The Grey Hair and the Tortoise

Getting older (one pet at a time)

How are you? I’m much better, thank you. A bit of time off has topped me back up.

That said, when I was away (with a little more time to spare than usual) I noticed a few grey hairs creeping into my beard, which feels particularly unfair because I’m still definitely not even a grown-up yet,.

Nobody is going to mistake me for Father Christmas (too soon for Christmas?), but once you’ve spotted them you become strangely aware that this whole ageing thing has apparently been happening in the background without asking permission once.

At the same time, we have a new kitten tearing around the house at roughly the speed of sound, and during a meeting last month flew up my leg, giving everyone the audible benefit of what was going on.

He’s a gorgeous little tabby who has brought that wonderful kitten combination of complete joy and absolutely no respect for personal property, sleep, furniture or apparently gravity…

At the other end of the animal kingdom’s pace spectrum, I have two tortoises.

They spend most of their lives plodding around at a speed that suggests nothing particularly urgent has happened since the Jurassic period, and there’s a very good chance they’ll outlive me and eventually become my children’s problem.

I observe the contrast around me…

One animal behaving as though every second of its existence needs to be experienced immediately, two others apparently prepared to take several minutes deciding whether a dandelion is worth the effort, and me standing somewhere in the middle feeling like a child finding grey hairs.

Whilst I’m on pets, you can have the full lowdown, the dog has had a slightly rougher month.

She’s an old, white, fluffy thing and had to go in for dental surgery, which resulted in a load of teeth being removed. I knew that she was going to look fairly sorry for herself when I collected her, but seeing her covered in blood, groggy from the anaesthetic and looking completely bereft was surprisingly heartbreaking. 

I love her more than a lot of humans I have met, which says a lot for someone who can’t even communicate in my language.

Luckily she’s bounced back brilliantly and already seems a much happier dog for having had it done.

Moving on from pets, you must try out Alone, one of my absolute favourite TV shows, currenty showing the world champoinships.

If you haven’t seen it, they essentially drop people into some of the most beautiful and inhospitable places on Earth, give them a handful of survival tools and ask them to last for as long as they can while filming themselves.

There’s something deep down in me that finds it completely irresistible.

Part of it is the scenery, part of it is that I can put ten minutes on and not really care if I miss another ten, but there’s also something much more primitive about watching a human being build a shelter, find food and try to survive somewhere that absolutely does not care whether they succeed.

Eventually, after the hunger, cold and increasingly questionable decisions about eating things they found under rocks, most contestants seem to arrive at some enormous realisation about their lives.

Strip away the emails, meetings, mortgage, internet, shops and everything else we’ve built around ourselves and eventually somebody sits beside a lake and realises they really love their dad and that he wasnt that much of a shit after all.

It does another of my favourite things, it has a quote at the start of each show, I hold onto it and look for the relevance as I watch someone question if that risky smelling fish is worth the calories.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

I love this. Everything is moving, whether you notice it or not.

The river changes.

You change.

(Your beard changes colour)

((Your tortoises barely appear to change at all, just to make everyone else feel inadequate))

The truth still needs a storyteller

We watched Don’t Look Up again the other night, and I couldn’t quite believe it’s five years old.

It holds up too uncomfortably well.

The basic premise is brilliantly simple. Scientists discover that a comet is heading towards Earth and is going to destroy it, which you would imagine might prove quite useful information.

Instead, the science has to fight its way through politicians worried about polls, businesses wondering whether there is any money in the asteroid, television presenters trying to make impending extinction entertaining, and a public increasingly incapable of distinguishing between knowledge, opinion and whatever happens to be trending that morning.

It is absolutely hilarious, Jennifer Lawrence is brilliant, and also every few minutes you find yourself thinking, “this really isn’t quite as ludicrous as it should be”.

And perhaps that is why stories are so powerful.

You can publish a thousand pieces of information about climate change, politics, inequality or the environment, but sometimes a two-hour film about a fictional asteroid makes the point land somewhere completely different.

Facts matter enormously, obviously, but facts do not always travel particularly well on their own.

Stories give them somewhere to live, and a heart to connect to. Which is where this eventually brings me back to marketing.

As ever people are falling down different side of the argument on AI, its uses and capabilities, and usually the conversation is about whether it can write a blog article, design something, build a website or produce a video.

Of course it can, but it can’t have your experience.

AI has never sat with your client while they were worrying about whether their business would survive.

It wasn’t in the workshop where somebody suddenly said the thing that changed the whole project.

It didn’t make the mistake you made five years ago that means you now immediately spot the warning signs when somebody else is about to make it.

It hasn’t had a customer phone up delighted because something beyond their expectations happened (even though you knew it would).

For years, Google has been trying to work out who is the authority in the room and therefore deserves to rank first. It settled on using first-hand experience as part of E-E-A-T, the idea that useful content should demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. 

Unlike writing content, it’s not a magic SEO thing that you can simply pay someone to do, because you need to demonstrate how you’ve been there and done it.

For example, if two articles both tell me how to solve the same problem, but one of them can say, “we did this with a client, here was the situation, here is what we changed and here is what happened afterwards”, that holds context and proof behind the advice.

It has happened.

The stories AI can’t tell

This is why I think case studies are about the most valuable thing you should focus on in the final quarter of this year.

Historically, businesses have often treated them as something to produce occasionally when somebody remembers or they have a great client (a mate) who is happy to be harangued into saying the right stuff.

The result becomes something like:

“The client approached us requiring a new website. We worked closely with key stakeholders to deliver a modern website. The client was delighted.”

Nobody needs that story. Even AI can manufacture that story.

What it cannot manufacture is the detail:

• The disagreement in the first meeting.
• The problem nobody had spotted.
• The thing the customer originally thought they wanted.
• The change you recommended.
• The result six months later.
• The quote from the person whose working day became easier because of it.

Those are the parts worth collecting and they are also incredibly useful within your wider content.

If you write an article explaining how organisations can improve website accessibility, link to the case study where you actually improved it.

Suddenly your blog is not simply saying, “we think this works”.

It is saying, “we know this works, and here is the evidence from when we actually did it”.

I’ve written before about how to approach clients and customers for better testimonials and case studies, it might just help.

But I think we should go further and start building a proper story bank. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Get your team into the habit of recording the moments that would normally disappear:

• A client comment that made everyone laugh.
• A surprising result.
• A project that went wrong and what you learned.
• A question nobody could immediately answer.
• A measurable improvement.
• A photograph from the workshop.
• A customer saying what the problem actually felt like before you solved it.

Over a year, you suddenly have something enormously valuable.

Not just a database of marketing assets, but a record of experience.

And when you sit down to write a new article, instead of asking AI to manufacture an example, you can ask your team, “when have we actually seen this happen?”

It is social proof, but it is also memory. And circles me back around to Don’t Look Up.

We live in a world with no shortage of people prepared to tell us what they think.

Politicians will tell us.

Influencers will tell us.

Brands will tell us.

And now machines can tell us, millions of times faster.

The increasing difficulty is knowing which of those voices has any real depth to it.

If someone can show you what happened, who it helped and what changed, there is something powerful underneath it, like the current of a river.

The river keeps changing and so do we, which means every project, mistake, customer conversation and result becomes part of the experience we carry into the next one.

So this quarter, rather than asking what else you can get AI to write, start collecting the stories only you can tell.

They might be the most valuable content you have.