Why AI Can't Replace Marketing Strategy — with LinkedIn's Robin O'Connell

0:03 Robin O'Connell: If you want to show up well in content, you have to be polished and professional. You should look like Apple. Like, you should base your brand on some of these really big, successful brands or, like, some of your big competitors. If I've learned anything from, like, 10 years in the marketing world, it's that the more you stand out, the better. And especially like today, when AI has risen the standard, like, it's so easy to create polished content. The. The more you can create something that stands out that is unusual. If all your competitors are blue, be pink. Like, if all your competitors are logical, be, like, highly emotional. Like, try and go against the grain. You're way more likely to stand out. Don't follow the crowd. Everyone goes left. You need to go right.

0:42 Georgie Healy: Comments and DMs. Is this a great signal that you might be onto something? If you're a brand or a person, even in the early days, I would say yes.

0:51 Robin O'Connell: I mean, you'd probably think that as well, right? Like, if you're getting a lot of messages of people that want to work with you, I would say that that's a lot more valuable than hundreds of thousands of impressions.

1:02 Georgie Healy: I'm pretty sure I DM'd you, right, Robyn? So clearly you're going on that podcast.

1:06 Robin O'Connell: Exactly.

1:07 Georgie Healy: Great conversion, that one.

1:09 Robin O'Connell: Exactly, yeah.

1:15 Georgie Healy: Hello and welcome to another episode of In the Blink of AI. I'm Georgie Healy, and you guys, we have been so smashing the podcast charts this week. It's thanks to you. It's 100% thanks to you. Listening to this episode, ranking the show has got us to the top 10 of business charts in Australia, top 200 of all podcasts ever. We're currently at 188. That's across, like, entertainment and tech and business and pop culture and fashion. Crazy to see this show next to my heroes. So thank you. Thank you so much for your support. I will continue to make the show better and better. It's my favorite thing in the world. Thank you for being part of it. Today, LinkedIn has 1.3 billion members globally.

2:01 Georgie Healy: The smaller accounts, those with 2,000 to 10,000, are the fastest growing segment on the platform. And today, we have the most incredible guests to dissect that. We have Robin O'. Connell. He leads LinkedIn's creative studio team in Anz. He's been with the company for over 10 years. And we talk about replacing your job with AI. We talk about pumping out 10 AI posts at once. Should we be doing that? How to create a real voice on LinkedIn that cuts through, gets traction, what good looks like? What are the results that would tell you you're on the right track? Can I speak from personal experience on this? And this is not sponsored, this is genuine.

2:39 Georgie Healy: LinkedIn is my biggest platform. It has been a complete career changer for me and it just started from posting regularly while I was at Google and the traction I made on that platform gave me the confidence to leave the amazing brand that is Google and back myself as a personal brand. And I couldn't have done that without the LinkedIn platform. And that's genuine. But I made so many mistakes. There's so many things I wish I knew. I wish this episode existed before I started. So I really hope it makes a big difference for you guys for your business or personal brand. And I can't wait to hear what you think. Let's dive in.

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3:39 Georgie Healy: Robyn welcome to In the Blink of AI. Very pumped for this episode. Ever since we first spoke, and it's not your first rodeo. You've been on a podcast before, so I know that you're just a great storyteller. No pressure, no pressure. I want to know before we dive into the interview questions, if there's any AI hack that you use, anything you can share with our listeners.

4:02 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, great question and delighted to be here. Thanks for having me on. I think the AI hack for me that comes to mind, the one that's had the most impact, is kind of, it's a little bit boring, but it is, I think, really interesting when you think about applying it. And that is using an AI note taker to transcribe all of your meetings, which a lot of people do already to some extent. But if you can do it consistently, like if you can keep getting those transcripts, I think the systems that you can build based on that get really, really interesting. So if you're a marketer, for example, and you're launching a campaign and you want to test that campaign concept, if you can use the transcripts of all those customer calls to train an agent or an instance of your AI to give you feedback, you now have really good insights into how your campaign might land based on actual customer verbatim kind of feedback and thoughts.

5:01 Robin O'Connell: And same as if you're a business owner and you want to brief in Like a marketing agency. Use those transcripts to help write the brief, to talk about customer problems, to give some verbatim quotes. I think the applications are really, really cool when you have that kind of base and foundation of like really, really good customer conversations. So a little bit of a boring hack, but I think really cool how you can apply it if you do it consistently.

5:27 Georgie Healy: Robin, the boring hacks are the ones that we use again and again and again.

5:32 Robin O'Connell: Exactly.

5:32 Georgie Healy: The cool, like I cloned my voice or whatever it is. It's like, that's nice. Are you actually going to use that every day?

5:39 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

5:40 Georgie Healy: Tell the listeners again really briefly why consistency is key with these note takers as opposed to, oh, well, this meeting's important. I'll do a note taker for that. I don't know if this one will be or won't be.

5:52 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, well, if you only turn it on for like certain customers or certain business meetings, then you are only going to have certain pieces of information recorded and often you'll bring bias into that. So. So maybe you'll turn it on when a conversation is going to be good or maybe it's a customer that you get on well with. But that's not the only data that we would want. And so consistency becomes really important to get the full breadth of like, information, all your different customer types, all the different interactions that you have, and worth saying that the customer should know that they're being recorded and we should be removing personal, identifiable information. But consistency can lead to just better data and therefore better tools and workflows that we can build.

6:37 Georgie Healy: Great shout. I had a big rant about some AI note takers. Don't let the participant know that they're on the call.

6:44 Robin O'Connell: Yes.

6:44 Georgie Healy: That makes me feel quite uncomfortable. Yeah, we like to know if there's AI there.

6:49 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

6:50 Georgie Healy: Okay. What is one thing you specifically think marketers should be using AI for? That would unlock more efficiency, growth, anything.

6:59 Robin O'Connell: That's a. I think it's a really good question. And I don't know if there's one thing. There are so many different ways we can be applying AI. But maybe my controversial take here might be I think you should be using it to some extent to try and replace your job. Right. And I know that that can be a little bit uncomfortable, but there's a couple of reasons for this. And the first is I think like when the business world looks at marketing, I think often you look at it from the outside and it looks pretty straightforward and you think, you know, I would be able to do that or marketers will know people have opinions about marketing and how advertising should be done.

7:39 Robin O'Connell: And I think that's led to a consensus that marketing might be one of the first ones that is like heavily replaced by AI when we think about different professions. And I don't think that that's true at all. And so this is a reason why I think marketers need to be learning the technology, applying it wherever possible, and having this mindset of can I replace elements of my work with AI and AI tools? Because what you will find if you do that is that it's not possible, right? And you will see pretty quickly that AI won't be able to replace end to end workflows. And so I think it's about using it, targeting different aspects of your job, seeing where it can be used and then really importantly, where it can't be used and where it's still not applicable. And I think that is where we can add so much value in those areas.

8:32 Georgie Healy: Do you think people are scared to use AI to replace their job because they genuinely think that I can replace their job? Is that why people are scared to try?

8:43 Robin O'Connell: I think to some extent, yes. Especially for those maybe earlier in their career. I also think that there's a really big element here of like information overload. And I think that there are so many advances that happen every single week. I think there's so many new tools for us to try. I think it can feel really, really scary from the outset kind of thinking like, how am I supposed to get my head around all of this? And I think those two things in combination, like, well, actually I'm a bit worried it might replace my job. Plus I don't even know where to start. I think those two things together lead to marketers and a lot of different professionals just not using it that much in their day to day.

9:25 Robin O'Connell: But I think what I've seen with marketers that are really successful in this are they do a few different things. So the first is think about like an end to end workflow, right? Not necessarily sitting down at your desk and thinking about everything you do every day, but more like specific tasks like you need to get a campaign live or you need to create some new resource for the field that you're working with, or you're creating a piece of content and then thinking about how can you apply AI and just the newest technology to that in order for you to get ahead. And I think the, the critical thing here is to create a Venn diagram, right? And you have one circle of like what's possible which is really exciting and we could kind of talk about all day, but then the really, really important circle is what's actually possible today.

10:14 Robin O'Connell: So it's like possibility plus reality and the overlap of those two circles, the center point is where you want to focus and where you want to build.

10:24 Georgie Healy: I have never heard that Venn diagram example. I love it. What do you hear people say, like, oh, I can't wait for the future, where it's this.

10:32 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

10:33 Georgie Healy: That you kind of. Either we need to dispel or maybe it's not there yet. Is there anything where you're like, cool guys, but we've got a lot in the present that we need to focus on as well.

10:43 Robin O'Connell: There's so many different things because I think, like, at the end of the day, like, AI became a part of our lives. Like, we opened up ChatGPT for the first time and we started using it. And it is nothing short of magic, Right? It is incredible. And once you use it more and more, you begin to realize how powerful it is. And when you start thinking about how you can then apply AI to what you're building or working on, the possibilities become endless pretty quickly. And so you might say, well, we should be able to get AI to analyze our customer base and our CRM. You know, decide what the ideal perfect customer is, create advertising for that profile, and then shoot it out to different platforms and put it live.

11:24 Robin O'Connell: And that sounds very realistic because of the world of AI and what's possible today. Once you get into it and once you start to build, you will see the limitations pretty quickly. I mean, like, just the fact that a lot of these systems don't talk to each other is often the biggest one, right?

11:42 Georgie Healy: Yes. That's such a great point. I mean, with Fable coming out, it's like, oh, we've reached AGI. So, of course, the first thing I did is who's going to win the World Cup? And tell me every single match exactly the scores posted on LinkedIn. I'm like, guys, we got it here. We got it. Nailed it. And everyone's like, wait, no, penalty shootout. Like, like, like there's a bit of nuance there that it kind of missed. Even Fable.

12:06 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, exactly.

12:08 Georgie Healy: Speaking of the things that in that end to end workflow for a marketer, what can't AI do? Well, that is perfect for a human being.

12:18 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, I think that's a really good question, and it's one that, like, every marketer should be asking themselves, because it's really where we should be focusing. And it's just kind of stepping out of that for a second and thinking about like marketing as a whole. And if you think about how you market, like how you go to market with your product, with your solution, with what you're selling, the vast majority of people will go straight to okay, what are the ads, what do the ads look like, what does the content look like? But the thing about that is that advertising is a very small part of marketing, right? It's just promotion, like one of the four P's.

12:55 Robin O'Connell: And so if you actually think about where marketing adds value and where marketing can be strategic, it's understanding your customer and your market really, really well. It's thinking about how you segment your market, who you're targeting, what your position is. So why would people pick your brand ahead of your competitors or ahead of some other alternative options? And then it's thinking about, okay, well, what price is the solution, how do we build the product, where do we sell it and then how do we promote it? And so along that journey, like advertising is less than 10%, I would say 90% of marketing is before the ad is created. And I think that when I think of the AI tools we have available to us today and if the question is like what can't Fable do?

13:45 Robin O'Connell: Or like what can't the best AI do? I don't think it can create marketing strategy. And I've been deep in the tools and deep in using these things and I would say that it is unbelievable at the tactics, like at automating the shit out of your tactics essentially, right? It can scale things, it can create so much content, can ingest and understand so much information. I don't think that it has the ability to write an end to end marketing strategy. It can help you with elements and it can help you with tactics, but it can't do it all. I still think now and for a long time into the future you will need a marketer and you will need someone with a really solid understanding of strategy to to do that for you.

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15:10 Georgie Healy: It reminds me of so many things. I don't know what a perfect marketing strategy is, but I know a beautiful campaign when I see one. I Know when something like really hits and I have none of the four P's under pinning my understanding of it, but I love it. We have a lot of business owners, a lot of startups and founders and operators that listen, what should they focus on? If there's 4Ps and there's ads and blah, blah, in the early days of seeing if something's going to pop off, what's the thing they should spend their human time on? If you share.

15:48 Robin O'Connell: If I could give like one, one piece of advice there, I think the role of marketing should be being the voice of the customer and really truly understanding the customer. And I would give that advice to founders, to people growing brands, to people thinking about just trying to get in front of more people. It all starts with step one of the strategy. And step one is a really comprehensive understanding of your customer, your audience, who you're targeting, what's important to them. It's having like really strong research backing that up. And it's a bit of a house of cards here. If you don't have that at the bottom, everything else can tumble.

16:26 Robin O'Connell: My favorite kind of framing here is when it comes to strategy in general, in the assumption lies the weakness. Right. And most strategies fail because something has been assumed. And so we should never really be assuming that we fully understand our customer. We have to talk to them, we have to understand them, we have to understand that market.

16:46 Georgie Healy: You don't have to comment on this, but I found something very interesting as I'm growing my own brand and.

16:51 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

16:52 Georgie Healy: And profile. And I have been researching a little bit about how to do so and I. The number of creators I have heard from that have said they've grown a huge audience of people they don't want.

17:07 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

17:08 Georgie Healy: Like they accidentally built this brand and it's like, I don't want my own customers.

17:14 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

17:14 Georgie Healy: Have you ever heard of that happening? Or is that a recent phenomenon with AI and growth and things like that?

17:20 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, look, it's almost a good problem to have, right? Because I mean, you still have the following, you have the brand and like you have the equity and I guess you need to figure out what to do with that next. But like, it totally makes sense. Like you can grow in the wrong direction and you become, you can kind of become famous for something that you don't want to be famous for or you can end up attracting an audience, I guess, that ultimately won't convert or you're not really looking to. Looking to do business with. And so I think it's a nice problem to have in most cases. But I think it can happen again if you kind of grow without too many, not constraints, but too many kind of problems like focus areas for what you're really trying to do.

18:06 Georgie Healy: Yeah, because with AI, you know, there's the hooks and this is content creation specifically. I'm sure it's a very niche part of the big picture. But, yeah, you can grow really quick. And so I was kind of a little bit down on myself. I was like, I could have been growing faster with AI, but ultimately I think what I'm doing is scalable, at least at the moment of, well, I like my audience, I know my audience, and then maybe grow from there.

18:33 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, 100%. And we've had this conversation before around, like, you know, you see these guides that are like, hey, you can 10x your content with AI and you can, you can like massively scale what you're doing to reach a bigger audience. Like, I think, like, if you see a post that says, hey, I've replaced my marketing team and I'm grown to like a million dollars revenue, comment delusional in the comments and I'll send you a PDF of how I did it, you can ignore those posts for the most part, because I really believe that, like, if you have the opportunity to create content and to create something to get in front of your audience and grow, is it better to create like 10 pieces of average content with AI, or is it better to focus in on a more repeatable, powerful formula?

19:18 Robin O'Connell: I would always urge you to do the second there. And I've seen brands do this and I've worked with brands where they've sat down and said, you know, we can use AI and we can create 10 or 20 pieces of content for our, our leadership and our business and get them to post about it and talk about it. That seems like a good idea. But the alternate there is. Rather than creating generic content at scale for all those different people and getting them to post it, what about if we looked at one or two that we know will be great at creating this content that have a story to tell that are motivated to do it. And what if we actually invest in creating that content with them?

19:58 Robin O'Connell: So I think like day in the life, kind of like interview style with an executive who. Or with a leader or with anyone at your company that has a really good story to tell. And when we go down that road and when we focus on something that's far more likely to be of high quality and to engage an audience that works really, really well, and then you can scale it and Then you can apply the 10x. You know, you can use AI to create four different versions of the content for your paid media campaign to test it, and you can formalize that process and apply it to different people and different stakeholders. But it comes back to focusing on quality rather than quantity. Like quality first, quantity second, I think is a really good way of thinking about content and content marketing.

20:44 Georgie Healy: Reps over research. Are you better putting in the reps when you're freaked out and overwhelmed just to see how people react or research, get that one piece of quality content, then put the reps in.

21:00 Robin O'Connell: It's a tough question to answer and I'll tell you why. It's because if you don't create the content and if you don't have a regular presence in market, how can you expect people to remember you? Right? You lap the person on the couch every time. And so it's really, really important that you are getting your content in front of people on a regular basis. But if that means that you're just posting generic content, maybe you're using AI to create content that no one really wants to see. Like, I would say that that doesn't really help you. You need to find the balance. And this goes for, you know, an individual trying to grow a brand and it goes for a company trying to grow a brand is we have to have regular presence in market.

21:46 Robin O'Connell: But I really think that focusing on the high quality pieces of content that are more likely to get engagement are ultimately what's going to make you successful. So if it was a binary choice, one or the other, I'd say focus on the quality content and then figure out the quantity afterwards. In an ideal world, you're trying to do both.

22:03 Georgie Healy: I'll make it about me for a second. I do get asked about my LinkedIn following, which, you know, hard one. But also like, I've made so many friends on the platform and I, I will just tell people, oh, it's just showing up. Sometimes I rage bait. Sometimes it's thought leadership, sometimes it's this, just do that. Like just do whatever and then I'll notice. They'll just post whatever and not get the traction. And I'll be like, yeah, not like that. And it's very hard, it's very hard to kind of be. If you were to tell a brand that is like, I am starting out on LinkedIn, for example, as a platform, do I rage bait to get the eyeballs? I know it depends on the brand, but is there any way they can figure out what would work for them?

22:55 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, I get that question quite a bit as well. What do you do when you're starting out on LinkedIn? And I would say that there's no one way to do it. There's no one way to get your go to market. Right. There's so many different ways that you can show up. A lot of it comes back to the strategy that we were talking about. Who are you trying to reach? What kind of a brand are you? Right, Favorite example of mine, Monzo bank in the uk, Neo bank. Kind of a challenger for some of the more traditional banks.

23:27 Georgie Healy: Guys, I was in fintech for a year, so I'm an expert. They are the cards that are portrait mode instead of landscape mode.

23:35 Robin O'Connell: There you go.

23:35 Georgie Healy: If you've even got a card, right?

23:37 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's one of the ways that they stand out. But they are against the grain, right? They're non traditional, they're a new way of doing things. Their brand voice reflects that. Go to their LinkedIn page and check out their posts. They are unhinged at times. Like they're really, really funny. Like they are very unique to the platform. This is a bank and I mean, yeah, it's a fintech company, it's a bank. Like it's in that area and it stands out so much against its competitors because that's what it's trying to do. It's trying to be seen as different and is trying to stand out and its brand voice is perfectly aligned to that.

24:13 Robin O'Connell: And so if you are a brand starting out right now and you're thinking like, how do I go from zero on a, on a platform or how do I get that go to market, right? Start with the strategy. Make sure that you're aligning your voice and what you do into your strategy. You have to make sure you get in front of the right people, right message, right way of promoting yourself. And just a couple of like tactical tips. Number one, when I started in the content marketing world, I had this idea that like, if you want to, you know, show up well in content, you have to be polished and professional. You should look like Apple. Like you should base your brand on some of these really big successful brands or like some of your big competitors.

24:55 Robin O'Connell: If I've learned anything from like 10 years in the marketing world and the kind of go to market world, it's that the more you stand out, the better. And especially like today when AI has risen the standard, like it's so easy to create polished content, the more you can create something that stands out that is unusual, you know if all your competitors are blue, be pink. Like, if all your competitors are logical, be like highly emotional. Like, try and go against the grain. You're way more likely to stand out. And if you can achieve that, you will see outsized results like that would be. My main tip is don't follow the crowd. Everyone goes left, you need to go right.

25:34 Georgie Healy: World cup is right now. I read that the reason they all have pink shoes right now is they probably all use the same algorithm that said, oh, well, pink stands out against green color theory. But now they all have pink shoes. Robin. Yeah, should have picked orange, right? Like any other color would have stuck out.

25:53 Robin O'Connell: That's such a big problem for the makers of those shoes now because are they Nike Adidasa or something else?

25:58 Georgie Healy: They're all pink.

25:58 Robin O'Connell: We have no idea. They're just pink shoes.

26:00 Georgie Healy: Right.

26:00 Robin O'Connell: And so that's the problem with just blending in.

26:03 Georgie Healy: Is there a perfect split though? If you could, you know, you're a brand or you're a personal, you don't want to be all rage, bait or clicks because that, that gets boring. Okay, that's another controversial take. She's full of controversial takes. You want a bit of thought leadership? If it's all thought leadership, it's like, okay, another lecture. Is there a good split?

26:27 Robin O'Connell: I think like there is the right split between like the posts and the content that drive outcomes, like the logical stuff, like the case study. And like this is the example of how I worked with this brand and that stuff is really important. Right? Because you know, if Monzo bank only ever talk about the funny stuff, like, do they actually have something that can help me in my day to day that they need to get like the logical stuff in there as well. And it's the same for us. We need to have posts that are a bit more in the thought leadership side that showcase what we do that can show people and brands what we're like to work with so that they can make that connection.

27:09 Robin O'Connell: Now that might not get you a huge amount of impressions and it might not go viral, but a better way to measure that is what's the outreach? Are you getting people saying, hey, I assume what you're doing on LinkedIn, I'd like to work together. Are you getting DMs, are you getting comments? I think that's a really good way of measuring that content more so than the mass reach element. But it's important that like, as you said, if we only ever focus on that people that aren't like in market and thinking about working with us or Working with our brand, they're not likely to remember that because we haven't done enough to capture their attention.

27:43 Robin O'Connell: So we still need the content that captures attention and kind of builds our brand. And that might be, you know, rage bait stuff, but it can look like a lot of different things. I would see it more as, like, the mass reach way of getting out to as many people as possible, building our brand, getting remembered. And I think a great content strategy does those two things. We work on getting attention and getting remembered. We also work on, like, logically getting people essentially, like to be leads. Right. To actually want to work with us and to reach out.

28:17 Georgie Healy: Comments and DMs. Is this a great signal that you might be onto something if you're a brand or a person? Even in the early days, I would say yes.

28:26 Robin O'Connell: I mean, you'd probably think that as well, right? Like, if you're getting a lot of messages of people that want to work with you, I would say that that's a lot more valuable than hundreds of thousands of impressions.

28:37 Georgie Healy: I'm pretty sure I DMed you, right, Robyn. So clearly you're going on that podcast.

28:42 Robin O'Connell: Exactly.

28:42 Georgie Healy: Great conversion, that one.

28:44 Robin O'Connell: Exactly.

28:45 Georgie Healy: Yeah.

28:45 Speaker C: Yeah.

28:46 Georgie Healy: It is a great point, though. I have friends that have much bigger followings and then they lament that I get more DMs. And so I'm like, I would love to have your following. And they're like, love to have your loyalty in your.

28:58 Robin O'Connell: There you go.

28:59 Georgie Healy: So try and do both, guys.

29:00 Robin O'Connell: Exactly. That's the dream, to do both.

29:03 Georgie Healy: I loved hearing about your dad using ChatGPT. Can you please tell listeners a little bit about him and what he's using ChatGPT for?

29:13 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, for sure. So my dad lives in Dublin. He's a serial entrepreneur, I guess you could say, has owned and operated a lot of different companies, built a lot of different brands over his lifetime. During COVID he had a retail technology business. Tough time to be in retail, so lockdowns, of course, it became quite difficult and he lost that business. And so past few years, he's been rebuilding and kind of thinking about what he's doing next. He's combined, like, a love of his, which is landscaping and gardening, with his amazing business brain. And so he's working in that space at the moment.

29:50 Georgie Healy: And what does he use ChatGPT for? Because clearly he's got the business acumen. Like, is it just doing everything he did before a little bit quicker?

29:59 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, great question. This is where my bias comes into it a little bit. Right. So my dad texts me and Says, hey, I'm using AI a little bit in the business and like, I'd love to chat a little bit about, like, where else I could use it. And so I thought I would be jumping on the call, like, looking at, like, how to use ChatGPT and why he should be asking us. He has been going to people's back gardens for a project, taking pictures of the space. He's been going home and working with ChatGPT and he's been kind of uploading his vision and he's like, I want to use this product, this material. And he's working with the image generation area of ChatGPT to essentially create images of the finished product of what it would look like post project.

30:42 Robin O'Connell: And he's going back with an iPad and he's showing people what this will look like. And I was blown away. It is such a brilliant use of AI that I don't think a lot of people are doing in that space. And so I was blown away by what he showed me.

30:58 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Imagine trying to describe the landscape and which plants and why. Like, it would be lost on me. I'd be like, that sounds expensive. I don't understand.

31:10 Robin O'Connell: Exactly. And visualizing it is just. It's so helpful. And so, like, there was two big lessons that I took away from this. The first was don't underestimate Dennis. Is Dennis been my dad.

31:20 Georgie Healy: And then we love Dennis.

31:23 Robin O'Connell: The second one being like, AI and that technology in the hands of the right people, like the people with the eye and the people with the business acumen, like, that's where it gets really, really powerful.

31:33 Georgie Healy: Unfair question. Do you think boomers like your dad are going to be able to leverage these tools better with their knowledge that they already have and years of experience or Gen Zs who are maybe more technologically literate?

31:48 Robin O'Connell: Well, that is such an interesting question, because Gen Z, I think if you look at the data, are using AI more and are more kind of a native. But my experience through my dad and through some of the other people that I've spoken to is like, there's no age limit to this stuff. Like, it is designed to be picked up and used. And a really big learning for me, the more that I've used AI and the more that I've kind of gotten into this world is it's the people with the expertise that are winning. Right. The future very much belongs to the experts and not the engineers, if that makes sense.

32:30 Georgie Healy: So who should be using AI that might currently think it's not for them and get the best Rewards out of it.

32:39 Robin O'Connell: I would say, like anyone listening to this, you are an expert in something. And I think that's really important, that it is the experts that are building the tools. And so for me, this kind of started when I started deep diving into the world of AI and building agents, and I had a look at how they were being built, and it's incredible, like, what these tools can do. Like, they can look at your website and your CRM and immediately understand you and your brand, and they can look at trends affecting your audience and create content based on that, and they can push that content out. It's incredible. But if you go below the surface and if you look at how they're built and if you look at some of the output, often they're built in a way that the marketing best practices or the real core knowledge that you need is completely absent from the tools because there hasn't been an expert involved in the process.

33:39 Robin O'Connell: It's been built by a technical wizard, but someone who doesn't have that level of marketing expertise. And it kind of forced me to ask myself, what is the difference between someone with 10 years of marketing experience or 20 years of marketing experience and someone who doesn't have experience in that area? And yeah, it's obviously the 10 years, right, the 20 years of knowledge. But the argument would be like, that's just data. Like, couldn't you just upload that into the tool and it would understand marketing? And I think where it led me was really to the fact that for an expert and for a marketer, all that experience, yes, it's having the information, but it's also knowing when to ignore it.

34:23 Robin O'Connell: You know what I mean? Like, it is being able to apply it in very ambiguous situations. Marketing is not black and white. The way we apply it, the way we build brands is not black and white. And these tools work best in black and white areas. And so I think the perfect formula right now is the technical plus the subject matter. Experts building one of these tools or building one of those workflows, I think that is where you can see some real magic.

34:49 Georgie Healy: 100%. I can always tell when someone wants a podcast, but is not a fan of podcasts because the questions they ask. I'm like, mate, have you ever listened to a podcast?

35:03 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, exactly.

35:03 Georgie Healy: It sounds so AI generated. Because, yes, I can get all the research about you, Robyn. I can find out the latest headlines on where you work. I can get so much incredible context and ask relevant things to the audience that I already have demographics on. And I cannot listen to that episode because it is just not the way people like to listen to the show.

35:28 Speaker C: Yeah.

35:28 Georgie Healy: I'm not saying I'm an expert, but you can't just let the tool dictate. What would you call it? Like, taste. I hate this word taste. Being overused. I can't think of another word for it, though.

35:43 Robin O'Connell: No, it's like acumen. It is like expertise. I am with you on the word taste. I don't think it's the right way to describe this.

35:51 Georgie Healy: As a marketer, you must be like, you've ruined the word for everything.

35:55 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's gone now. It's like a fad rather than an actual thing.

36:00 Georgie Healy: But.

36:00 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, but you're right. There's a better word for it, but it is that acumen. It is that knowledge. And again, it comes back to one of the earlier points we were talking about. Using the tools now and understanding what you can and can use them for is really important because you will learn quickly that today that acumen, that knowledge, that expertise that you have is still so essential. And, you know, the debate's open as to whether it will be in the next few years or so, but my bet is that that's not going anywhere anytime soon.

36:31 Georgie Healy: The more time you've had in roles and seen different market cycles, and this has come and gone again, like, it's like. What's that expression? Yeah, history repeats itself. There's nothing new under the sun. People have been equivocating AI to when electricity, like, came on the scene, you know, it was really dangerous. So, like, it could do a lot of damage. There's all this stuff, but it can also do a lot of incredible things.

36:59 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, 100%.

37:01 Georgie Healy: I could talk about electricity for a while. Okay, so is it harder to teach a marketer how to use AI, or is it harder to teach an engineer marketing? If you had to pick, you have to pick.

37:13 Robin O'Connell: I think that AI has been designed to be easy to use, and no one designed marketing to be easy to understand. I think that's really important. I do think it's quite easy to pick up the tools and use them. And it's getting easier all the time. As I said, marketing isn't black and white. Today there are debates that are raging on as to whether brand purpose is important. Like, should a brand have a deeper meaning or not? And does that affect how a brand grows? Is it important to segment your market or just mass target? How important is it to be differentiated as a product versus just being distinctive and look different? These are ongoing Debates in the marketing world where some of the best marketing minds in the business don't know the answer.

38:00 Robin O'Connell: Or two, marketing minds might have very different kind of views on what the answer is. And so I would say that because of that ambiguity, it is difficult to learn and it is difficult to teach. It's also hundreds of years of, of kind of, of knowledge has gone in there as opposed to with the AI tools and using AI, I do think that is easier to start using. So I don't know if it's 100 black or white, but if I had to pick, I think I would prefer to teach a marketer how to use AI.

38:32 Georgie Healy: Less trend affected to engineering tools, like, is a little bit more black and white perhaps. Like either the code fails or it doesn't.

38:42 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

38:42 Georgie Healy: Whereas marketing, it's like, well, we just saw too much of that. It's just not going to hit. Right. But if you didn't know what you were doing in that space.

38:50 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, exactly.

38:51 Georgie Healy: Buried the lead. You work at LinkedIn, you have for quite some time. What's the biggest misconception you get about working there? I keep asking you to give me back my top voice. You keep saying, no, I will not do that.

39:04 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

39:05 Georgie Healy: Anything else?

39:06 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, I think it's. I mean, a lot of people think that it is. At least my relatives think that it's all about selling premium profiles.

39:17 Georgie Healy: And you're saying it's not. It's not.

39:19 Robin O'Connell: It's not the only part. And so the part of LinkedIn that I work in is LinkedIn for marketing, kind of LinkedIn advertising. And so I help advertisers with content marketing strategy, which I absolutely love. But LinkedIn, because it is grown now to be really a platform rather than just a network, rather than just kind of like a feed or one thing, it's really, really diverse. And so there are some really, really cool things happening at LinkedIn. You know, I'm working for LinkedIn for marketing in Australia. You know, I could be talking next week to someone who's working in New York for a team that helps governments understand, like workforce data and helps like governments understand skill related to how the workforce changes.

40:04 Robin O'Connell: Or we could be working in a different part of the world on talent acquisition and helping recruiters find the best talent. It's really, really diverse. There's so many cool ways you can partner with LinkedIn to use the entire ecosystem. And I think that's probably a bit of a misconception as people sometimes view it as a jobs platform or a newsfeed, but it really has grown to be way beyond that.

40:27 Georgie Healy: I'll speak for myself. You know, I've made friends through the platform, which is possibly the most embarrassing thing to say on air, like all my LinkedIn friends. But it genuinely has become a place where, well, we've got so much in common. I really love the way you think. This is an interesting person who's kind of brave sharing, you know, like, there is an ability to meet people that become friends. But I think many of. I'll speak for myself. Myself, I'm on the platform all the time. I don't really speak to people that work at LinkedIn. And do you guys have the fanatical, like, are you guys updating your profiles a lot or are you too in it that you're like, that's. That seems weird. I don't know.

41:09 Robin O'Connell: I think the vast majority of people at LinkedIn are using the platform every day and are kind of living and breathing it.

41:16 Georgie Healy: Yeah.

41:16 Robin O'Connell: You do sometimes, like, it's like in kind of any job, you do get a bit like, head down, bum up, like really, like engrossed in the work. It is very nice to come up for air every now and again and to talk to someone who's using the platform, who has used it to build a network and build a profession and also make friends. And so it's really nice to have.

41:36 Georgie Healy: Do you have any friends outside of LinkedIn?

41:38 Robin O'Connell: I'm like, are you talking about me? Is that the.

41:40 Georgie Healy: Yes. You're my only friend now. Okay. That's really cool to know genuinely, because I feel like there are a lot of us in the startup space that rely on the platform to survive as a business. Yeah. That it is just unlike any other platform.

42:03 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

42:03 Georgie Healy: But it's quite cool. I think it did, for me, start as a job search.

42:08 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

42:09 Georgie Healy: And it's just evolved so much from there.

42:11 Robin O'Connell: Yeah. It's kind of like it's how a lot of people get started. But you're right, like, it has evolved so much, especially for startups and small business. Like, that's where I love to kind of like, work and to hear from people in those areas. Because, you know, getting the strategy right for LinkedIn, advertising or content, or just how you're using the platform can have unbelievable effects and I love hearing those stories.

42:35 Georgie Healy: I think my listeners would be very mad at me in the comments if I didn't ask you about what we call AI slop. Like, they write their whole post with AI and it's so many telltale signs. It's not even just the EM dashes anymore. Robin. It's like other signs that are, if not this, it's that and the way emojis are used. There's just so many telltale AI signs. So that when people post on LinkedIn, even if the content is good, it makes us cranky. Should we be posting, should we be using AI to create our posts or not?

43:11 Robin O'Connell: I think it's a really interesting question and I think, like, it comes back to, to part of the conversation we've had today is like, about putting your best foot forward when you're creating content, no matter, like, what the platform is. And for me, a big part of that is being authentic and being yourself in the content. And so I would always advise people to when they set out to create content for LinkedIn for any other platform, a great way to think about it is like, how am I providing value with this content? Like, what will make this valuable to someone who comes across it either because it's entertaining, because it's informative, because it helps them in their day to day.

43:52 Robin O'Connell: I think that's a really powerful framing and I think that that typically, in my experience, comes from people's like, lived experience and what they've seen in their career and throughout their kind of professional journey. And so I would argue that the best content comes from you using AI to polish as a thought partner, to give feedback. I would never, you know, argue against that. I think that's a really smart thing to do and a really great way to use the technology. But I would say that when it comes to content, unless there's a piece of yourself in that content, I think it's going to be really difficult for it to do well, to grow your brand and really just to engage people.

44:37 Georgie Healy: Is this something that I genuinely think that comes from me and do I think I'm adding value by posting it? Tick, tick, we love.

44:47 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

44:47 Georgie Healy: Robyn, should someone copy paste my entire LinkedIn post, put it through AI to create a sentence and then make that sentence the comment underneath?

44:59 Robin O'Connell: I would say, no, no, I don't

45:01 Georgie Healy: think we would not like that, people. Thank you.

45:04 Robin O'Connell: I feel like that was a personal dig at someone.

45:08 Georgie Healy: Some people, yeah. Don't do it.

45:11 Robin O'Connell: Well, I think, I mean, comments are really interesting. I think there, you'll see, like on the platform, they get more and more visibility and you'll see like an impression counter next to the comments that we're seeing.

45:21 Georgie Healy: This blew up my group chat. Yeah.

45:23 Robin O'Connell: Because I think there's been a realization that comments are so valuable, like discussion is really valuable on the platform and so when it comes to commenting, I would say bumping a post into AI and getting it to generate a content is not a good strategy. And actually joining the discussion is a really good strategy. It's a great way to get yourself more visibility, but also just to hear from other people to help the author of the posts. I think that is a really important point.

45:54 Georgie Healy: It's win, win.

45:55 Robin O'Connell: Yeah.

45:56 Georgie Healy: Commenting on other people's posts. If you're a little bit shy to write your own stuff, but you love what other people write, there is upside to commenting.

46:03 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, for sure.

46:05 Georgie Healy: Have you ever deleted a LinkedIn post because it didn't get enough likes?

46:09 Robin O'Connell: I haven't, actually. I've let it sit there in my shame. I've just allowed it to slowly die out. And I've thought, wow, I work in content at LinkedIn and I can't even create a good post.

46:21 Georgie Healy: That's so relatable. Thank you. I've been guilty of deleting before.

46:26 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, it's tempting. I would say that, like, it's just, it's hard to predict sometimes. Sometimes things will resonate, sometimes they won't. It can be, it can be difficult to know what will work. But I would also say that, you know, I have had a post and I've heard experience from other people who have created content, and it didn't have a great initial reaction, but the shelf life turned out to be really, really good.

46:51 Georgie Healy: This is another thing I'm noticing.

46:52 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, yeah.

46:53 Georgie Healy: Like Lazarus from the dead. Some of my posts are like, oh, did better than I thought.

46:59 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, exactly. And so my advice would be don't delete it and kind of leave it out there and don't worry about it too much. Like, a post without many likes is really not the worst thing in the

47:09 Georgie Healy: world in this time. Do you think it's best practice to have different social media personalities? Like, as a marketing lead, not even at LinkedIn necessarily. Would you say you can be more entertaining on this channel, more professional on this channel? Or is that just to confuse people?

47:31 Robin O'Connell: I guess, like, again, I, I, it does come back to the strategy a little bit. Like, who are you trying to be? Who are you trying to, to reach? What are you trying to drive? And is what you're doing achieving those things? Like, it all comes back to answering that question? I would say that, like, on LinkedIn, don't fall into the trap of, like, trying to send too professional and thinking, oh, everyone sounds professional on LinkedIn. I, to make sure that I'm really, really professional, I always encourage people to Be themselves on the platform. Like, people want to connect with people, not like a really polished professional version of you that doesn't speak like that or that doesn't show up like that in the workplace. Be the person that you are at work and you're more likely to create good content, to create connections with people and ultimately just to see better professional outcomes.

48:22 Georgie Healy: Don't be too stiff and sterile. You're not going to resonate. Yeah, spicy questions. Are you ready?

48:28 Robin O'Connell: I don't know.

48:33 Georgie Healy: They're not that bad, I swear. If Ireland could win at the rugby or the Football World cup, if that was a world that existed, which one would it be?

48:43 Robin O'Connell: I'll probably get some hate from this because the World cup is currently on the Football World cup, but it's Rugby World cup for me. I was born and raised watching Irish rugby, so for me it would be the Rugby World Cup. But please don't leave any mean comments.

48:58 Georgie Healy: Yeah, you've immediately cancelled. We're a big rugby nation, as you know. We're not very good at football here. The women are.

49:06 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, very true.

49:08 Georgie Healy: I'm gonna get myself cancelled now. Is the women's football team in Ireland quite strong as well? I feel like it is.

49:15 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, it is.

49:16 Georgie Healy: Yeah.

49:16 Robin O'Connell: I went to the. I think it was a World cup opener between Australia and Ireland and Sydney. It was a great game.

49:22 Georgie Healy: Yeah. I feel like I had a lot of friends that were there. Strong next year. Yes, we're in. We have a lot of founders and business owners. Listen, look, you have touched upon this, but if there's one thing they should do this week, tomorrow on the platforms to help grow their business, what is it?

49:39 Robin O'Connell: I am a big believer in this idea of, like, building in public. Like, this idea that when you're building a business, one of the best things that you can do is talk about that on a platform like LinkedIn or anywhere. I've seen the results from brands that do this, that use their founders, that use the people that are growing the business and use their voices, and it resonates so much with an audience. And I think that that kind of content, like talking about what you're building, talking about how it can help companies, talking about the challenges that you have, but also now the structures or processes that you've created, put in place, whatever it might be, like those professional learnings that come from your lived experience every single day, it performs so well.

50:24 Robin O'Connell: Like, it really, really helps you connect with an audience. And if you're wondering, like, what it looks like, it's often it's like Face to camera stuff where you're talking about, like, what's happening day to day at your company. I think if you can get into the habit of, like, creating that kind of content, you'll figure out really quickly what works and what doesn't work. You'll set a great example for current employees and future employees. I think it's a really good way of building a brand is kind of starting at the top and starting with just this concept of building in public.

50:55 Georgie Healy: So do we wait until we've gone the VC route and raised capital before we show up and prove that we've made it, or do we do it before we've even got any validation?

51:06 Robin O'Connell: I would say that, like, if you don't even have any validation, if you're, if you can't speak about the product, then you should still be speaking about personal experience where possible, but in terms of actually speaking about the product and what you're building, the earlier the better. But obviously there's some considerations there around, like going through rounds of funding, thinking about, like, if you're allowed to talk about things or you're not allowed to talk about things.

51:29 Georgie Healy: I wasn't even thinking of that, but I agree with you. Yeah, do it sooner than you think. Like, you don't have to wait for someone to give you a gold star before you're allowed to share. It's a lot more memorable if people remember when you came.

51:43 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, exactly.

51:45 Georgie Healy: All right, Robin, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people follow you? How do. How to. How to get in touch with you and get support from you on LinkedIn.

51:57 Robin O'Connell: Robin O' Connell on LinkedIn. My profile picture, I think I'm wearing this exact outfit, so you can't miss me. I do need to get a some new clothes.

52:05 Georgie Healy: I'm gonna get Comments like, it's AI. He's not real.

52:08 Robin O'Connell: Yeah, I knew it. And Robin O' Connell on LinkedIn.

52:11 Georgie Healy: Thank you so much, Mae, thank you.

52:13 Robin O'Connell: Appreciate it.

52:16 Georgie Healy: Thank you so much for listening to In the Blink of AI. If you want to go deeper on anything we've spoken about today, I write a weekly substack called Attention Is All I Need. Yes, it's hilarious. It's a pun. And essentially I go into AI rants, tech news events I'm going to and more. It's bite sized and I hear it's awesome. The link is in the show notes below.