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Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say That Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

Well, you were talking right before we got on about some mechanical issues with your vehicle. You had your windshield clobbered.

Stu Eddins: Yep, well, it had help. Yes, big old Dooley pickup truck that was soaring by and threw ice right at my windshield couldn’t hit it better, but if they aimed.

Mariah: I know I’ve been having some frustrating issues with my vehicle over the last year. So I got my battery replaced, got my fuel injection system replaced. I don’t quote me on that. I’m terrible at car things, but mechanics are cool.

Stu: Yeah, they are. My car knowledge is the gozinta type. Gas gozinta the tank, I gozinta the driver’s seat and the key gozinta the ignition. That’s about all I know. Yeah, no, it was, something I’d heard ages ago to describe a friend of mine who had no mechanical aptitude whatsoever. And here’s the tie-in to today’s discussion. He knew people who could.

Mariah: Yeah, I know a guy.

Stu: Those can be very helpful or very dangerous words.

Mariah: I think we should state right at the beginning of this that you guys, is a non-gender specific term that all Midwesterners use when they enter a room of humans.

Stu: Because in the Midwest, we don’t have y’all.

Mariah: Yeah, you’s guys, you guys.

Stu: Or all y’all.

Mariah: All y’all, yes.

Stu: By the way, more than you’ns. But anyway, we’re here talking about things like, how the sausage is made. We don’t have to have all the skill in one body or one person, sometimes not even one team. It’s interesting, Mariah, to some extent, you, you’ve grown up in the same cup of atmosphere where I have where early on, and we’re talking 10-12, years ago, you had to know more than just the one thing you did or stuff didn’t get done. There’s only so much you could afford to pay to farm out.

So you quickly jumped on Google and looked up how to do something and learned how to do it. And you may not have retained it the first time, but after the third time you’re looking it up, it’s like, okay, I kind of know this; sadly for a lot of people that was digital advertising or SEO, they didn’t know what they were doing. They would go out and get the opinions of the day and come back and do the work. It was kind of like search facilitated “test your way to success.”

What I’m finding anymore is that the people have become more specialized as the tasks have become more specialized. We looked at SEO, you know, a long time ago as being this thing that we did. We look at SEO today and realize it’s just an umbrella term for a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, yeah. There’s the, there’s the local aspect of the Google business profile.

There’s the aspect of, not just how do you rank, but what do you show when you rank, what’s pulled in for the for the description or the link, or, you know, because, little bit of an aside. While ranking is great, but somebody’s got to want to click you too. So you have to look interesting enough like you might have my answer, and I think I like the way you’re going to answer it. And all that comes from that little snippet that’s SEO, looking at things like website building website that was something where Concrete Five, there you go. There’s an old one, or WordPress back then; everybody just got onto these things and created a website. And it was a little more wild west sometimes, because there weren’t billions upon billions of websites. There weren’t these spin offs, left, right and sideways of a single website, creating even more stuff on URLs and online. We’re not there anymore.

Mariah: There’s such a…I see this amongst all my groups that are brave enough to let me in their WordPress sites, there’s an endless number of plugins too. You’ve got Yoast, you’ve got all these other different things that, like, Hey, your SEO is bad. It’s like, what are you even measuring? Yeah, just this little, this little sandbox of SEO, or in general, you know?

Stu: For a while, and this isn’t recently, but for a while, I’d say about eight, nine years ago, I was thinking, geez, I can’t hire people who have the range of skills I need, and I hadn’t mentally caught up to the thought that that was, we’ll call it, old school thinking, that that was the way of thinking things in a manner from 10 years before that. It was interesting to recalibrate a little bit and start to realize that knowledge at the time could be a mile wide and maybe a foot deep, because nobody else’s knowledge went deeper than that. But since then, all these different aspects of being online or, you know, just simply marketing itself, whether it’s digital or not, they’ve gotten deeper themselves each one. And to plumb those depths, you do need to have some specialization. In many cases, by the time you get down into those more detailed and granular levels, you really got to know what you’re doing, or you’re going to mess something up big time.

So earlier with shallower depth of knowledge, but across a broader range of topics, I was less likely to completely screw something into the ground.

Mariah: True.

Stu: It was just not going to happen. If it did, it was recoverable quickly today, man, if you mess something up, it’s probably really deep, and it could affect through ripple effect so many other things that specialization actually does have its place. To that end, you know, did the did the person who redid the ignition system or injection system in your car, was it the same one who helped you with your battery? Probably not. Could Have Been years before then it would have been, went down to my mechanic, who fixed everything, and now, because of the technical aspect of the car, what’s going on underneath the hood is a computer assisted by internal combustion anymore. It does require specialization.

Why should we expect less from things we work with online? Far more expansive as far as possibilities and potential, than just what’s going on in your car. So when I’m out hiring people, it is interesting to find out their range of knowledge, just left to right, just what? How many different topics do you understand?

And then tell me what you’re best at in that range, yeah, and having them describe back what it is, and I’ve noticed over time that the range, descriptively, the words they used to describe it, have narrowed. But within that narrowing is an even more, more I don’t know, segmented areas of that, of that knowledge, we used to say something like, okay, marketing is what we’re doing, okay? Then it became specifically digital marketing. Then it was, well, I’m a search I’m a search person. I’m a social person for marketing. And then within each one of these segments, there’s smaller segments.

And I don’t think it was like I believe it’s the Peter Principle. Work expands to fill the time allowed. Okay? I don’t think this is roles expanding to fill every possible niche and be specific. I think what it is, is people were able to dedicate a little more thought to a specific narrowing and find out for themselves that it could be deeper, that it needed to be deeper, to be different, to be effective, to have some small advantage and then turn it into a large advantage.

Mariah: Yeah, like 10 years ago, I would run across somebody and they’d say, I’m a social media manager, and my first that would be like, what do you actually do with your whole day? Yeah, but now you know the way that social media is now compared to 2015, you know, 2014 that’s a huge job. Oftentimes it’s a job for more than one person. And so it’s, like you said, this evolution of just because it’s not as broad, it’s much deeper. And probably I’m picturing in my brain like a beaker, like at the surface, you see this little definition as you go deeper and deeper, it gets wider and wider, and it just the the specialization is something that we have to embrace now instead of like but we need a jack of all trades. We need somebody that can do 10 different things. While that may be true, maybe you need 10 different full-time people, or five full and five part or 10 different contractors that you have a long-term relationship with.

Stu: And on the contractor side, I realized that not everybody wants to go out and hire a contractor for every new, unique thing that needs to be done. If the organization doesn’t want to invest the time in training somebody to do this, because we’re going to do it more often than not, maybe that’s where the gig economy pays off for us. We’re able to go out and find somebody who can handle a very specific task. And you know, hopefully, if you like them, you go back to them the next time it comes up. But you’re doing that because you don’t need that skill. 24/7, inside your own business.

Mariah: Yeah. Or maybe you know that somebody in your business wants to learn, needs to learn, but you don’t have the knowledge to teach them, right? I mean, we run into this occasionally with different requests that clients have, like, we’re a full-scale agency, but there are some little things that we’re like, oh, yeah, we could probably scale up on this. There’s somebody we know that we have a relationship with. They can teach Susie or Sally or Joe to do this.

Stu: And it’s the difference between participating and being effective. Back when, when I had broad knowledge that I was taking to work every single day, applying from SEO to website building to everything, to everything in between. You know, I didn’t need to have more technical competence with any of it. Nobody expected it. There was no competition forcing me to do it. And then, as I started narrowing down, I do a lot of things that are more that are much more marketing oriented right now than website design or user experience. Even though I used to do those things, I also found out that let’s take user experience. We have a coworker, that her job was like developing the personas and so on. That helped with user experience. And I, for a while, thought I was pretty good at that, and then she asked me to help her by, you know, coming up with some descriptions for some of these personas. And when I was done with it, she just kind of looked at me and said, You just really have no empathy. Do you?

Mariah: Oh man!

Stu: She was pulling my leg. But the fact is, that kind of drove home that something I thought I was competent at that competency was in a might as well been a different era. It was from a period of time where what I knew was good enough, but that bar of good enough had been pushed further and further away from my skill set. Now I’m doing I’m focusing much more on the advertising aspect of it, and I’m witnessing that same type of specialization happening now. Not long ago, and I’m talking like maybe pre-COVID into post-COVID timeframe, so five years…

Mariah: 700 years ago.

Stu: Yeah, I suspect that being a rocking chair, rocking back and forth my lap, talking about pre-COVID or something. But the fact is, we could look at an account of a certain size, you know, their size and scope limits here, and say, Okay, we’re going to take you to market with search, and we’re going to back it up with some display. Because, you know, keep your name out in front of people, top of mind awareness until they’re ready to search.

That was then. Now what’s happened, and the market itself has changed, and if we’re responsive to that market, we have to get better at the application of these of these tools of search and display, and realize that to do that, there’s not enough time in the day to become experts in both some people do. I’m not taking away from them, but, but if you have other responsibilities beyond that, it’s difficult. So you develop people, even in my in my short time since 2020, I have seen this branch out into a longer list of specific and specialty tasks.

Reddit was not a thing five years ago, really. I still think that while it might be a thing, nobody’s really figured it out too terribly well, but it’s there.

Mariah: Yeah, the people using it, have made it their own thing, but you have businesses figured it out,?

Stu: Right? Well, I also think that some of these things, without going too far down the path, are product-specific. If you’re trying to sell something that appeals to the demographic that is largely on that platform, and you don’t have to do much work to get their attention, you’re going to be much more successful than me coming along and saying, Hey, have you thought about applying to college? That entirely too interruptive. So anyway, that’s one thing about. But anyway, backing up from that, we had search, we had displayed, you know, we had Facebook out there that we put stuff out on, and it was good enough, but now it’s not good enough, because the consumer, the target market, is telling us it’s not. And I think part another thing that drives a specialization is the expectation of the market you’re trying to reach.

And that can get reflected in my marketing by I have to become better at different channels. It can be reflected in website design. Because we are literally talking about user experience during the design. It’s guiding every principle, and the experience isn’t what we tell the user, the experience is what the user tells us they want. And talk about a moving target. Okay, so that’s what that is.

If you have to respond to that, you’re gonna wind up getting people who are very specialized in such things as content, more others that are that are that are more specialized in the psychology of how people move through a website. You have people that are much more specialized in the design aspect of color and form and font and everything else. Because it used to be, you could just get away with Calibri on everything or whatever the heck your font was. Now you need to be more creative about it, because the expectation of your target market is better, is greater.

Mariah: And we just know more about what works for people with disabilities, people that have low vision and people that need things that are in audio form plus text. We have all of this body of knowledge. It’s a lot for one role or one individual to try to rein all that in.

Stu: Yeah. And speaking of that, just a flight of fancy here that I had; if we took our specialization approach to development that we have today, and we can magically jump back in time 10 years and say, This is how we’re going to develop your website. They would look at us, probably like we’re crazy and wonder why we are getting they might question that we’re just looking for busy work to charge more. Yeah, but today is considered the standard and that difference, right there also illustrates the need for specialization.

Mariah: We’ll write your content on the front end. We’ll also write it on the back end. And then there’s this layer in between that shows people how to get there and just chat bots how to get there, you know, all these things.

Stu: And then that the next thing let’s look at. Let’s look at that for just a moment; it’s been said that, as we go forward, we’re not writing content for humans, we’re writing it for bots. Okay? It’s a clever thing to say. It’s a simplification of an actual thing. However, we do have to think about that, and there’s gonna be a separate specialty coming up. I don’t know if it’d be long lived, but it’ll be there. It’ll be the same as the transition from the regular web to the responsive web for mobile, not today. That’s just declassing what we do. We design for multiple screen sizes. When that transition happened, nobody was same thing here. Where we’re designing and creating content, laying our website for humans to come, whereas it may be three to five years, it’d be 70% butts coming, and they don’t care about color, they don’t care about font type, they’re just there to chunk out information and go.

That’s gonna be a specialty. Now we can look at that and say, okay, somebody here has to get trained up on it. Yeah, we do. We have, we have to know what we’re talking about. We have to know the application of it. But I also know that very few websites, even those who are going in for design right now, probably have the appetite for that level of detailed work. So right now, the mechanics of it is be AI ready, as opposed to be AI compliant.

Mariah: Because there’s no there’s no guideline, there’s no consensus guideline.

Stu: In fact, we are still pretty much in public beta with these AI tools, so they don’t even know what to tell us to do. There are indicators, there are things to follow. And once those, those arrays of choices are confirmed to be this one, that one and the other one, then we can do the specialization, push down them. But right now, we’re pretty much in that same space I was in 15 years ago, with broad knowledge, no great depth. We can apply that same, that same type of thinking right now to Okay, I have broad knowledge about how the how the websites work, and how the Internet kind of works, and how I assume, from what other people assume, because it’s reading how AI works, yeah, I don’t have to have a specialized knowledge in AI yet. I have to understand that things are breaking up and starting to segment into different disciplines underneath it, but that’s all I’m required to know, because that’s as far as it’s gone. But when that finally even solidifies between those subdisciplines in AI, I don’t have to be the one who’s the expert. I need to hire the mechanic who is.

Mariah: Yeah, and the onus is for, it is like owning a vehicle, I hear this clanking sound. Something is not right. I better go find a person who does XYZ. I’m gonna do my little research on Google or wherever YouTube, and say, I think it’s my alternator. Better go find somebody that can do alternators. It’ll be the same thing with websites. You know, we know websites pretty well. We’re tooting our own horn. We are really good at websites right now. So, when things start to change, and when things start to, you know, flag like, hey, this has to be built differently. This has to be designed differently or written differently, the onus is for us to notice those things and seek out that specialist.

Stu: You it occurs me that the specialty could be the ability to learn.

Mariah: Absolutely.

Stu: It’s not that I have this one skill, because when that skill is done, they’re gonna set me aside. Is that I am highly trainable, and I take the initiative to train my re-train myself on certain things, yeah? And that’s where that yeah, under the ground, yeah, widening comes down in a in an expanding world where technology is pushing the edge. Nobody knows what’s beyond that edge, yet, having somebody with the ability to be flexible enough to keep up.

Mariah: Curious.

Stu: Learn, be curious, as you just said, yes indeed, and then, and then take all that and synthesize that into action, or, if not, action experiments to see what the action should be. I think maybe adaptability may be the skill we look for. And if you, if you have adaptability coupled to a relentless desire to be curious. First off, you probably need to put a leash on that person, keep them on task. Speaking from experience. Finding those people may be the best bet in a in an environment like we’re in right now now, whether they remain satisfied once things settle down and want to continue doing that specialty thing that they that they were doing or related to it, is one thing that’s a personality issue that you’ll solve another day. But I think that, you know, we’ve been talking about mechanics and we made differences between systems mechanics and things that go clunk mechanics and everything, or aircraft mechanic versus auto mechanic, whatever. Maybe it’s just a mechanic, because you know, I think, I think I’m pretty good mechanic when it comes to advertising, to the digital advertising stuff. I can go out and do this stuff. I have specialized knowledge in it, and I have a proven track record and all that. But I’m always looking for the next thing too. And though what I do may be considered in line with being a mechanic, I’m gonna dig myself into a hole here real quick. Maybe what we need to be doing is hiring for a specific position, but looking to fill it with somebody who through, interview and demonstration has the ability to be flexible and move to the adjacent or related parts of their education or experience.

Mariah: This is where you’re going to start. This is a problem we need to solve now. Yeah. And then once you solve that, we’ll move you on to the next thing and put in somebody new.

Stu: Now write that job description. That’ll be fun. Yeah. Hey, we want to hire people who can do, who can do some things really, really well, and commit to it and then change overnight.

Mariah: Yeah. I mean, that’s what we do at an agency. Yeah. We always tell people, if you’re doing the same thing every day that you did, you know, three years ago, when you were hired, we failed you in some capacity. I mean, there’s a few roles that are like standard, you know, you’ll have HR, you’ll have operations, you’ll have, you know, finance or whatever. But even those will chameleon with technology and business best practices.

Stu: But I think there’s some, there’s sometimes a tendency to complete the tasks are routine and common with the person having to be routine in com and their in their role. So maybe I need to amend my statement and say, You don’t need to look for people who are flexible, but to some extent, assume that they can be and maybe test for it a little bit.

Mariah: Yeah, yeah. Don’t ever say, you know, Fred’s over here in this bucket. He can only do this thing. Yeah, let him give it. Give it a try.

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.