The Bacon Podcast with Brian Basilico | CURE Your Sales & Marketing with Ideas That Make It SIZZLE!

I have always been driven by three principles in life and business. Although I have not always been 100% successful in adhering to them, I have noticed that I am 1000 times happier and more successful when I do.   First, life is about motion, emotion, promotion, commotion, and finally, ethical motivation! “When you stop learning, you stop earning.” I have loved learning from others, and I believe that when you teach others, you learn twice as much, twice as fast! Second, it’s advice from Kenny Rogers. “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em,  Know when to fold ’em, Know when to walk away, And know when to run.” All that motion, emotion, promotion, commotion, and ethical motivation will never change the cards you are dealt. Third, it’s part biblical and for the Byrds: “To everything (turn, turn, turn) / There is a season (turn, turn, turn) / And a time for every purpose under heaven.” 2014 was my turn to start a podcast, and 2024 (now 2025) is my turn to explore better ways to serve you… my people, fans, and audience!

This time of year, the two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s, always seem like a blur. It’s hard to remember what day today is, especially when both holidays fall in the middle of a week. Business generally grinds to a halt with people and companies taking vacations. TV is filled with retrospectives of the past year. It’s mind-blowing when you realize all of the events that have happened in the last 365 days. It’s also a time to look forward and try to plan how you would like your next year to play out. In this new technologically charged business environment, it’s almost impossible to predict. Larger companies with more people and resources are more capable of directing their futures than small companies, but none of us have crystal balls. All we can do is try to adapt to what’s next. In this podcast, I would like to give you some insights into what I see coming for business and technology in the coming year.

One of the world’s great mysteries is the Bermuda Triangle. When it comes to any social media platform, people, features, and more are like the Bermuda Triangle. One second, they are there, and the next, they are gone. If you feel like your content is being swallowed up by LinkedIn’s Bermuda Triangle (algorithms), I am here to offer you hope. The two things I have mentioned are to connect with as many relational contacts, and initiate engagement with them as much as possible. As I have said in past posts, email is the only tool you can use to control who sees your content. In reality, spam blockers and bad data can hinder that, but the message gets delivered. As a basic free system, social media is controlled by AI to determine who sees your content and when they see it, making it seem and feel like it just swallows it up.

We have officially transitioned from the information economy to the attention economy. The Information Economy has significantly transformed B2B business, driving a shift towards data-driven decision-making and digital transactions. In this paradigm, companies leverage information and communication technologies (ICT) to streamline business. The Attention Economy has profoundly impacted B2B business, transforming companies’ engagement with clients and prospects. In this new paradigm, marketers face the challenge of capturing and retaining the scarce attention of decision-makers amidst an overwhelming flood of information. The main difference between the email inbox and the postal inbox is often looked at as cost. It can cost pennies to send to either. Email costs a fraction of a cent to send, while it costs 50¢ to 70¢ to send a postcard. Email tends to have a 20-40% deliverability. But, if you have the correct mailing address for somebody’s postal box, you have a 90% or greater deliverability, which is 2-4 times more successful than email. We are seeing an increase in companies scrubbing their client data. What I mean is that they are looking at their CRM or accounting data and copying and filtering in spreadsheets (by the way, my company does that for them). The art of getting personal is going to become more of a norm than being part of the “AI Machine.” Automation is great at some things but not at developing relationships.  

In 1979, AT&T employed a marketing campaign aimed to soften AT&T’s image and promote long-distance calling as an essential part of everyday American life. It focused on “selling emotion” by emphasizing the human desire to connect with others. Phone numbers were designated to a person, an address, and even a desk when PBX systems were implemented at companies. With the advent of computers and now AI, talking to a human is damn near impossible, especially if they don’t have your number in their contact system in their phone or VOIP system. What has been lost in all of this transition to technology is the “Art of the Phone Call.” That makes every connection on social media and every conversation a valuable asset in your business arsenal. As I said before, it costs more to have human-to-human contact, but that is something that no internet form, chatbot, or automated voice tree hell will ever give you. The main thing is to find a way to get people to share information. Reaching out and touching someone digitally has become more complicated and time-consuming than it has been in the past. This is why the 10-10-10 method is so effective.

“Time Warp” is one of the most recognizable songs from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” It was created as a time filler for the stage play but has exploded in popularity and become a central part of audience participation during film screenings and live performances. When the movie came out in 1975, things were very different. People read newspapers, listened to the radio, and watched TV to get the news. Newspapers were themselves a Time Warp. The news was generally a day old, printed at night, and delivered by morning. Social media started out as a way for communities and news organizations to reach their audiences again. In its heyday, Twitter let you (the user) choose or restrict who and what you wanted to follow. Facebook and Instagram let you choose who you see and follow. The time warp happens when the algorithms feed you old information. Looking closely at your feed, you will see posts from hours, days, months, and years ago. Even though news and sports have been about what’s happening now, posts show me things that have happened before! This is part one of a series. Over the next few weeks, I will show you some tools and techniques that you can use to overcome these challenges. While social media is still a valid and attractive tool for business, you will want to use it with your eyes wide open. Their goal is to extract money for attention. Your goal is to use that attention to make money. Profit is the motive in both cases, but you must make more than you spend to see a profit.

Have you seen the price of eggs? I have not, but I hear it’s high. It is a battle cry for those who go to the grocery store and see that their cart has less, yet they are paying more. My wife loves carrot cake. Recently, there was a recall of carrots. I wonder if that is why I am paying $6 for one slice instead of an entire cake. We all are looking for that one thing: to get people’s attention and keep them engaged long enough to learn something and maybe even change their point of view. I am trying to convey the idea (the one thing) that complex problems rarely have simple messages or solutions. Audiences are looking for that one easy thing that will rock their world and make them wealthy and successful. Times change, people change, businesses change, and AI will accelerate this change. What has not changed is that “Businesses do not do business with other businesses… People do business with people!” But have you seen the price of eggs lately?

Back in the 1960s, the TV program was called The Twilight Zone. It was an anthology series that explored fantasy, science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller elements. In today’s complicated new marketing and media world, it can feel like we are living in a Twilight Zone. Marketing is about getting people to become aware and engaged and building trust. If you work in a vacuum, then your messages are delivered more organically to the recipient. But when you try to use a delivery platform like a social media or search platform, your message has additives of other content surrounding it and the timing as to how and when it’s delivered. We are in the part of the business year that is like another Twilight Zone. It’s the two months between Halloween and New Year’s Day. If you are in the consumer market, you are primed for people to be in a good mood and spend a lot of money on themselves and gifts for others. If you are in the business-to-business market, you are trying to finish the year strong while the people you sell to are winding down. No one can predict what 2025 will be like for business. AI will continue to grow in power and popularity, but how will your clients and audience use and adapt to it?

If you watch broadcast TV, I am sure you are happy the election is over and all we have to watch now are pharmaceutical and Christmas commercials. One of the interesting things I heard in post-election analysis was that a billion dollars was spent on TV ads. At the same time, the most decisive information was distributed via free-to-access websites and apps. This was described as paywall and non-paywall media. I never really thought about that but it makes sense. It becomes a matter of trust. Voters trusted without needing journalistic and regulatory confirmation that the information was accurate or even true. That works for elections, but you cannot take trust that lightly in business. Like a human body, trust is a complex system with some essential parts, needs, and truths. It has a brain, digestive system, lungs, and a heart. The body is a system, and the brain, the stomach, the lungs, and the heart all need each other for the body to function and survive. Trust in business is the same thing. It takes thinking, seeing, and feeling to ensure your business relationships are built on respect and trust. They need to be fed with consistent quality information, thought leadership, and a dash of advice. You must constantly breathe new life into relationships while expelling the negative. It also takes heart to feel and empathize with how a relationship is mutually beneficial and not merely transactional.

AI has been part of our culture for a long time. Think about the movies that have predicted where we are now. Although this is Hollywood and entertainment, we have realized most of this already: 2001 = Self-Driving Vehicles Matrix = VR Games and Headsets Her = ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa, and more impressive versions coming soon The biggest thing holding AI back or impeding it’s progress is it knowing who it’s talking to. Personalization will need to go way beyond what information is available on the Internet. What it will need (and what you want to do with your marketing) is called Hyper-Personalization. The problem with data is that it constantly changes. A real-life example is trying to do something very old-school: sending US Mail to customers. Chances are, you have a database or CRM where the records are old. In no way, shape, or form am I saying that digital marketing (social and email) wastes time and money? I can tell you that human-to-human interaction will increase interactions with your digital presence. Humans are complex, fickle, and emotionally charged beings. It takes just being there as another human being to build that trust again and again, as needed.