The New Rules of Discoverability: How User-Generated Content Is Reshaping Search, Trust, and Brand Visibility

Listeners and viewers, this is Ron Stefanski with yet another episode of Disrupt Ed, and I've taken a pause from being at New Lab this week while we've moved into a different, surroundings on the home front. And so I'm, broadcasting live out of my new office here in residential Detroit. And I am with Scott Wilder to do another episode of what we've become really fond of calling what we learned about tech, selling books and music, and drinking lots of coffee. So Scott and I, as you know from previous episodes, were once wedded together in a similar pursuit at Borders Books and Music, the big book emporium and chain. And through that time, we learned a lot about the emerging content creation scene because Borders hosted the first online event with an artist called Rodriguez who created the Blue Dog. And Scott was the architect of building sites for all two hundred, at that time, two fifty stores. So they each had a unique web presence out there and that's where our story began. And we've reconnected along that tech journey, and Scott has gone on to do some astronomic gobsmacking things in the world of tech, and he is currently the head of product for LastPass. So Scott, let's talk today about user generated content and the press of these large language learning models, ChatGPT and others, and how they're impacting life for content creators. Because I think a lot of people are wondering, you know, now I've been creating content. I've been doing it on my platform of choice on LinkedIn, on Pinterest, on YouTube. But now how do I have to consider the impact that using a large learning model is going to have on making my content more discoverable to my audience? So I'd love for you to weigh in on this and help us sort through this. Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me again. It's always great being a partner in crime with you and drinking coffee, reading books. I still have books on my bookshelves. I know they're kinda disappearing quickly. I just dropped off a whole bunch at the public library yesterday. You know what? I guess, you know, I'm gonna stay on that for just a second, Pat, because I have ten boxes of books still downstairs. And if you look around my office, it's all full of books now. But, you know, when you have to go through and move, what you end up doing is curating the books you most wanna have behind you. And what I'm finding is I've created a short stack of books that I wanna go back and reread. And as you know, I don't use a Kindle. I don't use an electronic thing. I gotta have the physical book. But now I have all these books that I'm kind of revisiting. And I'm currently reading, Angela's Ashes, which is a classic from when we could read borders together as a bestseller. And, I started rereading it. What a great read. But, anyway, you're talking about creating content. You're talking about those days of doing it, and now what's discoverable and how to make it more discoverable. So help us understand a little bit about that. Yeah. I mean, I have a simple framework for how to make how to be more discoverable in LMs. It's content, it's community, and it's citations. Right? So content, we'll talk about community, we'll talk about. Citations is just making sure that you're mentioned on other sites. You know, all these I look at content as kind of the the logs, the coal, the the wood that keeps the fire running. Right, and the fire is LLMs, and the challenge that organizations are facing is, like, how do you create more content, right, you know, without hiring more contractors, more people, yeah, you know, you can have LLMs create content, but then, you know, there's, at least at this stage, you you risk hallucinations, you risk whether or not it's authentic, so that's where UGC, user generated content, really comes into play, and can you really think about your ecosystem of advocates, influencers, just regular customers, and can they contribute content for you? And can they contribute content for you on the properties you own and also the non owned properties, like Reddit, Quora, YouTube, things like that. Now you were mentioning in a previous episode that Reddit has a big play in all this, and let let's walk through that a little bit. What is it about Reddit that you think helps define and influence the the state of the state for creators nowadays? Yeah. Well, Google Google kinda took the lead and upgraded their algorithms to, leverage Reddit more because it is user generated content, because user generated content gets, updated all the time. It also helps with the long tail, right, so the long tail meaning, like, you know, the the head of the you think about search engines, like, the top pages are, like, the most common content, but there's a huge long tail of other content that's being asked, so community is also good for that. And Reddit has some really good moderation tools and moderators that really keeps the content and the conversation on track. And so you're seeing ChatGPT, you're seeing Google, you're seeing Perplexity, all these AI tools really leveraging Reddit as opposed to others. Now what's happening is, all of a sudden, everybody's, like, thinking, I gotta be on Reddit, and I gotta do this, you know, I have to have a presence there. So so Miro, you know, a design site, are running a contest right now that says, you know, if, you know, I wore these just for this conversation. If you're they're in a contest that if you upvote us, you'll get a chance to win an AirPod. Well, you know, upvoting doesn't necessarily say it's gonna be valuable content. So I think, you know, it might change over time. The caveat being is Reddit gets a nice sixty million dollars from Google, so Google can use their content. Interesting. So when you think about content from that perspective, it's really about creating community, and for that, you need to be discoverable. I mean, you need to have your stuff found, right, in order to create that community. What are some of the things you think we're not thinking about as we move quickly into this large language model mode. Because, you know, in one of our very first episodes, you were telling me to try the use of several different large learning language models to see how the answers would be different. And almost by definition, I found that sort of crazy because by definition, they should all be finding and scraping the same content and coming to the same conclusions. But invariably, they don't. So something in their algorithmic compilation or something is different that allows them to showcase a certain amount of variety when you're when you're going from, you know, chat GPT to perplexity or some of these other ones. So tell us a little bit more about that. Help us understand a little bit more about that. I do go into bookstores, but I don't go into kitchens. But let's just use a kitchen analogy here. Like, you and I can make the same boulabes or same stew, but we use different ingredients. You know, you'll put more salt in, I'll put more sugar in. I know. See, I'm not a cook, but just you get the idea. And it's the same thing with these LLMs. They'll put more they'll emphasize Reddit more than YouTube versus another property. So that's just one example of how it might be difference different. But the LMs are really summarizing and translating and contextualizing the content. So I think from when it comes to UGC, we need to help these engines along. So if we just take Community, for example, every Community platform has a title and then the body for the text when a customer or user enters text. Well, the title is great, but the the text basically is, it's not really a format of any sort, like I don't think as a user, you know, I need to use bullet points, I need to use this, right? And so I think that, you know, if we're having UGC, releveraging user created content, we need to help the customer, help the user along, so that they can put their you don't want to ruin their creativity and their spontaneity, but you can help them along by having a simple template that will help, that will translate into something that the LLMs can pick up. So, you know, there's a company called WikiHow, and Jack, who created that, you know, is really great because years ago, you know, WikiHow basically is a user generated Wiki. Right? So you and I create, okay. Let's get off PulaBase and say, how to how to assemble a vacuum cleaner. I don't know. Right? So I could go in there and list out I love all these examples you're coming up with. It's like it's almost like you're following the list of things to do your wife gave you earlier today, you're kinda rougher. You know me too well. Busted. So but what he did is he really had a template, that included, like, you know, put five bullet points here, put this here, and I think, you know, as we start collecting user generated content, those are things we can do. Now sometimes user generated content could be on, you know, talked about citations, could be on G2, or could be someplace on another site, like G2 is a review site, so anything you can do to kind of guide the user to put their creativity, their content in a certain template or certain templated form, because the LMs, they like summaries. So literally, you know, you might have a title, but at the top of your post, you know, even if you had the word summary, that's gonna guide the LMs. They like bullet points. They like FAQs, thing things like that. So, yeah. So just kind of summarizing, the LLMs are different because of how they're weighting their sources and some of the algorithms they're using, just the same way as Bing and Google are different for search, and then there's things you can do to help the user when they're they're creating content. And you also, one last thing, so, a lot of times you'll have moderators on communities, They can help guide the user as well, Fame. Can you rephrase this, for example? No. That makes a lot of sense. Now, you know, I think about content creation from the standpoint of your average brilliant marketer, and it seems to me that that's where we're seeing the influence of user generated content kind of taking over center stage. So when companies are in effect learning about themselves, is that creating a scripted story about who they are and what their value proposition and all that is, that that's not very interesting or compelling to the consumer. And we don't put much trust in that because it's scripted and because it's telling us what they want us to know. And so we don't put as much trust in that and we put more trust in someone who's less scripted and more authentic. Recently, I've been following a woman who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Solo Stove, Liz Van Zura, and you know Liz through Rickby. I love her new product. My God. In following her, have you noticed that? I mean, her content just, I mean, not to draw too fine a point, but I mean it really sizzles. Know you she's on Good Morning America and she's got people at tailgates and to me that's that represents kind of the best of the best where. You're unleashing other people to tell your stories and it just so happens that they have a product that has high engagement from their audience. People who have solo stoves love these things And I in fact have one on order because I'm in a house now for the first time after fifteen years in a condo. So this is my fall bucket list is to have a solo stove for outside, you know, kind of fire nights. And to me, what's interesting about that is they've unleashed a whole community of people that are talking about, in effect, they're sharing are stories about their own use cases, what they found interesting. But it's captivating because you're hearing about someone's life at a tailgate and how they brought this puppy along and fired it up, and suddenly they're doing all kinds of things. It just seems to me that that's probably one of the best in your face examples of how the marketing narration has fundamentally flipped the script, and it's now the community who's buying this product actually advertising its other would be buyers. Right? Isn't that kind of what's happening? Yeah, no, exactly. First of all, it's a great, great product. I love the the community aspect of it, of bringing people together, but yeah, I mean, I'd rather hear it from, you know, somebody who's using the product than the company. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I go to Amazon, and I never read the product descriptions. I always read the fours and threes and twos. The reviews? The reviews, right? Because I'd rather know how John Smith or Sally Smith has used the product, and what they like and don't like, you know? Yeah. I mean, consumers want to hear from other other folks, right? People like them, you know, it's a it's a I might have told this story once, is I was hired by Sony to develop this product, which was an Internet reader you put on your night table, and they, you know, they had all this they hired me, and they said, here, read all the product information. And so I was like, I don't know if you guys have ever read Sony product information, but it's first of all, the mouse type is this it's mouse type, and it's and it's written by an engineer, not like a consumer in most cases. Anyway, I went to Amazon, and I read all the reviews, and, all the reviews talked about how there's a group of ladies, yes, ladies, who would use it as a recipe reader in the kitchen. Like, who knew? Oh, wow. Yeah. You know? Sony was saying, this is like you put on your night table as an Internet reader, and I wanted to hear what consumers said, and what the consumers were telling me, something totally different, and one of the reasons the product died was because they never really embraced that. They said, Wilder, you don't know what you're talking about. So but if you went to Amazon, and I literally, you know, maybe you can use some scrape tool and do this today, but I like to read what people say or or hear or watch the video, and I read probably, like, five hundred reviews, and all the fours, threes, twos. Don't worry about the fives and ones because the fives are probably from somebody like Tony, and the ones are probably had a bad hair day. And, you know, that's where the juice is, the, you know, the verbatim, the key insights, and you want to hear, you know, and also look for people who are like me, you know, single dads who, or dads, because I was, I wasn't a single dad. You know, I was a single guy. Single guy is trying to, like, figure out what to do with this device, and sure enough, there was all this advice about using it in the kitchen as a recipe reader. You know, I think that's a really good example because as I think about learning about products and where it comes from, I think about, you know, there's a certain amount of discernment that has to come from looking at user reviews. I mean, I use restaurants as an example. I always read the customer reviews and invariably you're going to have someone that tells you they had the best meal ever there and then following it is going be a person who waves it off and says, this is a horrible place. It's a reminder that restaurants have always been slaves to their their last worst effort. You know, they have to replicate the experience the same way over and over again. But it also tells you something about the power of the consumer in this whole process. You know, Scott, just as we are wrapping up, around the time we were wrapping up our tenure at Borders, there was the Clue Train Manifesto. Do you remember that? Yep. I have a copy still right here. It's one of the books I still have. And I always found the Clue Train manifesto a really powerful statement about where media was going and where marketing was going. And if you look back to the Clue manifesto, which I do, I go and reference it time and again, it's as evergreen as there is because what it basically says is in a world with technology, you know, trying to be all things to all people is not gonna work and and appealing to a mass audience, those days are over. People don't buy it. People don't want it. People are going to shun it and what they really want is. Authentic, real, specific to their needs. All those things And I find the Clue Tree Manifesto is as relevant today as it was twenty five years ago when it roughly came out. Yeah. No. It's it's great. You know, it's funny because we start, you know, we we started together, you know, talking about books, music, and coffee, but think about book clubs. Right? Like, people are giving feedback on the book. They're kind of reviewing the book to their friends and their peers. It's a it's a very similar concept. It's people who you trust, right, people who are like you in some way, you know, maybe they come from the same school, maybe they're, you know, your parents onto the same kid's baseball team, whatever it is, and you have something in common, and like you do in a book club, and you've been brought together, and you are listening and putting value on what somebody is saying, and that's the Clue Tree Manifesto is kind of saying something similar about these group of people who have like minded people. Right. Well, let's follow that train of thought as it relates to community, because I think the book club is a great example of early stage community building. And when we were at Borders, ninety nine point nine percent of the book clubs that were out there, and we were feeding them content and readers guides and publishers were giving us stuff to give away at stores to help foster that. But ninety nine point nine percent of those reading and book discussion groups were women only. They were exclusively women. And what I find interesting is the emergence of male book clubs. And I was talking to a friend of mine, Joe Hemley, recently who was a professor of psychology, and he had joined a book group of men probably a year or two ago. And there's an interesting adaptation of how they put this book group together. So they all choose the book together in a meeting. So they all come together and kind of throw out suggestions and then kind of all agree upon what they're going to read. But the key deviation from the standard book club is they don't read the book ahead of time, they read the book to each other and they go around paragraph by paragraph reading the book for however long it takes. And what's interesting about the communal experience Joe was describing to me is that someone will read something and then have a comment about it, and then they'll go off on a digression and they don't end up reading anymore until the next week. Other times they'll speed through a bunch of stuff and then they'll come to a grinding halt. But you know, that harkens back to historically what the reading experience was all about. There's another book that came out right around the time we were at Borders and Sven Burkerts, the author of this book, was a Borders bookseller at one point. And he wrote a book of early aughts called The Gutenberg Elegies. And basically, his contention was that there's something to be said about reading versus acquiring all kinds of information and content in sort of a massive blast feed. And what he was you know, the analogy he was using is that in the day when there were a few books, people had maybe one or two books in their possession. It was always a bible, and then it may be one or two other books. And they would reread and reread that same book over and over again, and good books lent themselves to multiple interpretations and going back and reading it and getting another interpretation out of it or getting something more out of it. And if you think about the way children read books, when they first start having you read them a book, I don't know if your kids are like this, but mine would be like, Read it again. Read it again. And they'd want you to read it two or three times. So I think that's what this book club invariably tapped into was this desire to really refract the knowledge experience, to really think about deeply and intentionally what they were putting in front of themselves by way of content, by way of information, by way of reading. Your thoughts on that? Well, I really love that you brought that up because, you know, I've been doing user working with user generated content, you know, for, you know, even before Borders, and I've also always wrestled with voice. The voice gets lost because most of their user generated content is text based. I mean, I know we have YouTube, but that's one way. It's not in so maybe it's interactive voice, or I'm sure there's a better term for it. So I think that's and to your point, that's you know, goes back many centuries. And so I think, yeah, there is this value of reading out loud or sharing, you know, sharing your thoughts about a book verbally versus, you know, writing writing a text message or things like that. So, yeah, I would love to see more of that. I wrestle with how the LMs will convey that, meaning conveying the stories that Ron has, the story that Scott has, and also the voice. You can, like, you know, put something into Google Notebook and, you know, get voice out of it, you know, like, can put a It's not the same. Right? It's not the not the same, and I hope somebody cracks the code on how to really preserve that. Well, know, when you think about it, there was from the last time we had our episode several weeks back until now, I read an article about how there's a large language model that is created, an app where you can basically create, using AI, you can completely create a podcast episode. Yeah. And I immediately freaked and I thought, woah, what does this do to Scott and me, man? We like sitting around talking about all this stuff. Are we gonna be are we gonna be obsolete within weeks of starting this? And the answer is no. I try not to worry too much about that. I think, you know, it's more important to say, like, you know, how can we crack the code so that our voice is maintained, how our voice is retained in terms of, you know, you can go to a bot, you can go to Google Notebook, and you can hear, you know, an automated voice. Like, for example, you know, I read the Washington Post and the New York Times every day. The Washington Post for a while has had an automated voice read articles. The Times just started, and I know it's not scalable. It's hard to be scalable, but I would love to hear the writer's voice. You know, it drives me crazy that, you know, that I can't hear the person who wrote the article actually speak. You know? I yes. It's more efficient sometimes to listen to the article while I'm walking, but I'd rather hear it, you know, the person who wrote the article. There's just, like, there's something there that a bot, at least for a while, maybe five years, whatever it is, is not gonna get that that that emotion, that sentiment. You're using a great example. It's not to interrupt. You're using a great example of The New York Times, and here's why. I mean, I think what they doubled down on over the last ten years to really reinvigorate the brand in a digital way was the paywall number one, but then number two, they doubled down on hiring really first rate journalists. And I think it's because they knew ultimately that voice is going to resonate with people and that that voice is going to become ever more important in establishing bona fides when it comes to content. Right? Yeah. I mean, I'd rather hear Ezra Klein and his voice, and I do hear his voice, but when I click on a call in an everyday article, then I hear an automated voice. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I build a relationship with the journalist. I start looking for that same journalist who wrote a certain article, and it's not the same. You know, like David Sanger is a great example. He writes, I love politics, I love war stuff, and he writes a lot about international affairs, and if I see an article that has an automated voice for him, it's not the same. I'll tell you a funny story, I graduated from college back in the '80s, and on my drive home from Vassar, I actually was with one of my best childhood friends, and I recorded our conversation in the car, and it's on a cassette, and I still have it, and I listen to it every few years. I sound totally different. Because I was growing up in New York, I have, you probably can hear a little bit, but I had a wicked New York City That accent, and listening to my voice, creates personality, creates an association, creates a feeling, or takes me back to what I was like then, you know? And I and I I think it's the same thing when I'm reading, you know, reading The New York Times, or, you know, I wanna hear that voice. You know, I wanna hear Ezra Klein the way he speaks, for example. Right. I was thinking of Nicholas Christoff when when you mentioned Ezra Klein. I mean, there are some really great and powerful journalists out there. I remember it was probably ten, fifteen years ago. Ricky Bragg was writing and come from, you know, come from the deep south and got a gig at The New York Times and was writing there for a while. And he wrote all over but the shout, you know, and he just had that, you know, that sort of well spun, you know, lilting Southern accent. And it came through not only in his writing, but in his voice, you know? And I think voice is an important consideration when it comes to all of this. Yeah. I have an exercise and a challenge for folks. If you think like, okay, Scott, okay, Ron, you know, you guys are smoking something and your voice isn't important. Call somebody from your past that you haven't spoken to in twenty or thirty years, and once you hear their voice and you have that connection, you'll understand what we're talking about. There's this thing really you know, this is something I've been doing recently is connecting with all these people from my past. And so then you can imagine now having, you know, a group of voices at a book club or some sort of, you know, online forum where people can talk, right? All of a sudden, you're going beyond text, you're getting that emotion, you're getting that authenticity, the trust comes in because you hear how they speak, you hear, you know, whether it's an accent, whether it's a, you know, a joke, you know, do they make coffee analogies all the time, whatever it is. Right. Well, you know, last week, Scott, I was in your old stomping grounds in New York City. I was at the Clinton Global Initiative for, three days, and there was a lot about content creating on the program. And so there are a number of content creators. There was a comedian, a trans comedian by the name of Cyrus Vaesse. And he's a comedian and he does all this stuff and he's seen and heard by millions. And then Malika Vaz was also on stage talking about her work with Untamed Planet and on sustainability. And there was Deepak Bhargava who was talking about social norms and about, you know, reclaiming democracy in different ways. Each of those content creators, and then there was a guy Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has developed a voice in recent years. He's a law student. He's in his twenties. But by being authentic, he's now reaching two billion views a month. I think how do you go from, you know, being someone that's just telling your own story to being so widely listened to, observed, followed, etc. You know, what do you think? You know, I mean, obviously you spend a lot of time thinking about this from a business perspective, but what do you think are some of the tenants of how people go from zero to five billion in, you know, in a short amount of time when it comes to somehow heralding the combination of their voice, their knowledge, their perspective, and their experiences into something that's compelling to many, many others. Yeah. I think it's the key is, like, what's the topic in the audience? Right? So what are you going to talk about that maybe hasn't been talked about too much, or it's been more niche? How do you bring it to the forefront? And is it something that people can relate to? You know? Well, you know, whatever that whatever that topic is, it could be a medical situation you find yourself And and are you are you gonna be find something that's relatable, both yourself, what you're saying? But it's not easy. I mean, it's definitely definitely a challenge. You You you see it on, you know, TikTok. You see it on Google YouTube Shorts. You see it, you know, on x. You know? So is there something that you're doing that others can relate to it? Unfortunately, a lot of times it's related to pain, like, pain or rough experience you're going through in your life. You know? If I had a life threatening disease, maybe more people would want to help me with that than, you know, hear about, like, you know, I don't know, something, you know, how I go to certain baseball stadiums all the time. I don't know, whatever, you know. So I think that's one thing, is the topic, the audience you're trying to reach. I think consistency is really important. And then you need your friends in arms. You need what I mean by that is you need other people like you who can help spread the word. You know? Ron's launching, you know, a really successful, you know, YouTube podcast. You know? Can you get together the border alumni, bring the band back together again, and see how they can help spread the word. So, you know, those are just like two or three of the different ingredients, but it takes time, and also patience and persistence. Like, don't give up right away. Yeah. I think that's true of a lot of cases with podcasts, and I see that happening all the time, where someone starts a podcast, and then six months in, they start losing their appetite because they don't have that big pop that they expected. And it takes a while to grow an audience. I mean, I know I I feel like I've been relatively successful at building an audience, but I haven't been you know, I I'm not one of those people that's gone from zero to a million. I've gone from zero to twenty five thousand in a year, which I consider an accomplishment because those are all curated connections that I feel some kind of association with. And so to me, that's always been a good model, is slowly build an audience and get better and better at refining your voice, refining the quality of your production. And really and truly, and I know this from every time someone takes a moment to share feedback about Disrupt Ed every single time, it's about you. It's about my guests. They find my guests to be some of the most interesting, quirky, intelligent, articulate, wise people. And so I think one of the successes of fulfilling that destiny to be a creator and to have an audience is to pick them right, To pick the people that you're gonna, you know, whose stories you want to share or lift up or socialize, because they certainly feel like you and I have certainly done that. We've restored a longtime friendship that was dormant and we kept up through social media and things like that, but not to the degree that we do now. And it's fun to go back and to think about some of those experiences, but to build on it and to create something new. I do think we're at an apocalypse time. I think we're at a time where everyone is considering questions around user generated content. It taken on the main stage for advertisers, for marketers, for product developers. All of them are looking at user generated content as the keys to unlocking you know, their audience and their full potential. Would you agree with that? Completely agree. I mean, I've actually, you know, done a lot of things in my career, but one of the consistent themes has been user generated content, right? And part of that's based on my own preference of, just like we were talking, I'd rather hear it from the book club than an automated voice, or from the company, you know, I don't want to hear from the publisher about a book, I want to hear about from my peers what they think of the book, so user generated content is is close to close close to my heart here, and I think there's a you know, as a creator or act I won't even say it's a creator. You know, Ron is an orchestrator. Right? So he has his his podcast, his video cast, and he's basically orchestrating it in terms of the marketing side of it, in terms of the content side, in terms of the guests he's inviting. And that's really the key is to be a good orchestrator.