Yep. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. You’ve got this passion.
It’s kind of like a side discussion here. I want to get into what you’re focused on now, which is AI. But you’ve also got this passion for the outdoors. I know you’re a fly fisherman and you’ve written some, even some children’s books about these topics. I’m always curious how people blend something they’re passionate about and what they do from a vocation.
Are there ways in which you’ve tried to do that, to combine your passion for the outdoors with what you do now?
Emanuel Rose: 10:05
I think we are always looking at realities, operations. Right. And we can see that in nature a lot easier. We can be in business, but it still exists. I think the biggest thing is that I’ve taken and my team is my publishing group.
So whether I’m writing a children’s book or another book on generative engine optimization, I have a way to to be creative, do my part and then push it over to my team to get the finished product. That’s way more beautiful than I could do on my own.
John Corcoran: 10:35
Yeah, yeah. Let’s get to talking about AI and some of the changes you’re seeing in marketing. There’s so many things we can talk about. You mentioned generative engine optimization, which is about how SEO is changing right now. And in some ways, there’s kind of a parallel between what you said when you started your company in 2010. Social media was this big disruptive force that was affecting a lot of companies.
A lot of people didn’t understand it. And today, AI is that thing that is disrupting a lot of other companies, and a lot of companies don’t understand it. Would you see parallels between those two?
Emanuel Rose: 11:16
Yeah for sure. I agree that they’re very similar in that they’re these big bubbles getting lots of press time, creating this kind of FOMO amongst small business, as well as all the way to fortune 500 companies. I think the biggest difference is that the AI tool is so much more broad reaching and has so much more potential for winning, winning time back for both us as executives and for businesses in their cost of goods of executives.
John Corcoran: 11:48
Yeah, and with the companies that you’re working with, are you finding that companies are open to it, or some companies are fearful of it, or some companies are just confused about it and not sure why. You know how AI is going to affect things, especially from a marketing standpoint. Like what are you seeing right now?
Emanuel Rose: 12:09
Yeah, I think it’s the blend, right? We’re still in that distributed curve of, you know, innovation and early adoption and mass market. And we’re still in this kind of early adopter phase of, you know, market penetration I think is still single digits really. It’s even in small businesses. And like for instance, I have a mastermind group that I invite all my clients to.
It’s an AI mastermind, and I don’t even have all my clients coming to it yet. These are people I’ve been working with for 15 years.
John Corcoran: 12:40
Yeah, yeah. And what are some ways in which you see marketing changing right now? How is it being affected by AI?
Emanuel Rose: 12:51
Well, I think the first thing is it’s allowing us to really talk about automation and automating all the mundane activities that we don’t want to do. So we haven’t you know, just getting the automations done is not even yet touching what AI is capable of. But I think the biggest thing is being able to customize and personalize at scale. We’ve never seen tools that can do what they do. They’re set up correctly.
Of course, there’s still a massive misuse of the tools, and we’re seeing that every day in our email inbox, right? 98% of it is garbage. Just like it was when the Email Newsletters first came out, that was 98% garbage from cold email outreach. But that customization and being able to to prompt scanning through and looking at somebody’s LinkedIn profile, noticing they’re a fly fisherman, and then going to their Instagram and seeing where the last trip was, they went to like writing. That kind of simple directive is very straightforward.
Now that in a way that we’ve never had access to as non-developers.
John Corcoran: 13:57
So in other words, we can use these AI tools to research and have a deeper understanding of the clients that we’re working with or the prospects that we’re talking to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emanuel Rose: 14:10
And to create a softer entry point to start a conversation. You know, we have obviously seen it on LinkedIn. It’s a lot of garbage. And LinkedIn is one of the places where I still do my own research and I still do my own outreach. It’s not a DM leverage.
Because I get better results when I do it myself. I look for three people, do my own research, and send three DMs. I get three answers versus setting up a tool to send 10,000 DMs to get three answers. Yeah. That’s fine.
John Corcoran: 14:43
Oh yeah. And it’s refreshing. Honestly, when you get a message where you can tell that it wasn’t sent by an AI. I mean, like, I get so many messages now on LinkedIn that are just someone immediately jumping into talking about themselves and their service and why you need to use their offshoring tool or whatever it is.
Emanuel Rose: 15:03
Yeah. Or the tool like Boardy where you and I met. What a great tool that is where you have the conversation with the voice AI and then actually meet somebody who you have a common interest in.
John Corcoran: 15:12
Yeah. So for those who don’t know, Boardy is this amazing tool that if you Google it or you look on LinkedIn, you can find it. And it’s basically an AI powered introduction tool at scale. I love making introductions, but it’s just a volume that I could never do personally, connecting people up who have mutual shared interests. And it’s really quite amazing what it’s doing.
And I have to say, it’s one of the first real tools that I’ve come out in this new generation of apps and software that is truly AI native, in the sense that it couldn’t have existed before AI came out. And there’s a lot of tools that are coming out right now that are just the last generation of tools with AI layered on top. It’s not truly disruptive or different, like Airbnb was, or like Uber was in the mobile revolution, or Twitter was with the social media revolution. And so that’s why I think it’s a really fascinating tool. Is there a marketing angle?
I mean, you and I are connected through it, but is there a marketing angle to using tools like that?
Emanuel Rose: 16:15
Well, boarding in particular, I use it to get referral sources. That’s one of the ways that would be the marketing angle, right? Also, you can ask him to connect you up with potential clients. Obviously that’s a little more obtuse.
John Corcoran: 16:29
Or here we are recording a podcast, which is a marketing asset, and we connected through boarding. So it led to more marketing.
Emanuel Rose: 16:39
Yeah, exactly. I think it was a genius, genius invention. And I agree that without this iteration of AI, it wouldn’t exist the way that it does now. And it’s not just a wrapper onto some old piece of software.
John Corcoran: 16:53
Yeah, yeah. What about you mentioned earlier? Generative AI, how that’s affecting SEO? There’s a lot of different theories going around. There are people saying that it’s the end of Google.
There’s other people saying that it’s not the end of Google. Google’s going to still have their slice of the pie, but the pie is going to get bigger. What are your thoughts on that?
Emanuel Rose: 17:14
Yeah, I think it’s an area that we all, as professional marketing people, have got to pay attention to. And it is as dynamic as Google has ever been because we actually don’t know. Right. You’ve got say, six primary LMS that all have their own secret algorithm process. We do know that Google is still important, just like the Yellow Pages is still important, just like Reddit is important.
So there’s some ways to structure website data around FAQs, for instance, is a really good way to structure actual content. Make sure that you’re doing it correctly in terms of what your prospects or clients would ask about your product or service. The other best practices is to is to really dig into the what your ideal client profile looks like from the top of the funnel, all the way to signing the contract, and then finding spots where they have questions and you have to provide answers and then build content specifically for those in their in their particular funnel.
John Corcoran: 18:21
Yeah, yeah. You know, another interesting angle on it is I actually got a message earlier today from a guest on my podcast who had seen that our episode had gone live, that of me interviewing him on my podcast and within, I think, 3 or 4 days, it was indexed in ChatGPT and showing up in ChatGPT. Nice. So it seems to me that the message behind that is that continuing to create content is still important. And personally, I believe that, you know, this can’t be faked.
And so, you know, in an age where everything we see online, we’re not going to know whether it’s real or not. We watched a video. We cannot we won’t be able to tell if that was real or not? Was that tweet drafted by a human or not? And so I think that we will value this sort of piece of authenticity so much more, because all the other stuff, we’re not sure if it’s true, if it’s authentic or if it’s fake.
That’s another, I think, insight that we have to take from this current revolution.
Emanuel Rose: 19:29
I agree 100%. I think the podcast, these types of these types of interactions are the cleanest, best pieces of content we can produce right now.
John Corcoran: 19:40
Yeah. What about vibe coding? You got into that?
Emanuel Rose: 19:43
I have built a couple of tools on that. I started out on lovable and And now I’ve moved on to Replit and I built a tool that’s around strategic planning. I built another really cool tool that takes and brings in your asana tasks, visualizes it, and then you connect it up and and then you can start to agent identify your, your tasks. And then a third project that’s a little deeper which is called privacy p r I v a c ai, which is a tool that allows you to put in a document and then all your personal identifiable information is hidden. And then you chat with the LM and you bring it back and it gets reconstituted.
So you can send it where you need to next.
John Corcoran: 20:39
Oh interesting. That’s an interesting one because there’s a lot of privacy concerns that are happening right now.
Emanuel Rose: 20:44
Yeah, we just saw that Google just got hit with another big fine, a $400 million fine for privacy violations. So we know whatever we’re putting into Google and the other LMS is that data is being at least as accessible at the very least, and most likely it’s being resold.
John Corcoran: 21:02
Yeah. Yeah. What about, you know, you’ve written a lot of books. You’ve created a lot of podcast episodes. How do you see content marketing being affected by AI today?
Emanuel Rose: 21:16
I kind of go back to what you were talking about, John. Where the podcast is, is the hub of all good marketing right now. And, and once we have this, this 30 minutes of video, then we can plug it in to some really amazing software and it, it chops it up and, and spits it out at 85% publishable, gets touched by the humans to clean it up, and then it’s dispersed out into the web sphere. It’s beautiful.
John Corcoran: 21:45
Yeah. Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, I think it’ll be something. where in the short term it’s going to be painful. There’s going to be people who are used to having, you know, doing this type of function maybe for many years, and they need to upskill or change their training, find something else that they can do with these tools in the longer term.
As is often the case with new technologies, we will likely look back and say, wow, I can’t believe we used to do things that way. I can’t believe how time consuming it was for one person to sit in front of a computer and spend ten hours editing to create, you know, 30s worth of content or you, you know, you go to filmmakers and the, you know, even today. But going back generations, the last few decades, spending months, you know, in an editing room, editing things together and how, you know, there’s they’ve sped up these processes. So it’s amazing impact.
Emanuel Rose: 22:45
It is phenomenal. And I think that you really hit on the point, which is we should be winning our time back with the application of these tools. And with that time, we should be doing something valuable for ourselves, for our friends, for our family, or for being creative.
John Corcoran: 23:02
Yeah, yeah. Or I heard someone say that, you know, if you went back like 150 years ago when 95% of all people were working in agriculture, basically, you know, farming and that sort of thing. And if you told people back then that in the future you’re going to have two days a week where you just go and do whatever you want at your leisure and don’t have to worry about anything, and that you’ll be working like in an air conditioned office and not out in the field toiling. They probably would have said, that’s crazy. I can’t imagine that being possible.
And yet we may be at one of these inflection points where maybe that changes even more. Maybe at some point in the future, it will become commonplace for people to have three days a week of leisure. You know, I don’t know, maybe.
Emanuel Rose: 23:52
Yeah, I think it’s possible for us, for those of us who want to look at their lives and decide how much is enough, and then if I only work four days a week, then what do I do with the other three days? And I think we have an opportunity for a second renaissance here to bring back the arts and the mysteries of being human and not just working.
John Corcoran: 24:15
You’ve written some books about Gen Z. What are your thoughts on how that’s going to affect the younger generation? Because I’ve read some studies that say that the Gen Z generation graduating from college now is going to be dramatically affected, that a lot of those types of jobs are going to be lost. And so the unemployment rate is going to be higher for that younger generation, which could create, you know, a lot of disaffection and a lot of bitterness.
Emanuel Rose: 24:46
Yeah, I mean, I’m not, I’m not a forecaster of. Whoa! I think that it’s amazing how you know this group of kids, number one, they don’t really look at having a job the way you and I did getting out of college, right? Yeah. This is the side hustle economy.
And a lot of them haven’t even had a job. Right. They’ve been making money in lots of different ways. So I think there’s lots of amazing opportunities for the ones who are who are driven and focused. And they have amazing skills, technology skills and understand where it came from and where it’s going.
So yeah, that part’s cool. I like that, you know, as far as reaching out to those people, you just want to continue to have a CEO centered marketing process so that there’s always a spokesperson that they can relate to. And that’s the real secret with Gen Z.
John Corcoran: 25:42
Yeah. Well, speaking of that, what do you say to companies where the CEO maybe isn’t the best spokesperson for their company, or is reluctant to be front and center and be that spokesperson.
Emanuel Rose: 25:57
Yeah, I just say it’s time to grow up and start today. Talk to John about getting a podcast going, because that’s going to be the simplest way to have your face on camera and answer very, very straightforward questions about yourself and your company and who you serve.
John Corcoran: 26:15
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a new era. And I, I agree it’s an important role for the CEO of the company to be doing that. Certainly there are some companies where their time is limited and they sometimes are the spokesperson and other people serve that role as well. But for a lot of companies, especially smaller companies or midsize companies, that’s an important role for them.
Yeah.
Emanuel Rose: 26:39
Yeah, it’s a mandate. And you can see that. I mean, Kylie Jenner’s a billionaire. Elon Musk is a billionaire. You know, Richard Branson’s a billionaire.
These are people who don’t have less time than anybody else, right? But they’re all the face of their brands, right?
John Corcoran: 26:53
Right. I want to wrap up, but before I do that, I want to ask, is there as far as AI is concerned and how it’s affecting the world of marketing, which is your area of expertise? Anything else you’re excited about focused on kind of have your eye on as we know, this is the end of 2025 and you’re the end of the 2025. What are you keeping your eye on that’s affecting this world?
Emanuel Rose: 27:19
Well, I think that it’s really important that we kind of lose the bubble excitement about this and, and move it into AI and how we deploy it in a systematic way and look for clear paths to either save human hours or reach more, more prospects. In order to do that, there’s often a lot of work that has to be done to prepare for that in terms of the data aggregation and the ERP system and then and, you know, planning process and change management plan. So we have to approach it as grown up business people, not just looking for the next shiny thing.
John Corcoran: 28:01
Yeah. Yeah. Or you know, I think there’s a lot of people, companies that want to do more marketing, for example. But there may be tools out there that they could in theory use, but they need some human element to hold their hand to make sure that they actually get it done, because otherwise they’re just not doing it.
Emanuel Rose: 28:21
Yeah. And yeah, that’s part of the reason why I put this mastermind together, was so that people could actually get together and have conversations about what’s actually happening. Yeah. And help guide each other. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 28:32
Yeah, that’s a good idea. And that might be an interesting model for other businesses listening to this as well. Is that something that they should do as well? Bring their clients together and you’ll be that forum and be that That connector that brings people together and allows their clients to have a conversation that they’re not able to have anywhere else.
Emanuel Rose: 28:53
Yeah, I think so. I think the more we can get back to creating communities and conversations, I think that will help heal a lot of the wounds that our culture has right now.
John Corcoran: 29:01
Yeah. Emanuel, I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge any peers or contemporaries or key clients or something like that, that have been really influential for you. Continue to be influential for you. Is there anyone in particular you’d want to shout out and thank?
Emanuel Rose: 29:21
Yeah, I do. I really know who my first client was. It’s a man named Glen Golden who owns a commercial real estate finance company in western United States. And he kind of he, he, he allowed me to start working with him as kind of as my first client. And he’s still a client to this day and has always been open in in a mentor of good knowledge and and and good tidings.
So I really appreciate and I’m thankful for the relationship I have with Glenn.
John Corcoran: 30:00
That’s awesome. And did you meet him at that Chamber of Commerce meeting you mentioned earlier?
Emanuel Rose: 30:05
I was through a friend’s connection. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 30:07
Okay. Cool. This would be great. Where can people go? To learn more about you, check out your podcast and check out your books and anything else.
Emanuel Rose: 30:16
Okay, Google up Emanuel Rose or go to emanuelrose.com or strategicemarketing.com.
John Corcoran: 30:21
emanuelrose.com.
Emanuel Rose: 30:26
That’s perfect.
John Corcoran: 30:27
Yeah. Emanuel thanks so much.
Emanuel Rose: 30:29
Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation, John.
Outro: 30:34
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.