Ramblings by Mason Pelt (Podcast)

Google grants access to information kings didn’t have 50 years before. I have consumed so much content, books, podcasts, movies, articles, songs, and possibly the Ph.D. thesis of a woman from Chesapeake. I cannot remember it all.

Like most, I’ll occasionally use Google to find a specific but only half-recalled crumb of content. Increasingly I use services other than Google because Google sucks as a search engine. No, Grammarly, I don’t mean “Google search could be better.” Google search is worse than it was three years ago.³

People Google Search In Two Ways

People use Google to find general information where any credible source is acceptable. Or they use Google looking for specific results.

Searching, “who is Neil Gaiman”, or “list of the endless in the Neil Gaiman series” will likely give searchers the answers they seek.

But ask with less specificity, incorrect information, and synonyms, “list of the eternals from the Marvel comics books by Neil Gaiman” and Google fails to return an answer about the DC Comics series The Sandman.

A human could justifiably struggle to answer the same question. This is a fundamental limitation of indexing an evolving glob of information.

Complexities Of Indexing Growing Information

You don’t need to keep an index for a few books on a nightstand. If you have no memory of one or more books, just read the dust jackets. This solution doesn’t scale.

At libraries with rooms of shelves crammed with books, indexing them is a process. Library classification is complex, but every book has its place. Staff spend their days’ shelf reading, looking for out-of-place books, and putting them where they belong.

Google is the shop with an index of the web. Per a Google help page, “that index is similar to an index in a library, which lists information about all the books the library has available.” Instead of books, Google indexes webpages.

Google was the first search engine to use bibliometrics as part of an algorithm to sort and rank results based on quality and relevance to a search. People used this index of webpages to find the specific in the everything. The web has grown exponentially, shifting as pages are changed, deleted, replaced, and moved.

Few Attempt To Manipulate Libraries

Ranking at the top of a highly searched term on Google can mean millions of dollars. It’s like a high-profit marathon that never ends, and only pays out while you’re winning. The incentives mean Google has been playing cat and mouse with marketers trying to beat the algorithm since the early days.

For a few years now, Google, the Kleenex of online search,...

The Business Of Helping Build Businesses by Mason Pelt was first published in HackerNoon on January 12, 2020. While This article was published first on HackerNoon, the website’s editorial team deleted it following a copyright dispute. This article is updated with more context and published in MasonPelt.com on May 3, 2023.

This goes out to freelancers and those who run professional service companies. Are you building a business or helping others build theirs? It can be both. But that requires awareness, caution, and focus.

Every company I’ve founded has been a B2B service firm, meaning we make money providing services to other companies. Sometimes those services are tightly connected to the business with whom we work — for example, working as a fractional marketing team member for a startup yet to hire anyone to fill the role.

Working as a service provider (for example, offering PPC management), especially when tied tightly to a fledgling company, makes it easy to think you function like a founder. In some cases, I’ve even been told my role was that of a temporary founder. To serve as a generalist hand on deck, with the goal of growing the company.

At issue is that a contracted firm is not a founder or even an employee. If the startup goes big, there is no future liquidity event that makes the contracted agency money. If the startup fails, well, the contractor loses a client, and probably never possessed the clout to prevent the failure.

I love it when the founders of companies my agency works with are successful. But I learned the hard way that shorting my own company to help them is a bad idea. Just like any funded startup, if my agency has an investor, I owe them my best effort to create a return on their investment. It should be the same when I am the only investor.

I used to office in a startup accelerator. While there, I’d listen to pitches and watch teams work on developing ideas that were statistically doomed to fail. I thought it was cool. For a long time, I sought out working with startups, it was fun, and I am predisposed towards buying into “the vision”. I’d probably have worked for Fyre Festival at a deep discount if I’d met Billy McFarland.

I used to bend over backward, offering startups discounts because the idea that I could have even a small part in shaping the next unicorn was kind of exciting. Later I got jaded and stopped working with all pre-revenue startups for some time.

My disillusion with early-stage startups happened because I’ve worked with maybe 40 failed startups. In most cases, I’d start with a discounted offer and then listen as founders tried to negotiate the rates further. Typical reasons a startup would ask for a discount included not having closed an A-round and merely being a startup.

Of the startups that had little funding, most spent money foolishly, and as a service provider I had no control. Even when I was on the cap table or paid a percentage of the value I was creating, I was not a founder or investor; I never had a vote.

If I felt buying 10 Aeron Chairs from Herman Miller was a waste of money, that opinion did not matter. As a service provider or a minority shareholder, I had no real control over anything. But I had mistakenly tied the revenue of my business to the success of a startup that spends $12,000 on chairs, despite having only four employees and an insignificant $200k seed round.

Anyone who hires my agency will expect us to produce good work and follow what is laid out in our contracts. What I expect are my rates, paid according to our agreement. Clearly, if I fail to deliver, no one will work with me, so for my firm to succeed, I must be successful in helping other businesses. That lesson took me a long time to learn, and honestly, I’m still learning.

For those of you in the business of helping other businesses, don’t forget about your firm. It’s important to provide results for clients, and it’s paramount to live up to your contracts. That is all for nothing if your firm isn’t economically stable. This isn’t profound, but put on your oxygen mask first.

---

This article was written by Push ROI’s Mason Pelt, was first published in HackerNoon<...

To greatly paraphrase Tolstoy, you can explain anything to a complete ding dong if they know nothing about the topic, but you’ll fail to explain it to the greatest minds if they start with any preconceptions. Cognitive bias is powerful. People will pay more for a worse product if they think the brand is better.

BuzzFeed News

BuzzFeed built a digital brand that can only be understood by living online during its heyday. The way reposted videos of TikTok fill Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, is only slightly more pervasive than the level to which BuzzFeed content once filled social feeds. Everyone knew BuzzFeed, but few loved it.

The media company built traffic without an audience. BuzzFeed appeared to show you a compilation of oddly satisfying power-washing videos or a quiz to learn what kind of potato you were. Like the big-name cola that isn’t Coca-Cola, people knew the brand, but it was a preference for very few.

BuzzFeed News launched in 2011, and was shuttered in 2023. The news outlet won the George Polk Award, The Sidney Award, National Magazine Award, the National Press Foundation award, and a Pulitzer Prize. BuzzFeed News built an audience concentrated with news hounds and other journalists. Although BuzzFeed News was editorially separate from BuzzFeed in the ways that matter, the company never really shook the BuzzFeed brand.

The first rule of celebrity roasts is, tell jokes to make the widest audience laugh. In practice, this means a lot of jokes about Martha Stewart going to prison. Sadly for BuzzFeed News, the BuzzFeed brand meant, the jokes were about investigations into what K-pop star you’d be if a member of BTS bit you. Jokes no one could make about any other Pulitzer Prize winning outlet.

It hurt BuzzFeed News more because many of the highest-traffic articles are entertainment reporting of the gossip column variety. Here are three examples;

1. Bhad Bhabie Said People Who Joined Her OnlyFans As Soon As She Turned 18 Should Be In Jail And Revealed She Often Receives Explicit Photos From Her Subscribers
2. People Are Convinced That Miley Cyrus Just Slammed Liam Hemsworth For Cheating For Months After She Dropped Her Breakup Anthem “Flowers” On His Birthday
3. Ray J Just Claimed That Kris Jenner Watched Multiple Different Sex Tapes Of Him And Kim Kardashian And Chose Which One To Release To The Public

I haven’t seen BuzzFeed News’ analytics, so I’m not claiming these are the highest-traffic articles ever published on the site. However, These articles cascaded more widely than the average article on the site. More people saw the headlines, and those brand impressions enforced preconceptions.

Almost every news outlet finds that sports and entertainment content are the major traffic drivers. But no other news outlets are cursed with BuzzFeed branding. Look, Gatorade is not called Pepsi Sports Drink for a reason.

The Twitter Blues

The world doesn’t need more articles about Twitter, I will publish this anyway because Twitter was an online home for some time for me and many others. Twitter is dead to me, at least for now, It could close or turn into 4chan tomorrow, and it would be no more dead to me. Still the Twitter blue check is a branding case study.

The blue check, once associated with identity verification came to be seen as a status symbol because of who had them. The first to get blue checks were those so famous that they were not only at risk for impersonation but were also likely to be harmed in a legally actionable way by impersonation. Beyoncé, Stephen King, and Barack Obama were not important because they had the blue checks, they had the blue check because they were important.

Twitter used this branding effectively for many years. A company could get the blue check as part of advertising deals. For a while it was a kind of open secret that spending a certain amount on Twitter ads would cause a blue badge to appear. The perceived eliteness of the badge most assuredly made Twitter money.

Verifying news outlets and journalist also helped build brand power. It made it easier for a subset of people with distribution outside of Twitter to gain visibility with the truly famous. Impor...

On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon.

Google+ launched with hype in 2011. Even a flurry of new players fighting to capture the mindshare of an uncertain Twitter doesn’t match the hype I saw around Google’s new social network. It was a big deal in June, July, and part of August in 2011.

The startup I worked with used Google+ to connect experts with people who wanted one-on-one online instruction. Solid as a concept, and outsourcing almost the entirety of product development to the rapidly growing social network arm of a major tech company left startup costs at nearly zero.

R.I.P. Google+ June 28, 2011 – [Technically] April 2, 2019

In November of 2011, The BBC ran an article titled ‘Google denies Google+ death reports‘. The BBC joined the chatter after most of the tech press had already called the time of death. A critical mass of normal users abandoned Google+ by September.

In January 2012, Google made signing up for a Google+ account mandatory to create a Google account. But just because you make a horse create an account doesn’t mean they will log in. I expect Google+ is the fastest-growing social network of all time by number of inactive, resentful signups.

In April 2014, Tech Crunch pronounced the social network the ‘Walking Dead’. As of September 2014, joining Google+ was no longer required to create a Google account. It was a ghost town of a social network, just a few survivors posting, and responding to one another.

Google+ was laid to rest in April 2019. A wild ride, where the only real activity came during a three-month window at the start.

People Want To Be brands

Celebrities say no to things out of concern for their public-facing brand. But many people who are a far cry from celebrity status lose perspective. Someone with 10,000 social media followers will often come across like a bad first-time novelist’s interpretation of how they think a famous person behaves.

I’ve had calls with representatives for actual celebrities of the performance at the Grammy Awards variety. I’ve also had calls with people (and their management) who think they are on track to perform at the Grammy Awards. The constant from those conversations is far more concern about a brand image from those with thousands of followers than those with millions of fans.

Back to the chef. Due to their brand concerns, they objected to nearly every marketing decision for the marketplace they used as a seller. Late-night calls opposing words used in marketing copy on pages unrelated to them type of objections.

So far as I can tell, our chef never built a social following outside of Google+. If memory serves, even on Google+ they peeked at just over 18,000 followers. Our chef had a Google+ page, not a brand, but they acted like they thought they were Gordon Ramsay.

I wouldn’t expect that level of nonsense from Gordon Ramsay. I know for a fact that Gordon Ramsay didn’t refuse to allow any advertising of his brand image to promote his video course from Master Class. Here’s the trailer for that Master Class if you don’t believe me.

Most People Aren’t Brands

Don’t get me wrong, 18,000 real, organically amassed followers are impressive on almost any social network, but it’s not a brand. Few were searching for this chef outside of Google+. Even on the platform, the chef was hardly sought out.

I hold with most of the ideas in the essay 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kell. That a creator only needs 1,000 true fans to make a living is a fact. Here’s what Kell calls a fan.

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen;

Rarely will 18,000 followers translate to 1,000 or even 100 true fans. On social media, followers are largely transient and unattached. Wh...

Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Charlie Javice share a few things in common. They all seem to have committed fraud; though a court of law convicted only Homes at the time of writing. The three are also Forbes ’30 Under 30′ Alumni.

Forbes is the best in the business at monetizing frauds on the way up and later on the way down. Javice was the CEO of a startup called Frank that JPMorgan Chase acquired in large part because of the over 4 million users the company boasted. The best coverage of JPMorgan Chase’s lawsuit claiming Frank only had 300,000 real users and created 4.265 million fake customer records to satisfy due diligence is in Forbes.

Holmes was found guilty on four of 11 fraud charges as the founder of the fake blood-testing startup Theranos. She received an 11-year prison sentence. Forbes has published many articles covering the trial, the sentencing, and the analysis of what went wrong. Just as they once happily propped Holmes up as some business and technical thought leader.

Bankman-Fried, once propped up by fawning media coverage in Forbes, now graces the pages with words about his probable fraud with FTX and Alameda Research. These paragraphs are becoming monotonous.

Forbes made money with articles, building up these fraudsters without critical analysis. The media juggernaut now makes money writing about the frauds, which were at least partly made possible by the endowment of trust from Forbes.

In an article I wrote in 2020 about fake gurus, I talked about Sam Ovens, a man who aggressively marketed a course teaching people to run businesses. The courses were advertised as teaching how to create a “wildly profitable” consulting business even if you don’t have any tech skills or previous business experience. It sounds like a scam on the surface, and with further analysis, it looks more like a scam.

In 2017, Sam Ovens made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia: Industry, Manufacturing & Energy list. Ovens was from New Zealand, selling the secrets to earning six figures. His company had offices in Dublin and New York City. Why was he on a list for manufacturing in Asia?

Forbes doesn’t just make money from Ads and subscriptions; they will sell you a chance to write for Forbes. As I showed in the older article, I paid nearly $2,000 to join one of the Forbes Councils.

The primary benefit of joining a Forbes Council is being able to write for Forbes. Forbes Councils are differentiated from the staff writers and contributors. But Forbes (along with other large publications) has already had problems with contributors selling placements.

My digi-pal Jon Christian wrote an expose about Forbes link selling years ago. He didn’t cover the full extent of how bad the link selling was and still is in premium publications. He’s a reporter and an ethical one.

I’m a demon at an ad agency. Until I started Tweeting about the links people offered to sell me, I was getting offers to buy articles in publications like Inc, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Years back, a friend’s company traded video production work for an article from a Forbes contributor. The post was deleted, so I won’t out anyone, but backroom deals happen.

In my professional context as ad agency demon, reporters and editors largely view my submissions with skepticism. I’d have less of a microscope on me were I just a freelance writer. That’s probably why I often notice “freelance” reporters covering PR firms’ clients from contributor bylines at Forbes (and others).

I’ve written about Spring Free EV, because of the comical way the startup chose to breach a contract with Push ROI, my...