Trust Insights

Chris was walking through what it would take to clean up the Marketing Over Coffee archive. A thousand-odd episodes back to 2007, when he and John were recording in a Dunkin' on Route 9 in Natick. The archive is a disaster. Sponsor blocks for a company that's been acquired five times over and doesn't exist in any form. Signup forms pointed at a service that's been dead about fifteen years. 165 outbound links that now 404. John's word for the current maintenance situation was "duct tape and chicken wire," and having looked at it, that's generous. So you point an agent at the mess. Fine. Except the agent has to actually reach WordPress, reach a transcription service, reach whatever makes the audiograms, and every one of those handoffs costs you real money if it goes through an MCP. His suggestion: put "does this have a CLI?" into your martech audit, next to the questions you already ask. If your vendor doesn't have one and their competitor does, that's a conversation worth having, and you have more leverage in it than you'd expect. Anyone actually checked their stack for this? Full video on YouTube! #MarTech #MarketingOps #AIAgents

Do you know what AI costs you when you ask people to use it?

One podcast episode can become a blog post, a newsletter, a set of social posts, and a video script. Doing all of that by hand is the part that never scales. That's the focus of this week's So What? livestream. We're getting into how to take any piece of media and transform it programmatically, so a single recording stops being one asset and starts being ten. What we'll cover: - How to take any piece of media and transform it programmatically - Everything you can pull from a single podcast episode - How to teach your AI agents to do the transformation for you Live tomorrow at 1pm ET on YouTube. Bring your questions! #ContentMarketing #MarketingAI #ContentStrategy #AIAgents

In this week's In-Ear #Insights (the @TrustInsights #podcast) @katierobbert & @cspenn Ever wonder who actually reads your blog posts? You might be surprised to learn that machines are your main audience. Find out how to transform one idea into videos, audio, and clips in minutes using free tools that do the heavy lifting for you. #Analytics #Data #ContentRepurposing #AITools #Insights #podcast

An hour of Katie Robbert and Christopher Penn's time, with no pitch attached. On August 18 at noon ET, that's what's on the table. A live AMA with no slides and no set agenda. You bring the question, they work through it with you in real time. The topics people actually raise tend to cluster. A GA4 setup that's quietly been wrong for months. An AI pilot that dazzled everyone in the demo and then went nowhere. A team that nods along in the meeting and never opens the tool again. None of those have a tidy one-line answer. That's the whole reason to do it live instead of in a blog post. You get the follow-up question, and the "well, it depends on what you're measuring" that actually unblocks you. It's free, it runs an hour, and the only thing to bring is the problem you've been circling. Link below in the comments!

You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers! We’re doing a FREE Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Tuesday, August 18th at 12pm EST. Got specific questions that Christopher Penn and I can answer for you? Join us! Don’t have questions, but know someone else who might? Please share the link - we appreciate it! Here is a picture of our Chief Barketing Officer, Georgia - who will also likely make an appearance. Registration link in the comments.

It's back to Traction Monday's with John Wall! Public speaking is still one of the most cost effective ways to put an expert in front of your market. Trade shows, conferences, and now virtual webinars all work, and the virtual route means your speaker never has to leave the office. But the format is not the point. The audience is. The most common mistake we see is sending a strong closer to talk to rooms full of people who are happy to learn and will never buy. Interest is not intent. Before you commit, look hard at who is actually in the seats and how much that audience is worth to you. Give it a month or two, then judge whether the leads justify the effort. And the effort is real. A brand new hour long talk can take 30 to 50 hours to build. The advantage shows up later. Once you have delivered a talk ten or fifteen times, the prep drops to almost nothing and the same talk becomes a repeatable marketing engine. Find those topics. Then run them. One caution: do not turn yourself into free training for an event that profits off your work while you get nothing back. We dig into what is working in events and speaking every week in our free Analytics for Marketers Slack. Search "Trust Insights Analytics for Marketers" to join. What is the best lead you have ever landed from a speaking gig? #B2BMarketing #EventMarketing #PublicSpeaking #LeadGeneration

Chris fixed a leaking furnace valve with his phone last week. He pointed the camera at it, asked what was wrong, and AI told him to hand tighten the pressure release valve. That saved him a $175 plumber call. It stuck with me, because "installation and repair" is one of the categories where the big new AI jobs study shows almost no usage at all. The study mines millions of Claude conversations to see where AI shows up across professions. Useful, but what it's really measuring is what people already know how to do with AI. And most people don't know much yet. They write emails with it, or ask it things they'd normally Google. So it tells you how aware people are in 2026. Not what the tools can actually do. The furnace fix is a small example of that gap. Our new paper works the problem backwards. Instead of scraping chat logs, we ran 90,000 job tasks through our TRIPS framework to score what AI can plausibly do. It matches reality a lot better than usage data, which fit only about a third of what's actually possible. If you're working out where AI fits in your business, start from what it can do, not from what your team already types into a chatbot. Both versions of the paper, the readable one and the academic one, are in our free Slack. Link's in the comments. #AIEnablement #FutureOfWork #AIStrategy #TrustInsights

Come hang out in just 5 minutes! Bring your questions! #AI #Automation #TheoreticalAI #AIUsage

Straight from the CEO! #Visibility #BlockingAI #AI #BusinessOrg