around Stop Asian Hate started to fade. The reach around this started to fade because it was gaining momentum, right? And I know some friends that were involved with Stop Asian Hate. So the question is, again, was Stop Asian Hate fake marketing? Now, when you look at this guy's tweet, which has 13 million views on it, which is a lot, all the evidence that he's showing right now is Asian people being attacked mostly by African American people, right? And again, this is not about race at the end of the day. this, this guy's like revealing this right now. He's like a— he's trending on Reddit. What I'm more interested in is this was a growing movement, and the moment the narrative didn't fit anymore, they stopped covering it, right? And so then like someone else covers this later and they're like, yeah, you know, um, because then the media started going after white people. Oh, this, this racism over here, you know, it's, it's, um, you know, um, you know, white people are oppressing, blah blah blah. It's like that was the media's narrative. And once they found something that didn't fit their narrative anymore, they stopped covering it. And so that's what we were talking about this before. It's like the power of you being the media. That's going to happen more and more because we can't trust the media as much because they just want to cover what they want to cover. 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 Ollie, and 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.

The media covers what they want to cover, but they own the properties and it's their right to.

Totally.

Right? And it's just like— Totally.

But they have their incentives. You know what I mean?

Their incentives are whatever they want that helps make—

Well, their incentive is to drive as much reach as possible, and it's whatever narrative— And make money.

Yes.

Yes. So show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Again, this is not a race thing. Um, but it's, um, was it fake marketing? I don't think it was fake marketing. It's just the media didn't want to cover it anymore because it didn't fit their incentives.

Got it. Yeah, no, I haven't— I never saw that tweet. I also, being Indian, you know, didn't experience any hate from COVID Me neither.

Yeah, so we can't really speak too much, but we can only speak to the marketing of this and this tweet over here. So that is that. What else do you have?

You know, it's funny enough, you saw the Elon Musk, uh, Cannes stuff on how, you know, he was trying to woo back, uh, advertisers.

Yeah.

And when you think about what was happening with Cannes and him just getting people advertising back, I was talking to a really important journalist and when I— not important, I'm not saying they're unimportant, but a journalist that covers a lot of advertising stuff, right? And they're well known in the space. And they're talking about big corporations, how they're boycotting. And I'm not saying companies are right or wrong for boycotting, but some of the examples they gave was, oh, X has adult content, you know, and is this acceptable? Should companies have their brand there? And then I said, you also can find adult content on Instagram and you can find it on Google. Right? If you look at some of the most popular Google searches, they're for adult-related content.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and then they're just like, they didn't know how to answer that. And then they're talking about antisemitic content. And I'm like, yeah, antisemitic content sucks. You also find that on Facebook. You also find it on Google and other places too. You can just do a search on the web on Google and it'll showcase results from other places. But it was funny because A lot of brands stood up and says, we refuse to advertise on X. And I've talked to a lot of big brands that don't advertise on X and I've questioned some of them, would you ever pull out from Facebook and Google? And if I show them examples of some of the things that they say and why they don't advertise on X, and I'm not saying they should advertise on X or not, you know, the real truth comes out in which one of the reasons whether they like the content on Google or Facebook or, you know, and I get the founders of Google and Facebook don't really say much. Elon, you know, saying whatever he wants does cause problems for X as a business when it comes to revenue generation. At least that's my opinion. Google and Facebook or Google and Meta drive so much volume, companies can't just pull out and stop spending money on them. They're just too big.

But it's too good for them.

It's too good. It drives too much revenue. And it's funny, and when you actually confront some of these businesses and you tell 'em, you're like, well, X is a platform. It doesn't really drive that much volume. Meta and Google drive volume. Would you pull out? And then their tune really changes. And yeah, I haven't met one business that's a big publicly traded company That would, you know, in marketing, then someone would've told me that they would pull out. And the main reason being is it moves the needle. You can't actually, you know, cut off the juice that's driving your revenue and your growth or a portion of it.

The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is, Right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now, and it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school dot io slash hire again. It's marketing. School.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. Woke advertisers are colluding to stop Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and others. So this tweet came from the House Judiciary GOP. So this is official government account, has a silver checkmark. It says, new report, how the world's biggest brands seek to control online speech. New info reveals that woke advertisers and brands are colluding together to attack people like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, political candidates and news organizations. So we can read the whole— I mean, it's actually a very long document. I should have taken the PDF and dropped it into Claude to give a summary, but here's the executive summary. I'm just going to read this real quick. So it says the Committee of Judiciary has jurisdiction— it's word soup— over the protection of trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies. In exercising oversight of the adequacy and sufficiency of existing US antitrust laws, The committee has been investigating apparent collusion within the World Federation of Advertisers and specifically its Global Alliance for Responsible Media. I didn't even know what these two were things. So WFA and GARM. Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and industry associations participated in boycotts and other coordinated action to demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed disfavored by GARM and its members. This collusion can have the effect of eliminating a variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers. I'm just gonna list some numbers over here.

This was created—

WFA was created in 2019. GARM quickly amassed tremendous market power in the advertising industry. WFA members represent roughly 90% of global marketing spend or almost $1 trillion annually. Are you in WFA?

Nope.

Okay. GARM includes every major advertising agency holding company in its ranks and includes the world's largest media buying agency, GroupM on its steer team. So, GroupM is a big agency.

Yeah, it's owned by WPP.

Yup. GARM's steer team, which acts as a board of directors and is closely involved in GARM's day-to-day operations, includes 4 large corporations: Unilever, Mars, Diageo, and Procter Gamble that spend billions annually on advertising, okay? And the last bullet point I have over here, GARM reports to the WFA executive committee, which must endorse GARM's work and includes representatives from It's Anheuser-Busch, L'Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, as well as many more large corporations and household name brands. And Elon was the one that shared this today.

You know who the largest advertiser in the world is, right?

If you tell me, I will be like, yes, but I forgot.

You said the name earlier. Right now.

Procter Gamble? Yes, Procter Gamble. Yeah. So—

They spend more money than anyone else when it comes to marketing.

It's funny we talk about this. It's not really funny, but like, It's no surprise.

Yeah, and this is why I just stay out of all this stuff because from a business standpoint, keep your head down, do the best you can, make money, and try not to get in people's ways and try not to get political and affect stuff.

It's weird how— it's actually not weird. I mean, the larger you get, the more— so here's the thing, the larger you get, the more stakeholders you have, the more you're getting influenced by people, right? Just like the more people you have on your cap table, right? But for you, I think you're in a really good spot right now because you own the lion's share of the equity, right? And, um, you know, largely you don't have to worry about outside influence and that's, that's more power to you at the end of the day. Right. You're not going to be, you're not easily influenced as you are as a person. You're also, you don't have any board or shareholder. You don't have a board, right? Not like a formal board. Okay. So yeah, there you go.

May have one. I don't know.

You probably will have one eventually, the larger you get. So yeah.

But yeah, I think when it comes to X, Elon caused a lot of his own problems.

Yeah. I mean, look, But we talk about Joe Rogan here and political candidates too, right? Like they'll do what it takes with whatever power they have and it's fine. It's their incentive.

Yeah. And people should do whatever they want. I've learned in life, if you want to succeed, you're better off just staying out of the limelight and staying out of people's ways. When I'm saying staying out of the limelight, I'm not talking about trying to build a personal brand. I'm talking about saying stuff that's just going to get a lot of press and is gonna paint you in a really bad picture.

That stuff will bite you in the butt, which is why we tend not to talk about that stuff.

And it doesn't matter how rich you are.

Yep.

The government can make an example out of you. People can make an example out of you. They can come after you. You're better off just keeping your mouth shut with a lot of this stuff.

The stuff you do wanna say, go say it to your friends, right? Don't say it in public. Not smart. You might not get as many views as you want, but that's for the better, so. Cool.

All right. Well, I think that's it. Make sure you guys all go to marketingschool.io/agency to join the Agency Owners Association.

You got it. And leave a rating, review, and subscribe too, because we were— we haven't gotten one for a while. So give us one.

All right.

Goodbye, guys.