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Quick Pulses/ Tachyons / Soundbites from directly from the show…………….
The Importance of UX Design and AB Testing
What do you, I imagine there's a lot of UX design, even though you're not a product manager, you're not. But I imagine, tell me a little bit about that journey as you're doing, you know, what color or however, how does that unfold in your actual design thinking if there is? Absolutely. And I was a product manager for six years. That's what I went to AOL or in those days, America Online is where I began my product management career. And one of the things I think that's so important to the world of experience and being a CXO is having done these things. And so I understand what the potential is. And while I may have lost some of the sharpness around actual product management processes, which have evolved since I was one, I do kind of understand the process. And so I think that UX design is so critical to accomplishing the tasks that you want to. And because of the way that we can test now, we just have so much of an advantage to understanding the dynamics that are going on. So I've been doing kind of like AB testing and the like for 10 years or more now at this point. And a lot of it has to do with product design and workflows for the users. And what you learn is just like, it's so incredible. As long as everybody's focused on the end, which is growth and how do you drive more of that? You're just working back basically through that process to understand where are the points of friction? How do I improve those? And so. One of the big points of the book is creating a test-and-learn culture and applying it toward product development. That's just so important. So everybody from the team that's managing our website, they're constantly testing navigational changes. We just had one where moving a topic from one to another drives 40% more conversion for that topic. I mean, it's like, wow, where did that come from? We have other things where, you know, we were starting to employ kind of digital monitoring that tells us, you know, basically there are a lot of people trying to do something on this page, but nothing is happening. and you got a problem there and here's a heat map to show you what they're doing. And you can see basically like there's an action, a call to action button that's on a picture, but only that button is active and people are clicking all over the picture and it won't load. And so you can go fix that. Whereas like in the old days, You might have ever known that or never fixed it and just really frustrated and lost a lot of people from the process. So this is particularly important in commerce flows. And so we spend a lot of time and energy perfecting that kind of join renew process. And I tell a story in the book that was inspired by one of the co-founders of Stripe. And his advice wakes you up. All the things you could do to decrease friction was fix your checkout page. So big advice from somebody who knows what they're talking about………………..
The Art and Science of Marketing
The art, like the mission of this organization and contains the words, the art and science of medicine. Our job is to promote the art and science of medicine. And sometimes I'll say that to people at marketing is a combination of both still has the art of understanding human behavior and what to say to people to get them to move. combined with even more of the science now about data and being able to tell what's actually happening out there. And because of that, there's no more exciting time in history to be in marketing than right now…………
Real-World Impact of AI on Jobs
Yeah, it's a very real thing. I saw something on LinkedIn the other day. It was like a new Volvo commercial that had been produced totally through AI. It was very cool. And I heard through someone else that I'd sent it to that, I don't know, the scene designers, whatever, in Los Angeles had canceled their internship program and said, don't go into scene design because it's just not going to exist in that form or fashion anymore. And so there are real implications for this. And in other times in technology, it just meant that like other jobs would be created to be able to do that. But like in the case of like that scene design, it's going to be a lot fewer. And it's, you know, that the AI is doing a large part of something like do this. So that's just going to be a very different process going forward. And I don't, you know, I have two daughters, 24 and 26 that are in the early parts of their career. Like it's impossible to like know how to advise people. All you have is the ability to kind of see what is already being transformed. uh, through genitor of AI or other AI, uh, type of capabilities and what looks promising and what doesn't. So I think in a lot of ways, a lot of industry will, they'll figure out how to harvest it. And hopefully, you know, people, uh, will be augmented by this technology and not replaced…………
United Airlines' Exemplary Customer Experience
Is there are there any brands that you have just found really inspiring or companies as you've gone through this journey over your career? I'll tell you the one that I think a lot of right now, and it's kind of funny having come out of this past weekend where I was one of those millions of people that was waylaid by this CrowdStrike thing with travel. I think United Airlines has it going on when it comes to customer experience and really leveraging that kind of omnichannel experience. And I think that it played out a lot over the weekend, even though I was facing a lot of obstacles to kind of getting the job done, which was getting home. And I did have to spend an extra day out in California and not such a bad place to get stranded, but not where I wanted to be. But when you think about how their app works, the kinds of communications I get, how I can see the progress of my bags and just kind of like the level of certainty I have around things that I used to have question marks. The fact that when I got my flight canceled, that they automatically rebooked me on something else, at least that I had that going. Just there are so many things that have brought me into their orbit. So to speak that I do appreciate because I know how hard it is to do on the other end…..
The Essence of Storytelling in Modern Marketing
Here's kind of another thing. We talked about how people always kind of jump to product. People always jump to the storytelling platform. I mean, how many times have you heard in your lifetime, like, I want to do a podcast. Oh, I should write an article. I should start my Instagram feed. It's like, well, hold on. what are we trying to do here? And so again, that's why storytelling platform in the book, it comes after defining your target, having a target definition. What is the proposition of your product? Then you have your brand proposition, your product proposition before you get into storytelling. And even then storytelling, it's not like I'm telling like, you know, Jack got up this morning and went to work and this is what happened in his day. Storytelling is the way that you express your brand proposition across all these digital platforms and they all work together. And that's the important thing to really understand is the flow of those things. Because in today's digital 10-second customer journey world, you only get a matter of seconds to catch somebody's attention. They're not going to read a lot and do a lot of research for the first encounter. um the job is to get them to nod and i talk about that in the book it's like get the nod which is like you see something that you feel like really understands who you are and what you need and then you're willing to say i'll learn more i'll go to your landing page or i'll do whatever it is and then you could be out the other end of that process in 10 seconds That is the part that has to be shaped before you get into like what your social posts are and what are you gonna tweet or what kind of videos I should make and be on YouTube or whatever it is. And so that's a carefully planned process. I always say like the clock on the 10 second journey starts really, the work is before the clock starts…….
Pre-pandemic Preparation Paved the Way
I'm going to tell you, I'm very grateful that I started here in 2017 and I had a couple of years under my belt with my team before the pandemic happened and we all got dispersed. And so I think that's pretty important. And many of us are back in the office at least for several days a week, which I think also is very important. But the principles of it are things that we were working on and getting implemented. Uh, one of the other concepts that kind of talk about in the book is, uh, the success storytelling platform. And thankfully we were in process of having kind of built that out. And so, you know, one of the first S's home base is your, your site. And so we had made major kind of changes to the website and its role as a kind of a media platform for the organization before everything kind of went down, so to speak……...
Passion and Commitment in Leadership
It's funny what you just said. I mean, because I think about it a lot. And people are pretty amazed when they talk to me. How can you still be so excited seven years into something? I truly am. I love it so much. And I didn't come here because of the mission aspect. I came here initially because it was so closely related to the work that I was doing in such a much bigger platform. But over the course of time, like it really does make a connection to be able to help people who do things like I can never do. And so it does, it tends to make you feel pretty good on a day-to-day basis to be able to do that. For me, we're at a 20-year high for membership. And so that's against the trend for a lot of association…………
The 10-Second Customer Journey
Do you want to delve into a little bit, maybe the overview of your book or highlight a chapter? I wish I could have read it, but obviously that wasn't in the cards. It just was released two weeks ago. So anyway. Absolutely. As I said before, the book is about a playbook for growing customers in the digital age and kind of keeping them. What I did in the book was really lay out a playbook in kind of sequential order of the steps that you need to take to be able to do that. Part of this is defining customer experience for the digital age. If you go back to the history of customer experience, these were in the days of Lou Carbone And, you know, creating experience and you're not buying a product, you're buying an experience. Like these were all about live and retail experience where you're having human interactions and sensory perceptions of all this stuff. As I say, like you can't smell a hamburger on a website. So how do we adapt the concept of customer experience for the digital age so that we can take somebody from maybe being exposed to your product or your brand for the first time and have it in your shopping cart and out the other door in 10 seconds. That's what the 10 second customer journey is all about. And in the middle of that process is reducing all the points of friction that might stop someone along the way in that just matter of split seconds that you've got these days to convince somebody to engage with and buy your product. I like what you're saying about the frictionless. I mean, there's that trust with, I think of Amazon immediately. I mean, so much of what I do is on Amazon because of that issue with putting my credit card, giving my credit card……………
Innovations and Emotional Moments During the Pandemic
Strangely, we discovered like a whole new talent, I think, of the organization in the pandemic, which was around video production capability. And with the challenges that, of course, producing that remotely But things that we launched in the middle of the pandemic, like the AMA update, which is our daily video cast and podcast, we launched in response to getting the word out for how we were helping physicians in the pandemic, getting the issues out there on the table and raising visibility of what they needed. That started then. And three years later, we now have a studio in our building. But for the beginning, it was like super scrappy. I'm in my bedroom, like next to my bed. I mean, it's amazing what you can do in those circumstances when it's really necessary. One of my favorite things I think we've ever done is like in that first year of the pandemic, of course, none of the medical students were having their graduations because they were all canceled. And we got word that they would love some kind of form of recognition. And I thought to myself, well, why don't we go big? And we created the medical school tribute of the class of 2020. And we had a huge lineup of all of the leading physicians in the United States and every actor who has ever played a physician on television, including five Oscar winners………..
The Impact of AI on Content Creation
Content generation, developing organic traffic, using search, SEO, like that's in jeopardy right now. And so it really crystallized for me because I don't know what I was watching. I think I was watching like Anybody But You or something like that. And I'm like, are koalas dangerous? And I like, you know, I type in that into like Google. And, you know, what do I get? I get the AI generated answer and it's like basically answers everything. I don't have to go anywhere. So, you know, that's the story right now. And yeah, it's a lot easier for me, but it doesn't do much good for all the people that spent all the time and energy creating that content. It's certainly not gonna drive them to your site to find out more……………….
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