Category: content marketing

Will AI kill keyword gurus in 2020?

Sarat Pratapchandran1 Comment

letter oneThe Internet grew. New terms like search engine optimization (SEO) created thought leaders, book publishers, keyword specialists, and gurus of search.

Our vocabulary created many enterprising business models in the last decade.

We promised the corner cupcake store owner higher rankings on search engines. She got data on traffic, visits, referrals, direct hits, and examples of organic growth, half of which she never understood.

We became experts in search making money on similes, metaphors, and the unused thesaurus. But one thing remained clear: websites that created authentic, fresh, valuable content gave search engines a run for their money.

Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes coffee for you, runs your inventory, manages your supply chain, and delivers profits. AI will easily drive your web traffic to the top spot of search engines.

You don’t need a digital marketing agency, a search engine specialist or a keyword expert. The middleman will vanish.

Firms like WordLift, Woorank and Alli AI are helping businesses get higher search engine rankings without an intermediary. If you have reached maturity in online marketing you will rely more on AI this decade rather than search engine experts.

But folks like me will depend on books like Word Power Made Easy, by Norman Lewis. There is a difference between original and artificial in our vocabulary and that will never go away.

Soledad and the power of storytelling

Sarat PratapchandranLeave a comment

American television personality, Soledad O”Brien offers us consolation in a world of us versus them. Our infinite power to tell stories will help us learn more about each other.

Soledad grew up as a biracial kid in a mostly White town in New York . Here, she understood why race was not a social construct. Race is real in America.  We are very much connected to ethnic origins, privilege, poverty, social standing and accomplishments.

Her parents were immigrants.  Her dad was Australian and her mom came from Cuba and it was tough for them to get get married and raise a family in the America of the 50s and the 60s.

In television, Soledad learned why producers had pre-conceived notions of stories even before they were aired. Stories of poor people almost always led with negative connotations of where they came from, unemployment in their communities, drugs and violence. Very rarely did producers take notice of the individual human being, their successes, their accomplishments. The personality of the poor gets sadly forgotten in American television, especially if you are black or latino. Soledad was delivering the Elizabeth D. Rockwell lecture at the University of Houston recently.

Today’s television relies on talking heads, who get an annual payment and claim to be so-called experts on specific subjects. Armchair journalists never got real stories from the field and I learned that in journalism school.

In-depth, incisive, deliberate reporting  is costly. Real reporting requires hard work, patience and the courage to ask hard questions. We have to be vulnerable and learn and understand the context of the subjects we are interviewing.

Sadly, our evening news revolves around shootings, the cat that got lost in the alley or an angry parent who found that the school bus was late.

I will leave you with a profound quote from Soledad: “I’ve learned that fear limits you and your vision. It serves as blinders to what may be just a few steps down the road for you. The journey is valuable, but believing in your talents, your abilities, and your self-worth can empower you to walk down an even brighter path. Transforming fear into freedom-how great is that?”