My friend Joe Pulizzi attended my Uprising retreat and was so moved by the experience that he wrote a beautiful lesson about it in his newsletter for content creators, The Tilt.

Joe and I are aligned on most marketing ideas, and his conclusion at the end of the post was profound and eloquent: “You don’t start with the room.”

He was reinforcing the idea that nobody just starts with a premium event, a smash YouTube channel, or a must-read newsletter. You have to earn that “room.” Or, in the case of my retreat, literally a room.

He wrote this so elegantly that, with his permission, I’ve quoted some of his highlights here. I think you’ll love his wisdom:

Last week I spent three days at Mark Schaefer’s The Uprising marketing retreat in Tennessee. It was small, around 40 people, and that was the point.

The room was filled with smart marketers, entrepreneurs, authors, consultants, and creators. But what stood out was not just the intelligence in the room. It was how quickly people became useful to one another. Helpful. Honest. Shockingly vulnerable.

That does not happen by accident. It happens when the right people are brought together around the right idea, with enough trust already in the room for something meaningful to happen.

Over three days of conversations, presentations, sidebars, meals, and big questions about where all this is going, one idea kept coming back to me.

In the next 12 to 18 months, small, trusted communities will matter more than ever.

Not because community is trendy. And not because AI is going to destroy everything tomorrow.

Because uncertainty is rising.

Search is changing. Discovery is changing. Content is exploding. Trust is harder to earn and easier to lose. People are overwhelmed, distracted, and suspicious. At the same time, they are desperate to find other people who understand what they are dealing with. That is where community becomes incredibly powerful.

But there’s a problem.

Everyone now wants to “build a community.”

That sounds wonderful. It is also mostly wrong.

Community Is Not the First Step

You do not build a community first. You build the reason a community should exist. That’s the part most people want to skip.

They launch the group. They open the Slack channel. They create the Discord server. They announce the membership. They schedule the webinar. They build the event page.

And then they wonder why nobody shows up.

The mistake is simple. They built the campfire before anyone had a reason to sit down in front of it.

A community is not a Facebook group. It is not a LinkedIn group. It is not a membership site. It is not a monthly Zoom call. It is not an event. Those are containers.

The community is the trust inside the container.

It is the shared language, shared struggle, shared progress, and repeated interaction. It is the feeling that says, “These are my people.” It is the sense that if you disappeared, someone would notice.

Mark Did Not Start With a Room

This is what made The Uprising such a good reminder.

Mark did not just rent a space, invite some people, and magically create a community. He had already done the work.

For years, Mark has published, spoken, written books, shared ideas, challenged assumptions, and built trust around a clear point of view. People came to The Uprising because they already had a reason to believe the room would matter.

The event was not the beginning of the community. It was an expression of the community. It’s where the community happened to be at that particular moment.

This is what so many people miss. They see the outcome and copy the container. They see the event, but not the years of trust. They see the membership, but not the audience.

Back to me.

Joe and I preach from the same hymnbook when it comes to community and its importance in the AI Age.

So how do you get there?

There is a process. It is not quick. It is not easy. But it works. This is the process I teach in my personal branding master class:

1. Where do you fit in your industry or marketplace?

Figure out your unique angle. What problem do you solve, and how do you uniquely solve it?

How do you finish this sentence: “Only I …”

That might seem intimidating but I’ve never had a class participant where we haven;t been able to figure that out. There’s still a big world of opportunity out there.

2. Find Your Space

Now you have the story to tell the world?

Joe was also very specific on this advice: Pick One Main Platform

“This is where people get overwhelmed,” Joe wrote. “They think they need a podcast, newsletter, YouTube channel, LinkedIn strategy, Instagram Reels, TikTok presence, webinar series, book project, and community all at the same time. Do not do that. Pick one main platform. One.”

To stand out, you have to be great. And you can’t be great in 12 places.

3. Stick to a Consistent Schedule

If you take my class, you will hear one word more than any other — “consistency.”

Consistency is more important than genius.

Once you begin, give yourself 18 months at least to see if it’s working. You can build your “room,” but you have to keep showing up. This also has powerful SEO and AI visibility advantages, of course.

You’ve implied to your audience that you’re going to help them solve a problem.

“The promise does not need to be clever, ” Joe said, “It needs to be clear.”

Over time, you become part of your audience’s weekly routine. Your goal is to become a habit.

4. Build Your Audience

Joe advised, “Audience building is not just publishing. It is relationship building. This is the part that gets missed because it is not scalable at first.”

He offered specific advice:

Make a list of 20 people who matter to the future of the audience you want to serve. They could be peers, customers, readers, event organizers, authors, podcast hosts, niche experts, future collaborators, or people already gathering the audience you care about.

Then help them. Share their work. Comment with substance. Interview them. Send the useful email. Introduce them to someone. Buy their book. Attend their event. Meet them in person when you can.

The future may be AI-powered, but trust is still built person by person.

5. Audience Precedes Community

Most creators miss the biggest opportunity. Once they build an audience, they stop there. But the most value, the most fun, the most connection comes through a community.

A community differs from an audience in three ways:

1. There is communion. People know each other and become friends.
2. There is a shared purpose.
3. There is a shared direction (which might change over time as the community pulls you forward).

This is the room. This will matter the most in the AI Era.

How do you know you’re ready? Do you have a few super fans? It doesn’t have to be a big group. Maybe 5-10 people who just want to know more. They comment on your posts. They ask questions. They’re excited about your ideas.

If you want to know a whole lot more about community-building, please take a look at the book Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.

Build the Reason First

I’ll let Joe Pulizzi take us home on this post. Here are some of his concluding comments:

I keep thinking about that room at The Uprising.

The trust. The conversations. The openness. The willingness to help. The feeling that the people there were not just attending another event, but participating in something that mattered to them.

That is rare. I believe more of us are going to need that.

The people who have real trust with a specific audience will have an advantage. The people who have direct relationships will have an advantage. The people who are known for something will have an advantage.

Start with the person you want to serve. Start with the problem they are embarrassed to admit. Start with the one platform you can commit to. Start with the 20 people you can help. Start with a promise you can keep every week.

Do that long enough, and the community has a chance to appear.

Build the reason first. The campfire comes later.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Content creators don’t start with “the room” appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

On every post I’ve written for at least two years, I’ve included a badge that states: “100% Human Content.” And this is, too (as you’ll see) but I used AI to compose most of it. I’d like to use this as a teachable moment on a smart way to use AI.

This post is about my annual Uprising Retreat. Nearly everyone there noted that this event is impossible to describe unless you’re there, but I’ll try. It’s a gathering of curious and brilliant people who openly share and teach one another, creating a bond that fosters career relevance. We also have a lot of fun in a breathtakingly beautiful place.

Now, during this event, I am psychologically and emotionally immersed. There is no way I can capture all the great highlights. This is where AI comes in.

Many of the attendees used the Plaud voice recorder to record and transcribe the talks. Dr. Matt Wilkinson uploaded these transcripts to Notebook LM, where we could all slice and dice the commentary. I used this to create a first draft of a highlight post and then used Claude to massage it a bit and put it in my voice.

So … what you are about to read is fully human content, parsed and assembled by AI.

The gift of uncertainty

Before each event, I send out a survey to let attendees prioritize the agenda. This year, one word kept popping up as they wrote about their careers: Uncertainty. So, I set the tone for the event with a brand new talk called “The Gift of Uncertainty.”

We are living in a “poly crisis.” Not just a hard moment. A genuinely disorienting one, where the norms and traditions and even laws that used to orient us feel like they’re shifting in real time. We are in a world of malignant uncertainty.

I opened the Uprising by saying this isn’t a flaw in the system — it’s our fuel, especially if you’re in marketing. I encouraged everyone to explore the “courage dividends” that come from overcoming fear and acting on opportunity,  even when the outcome is uncertain.

We live in chaos. But that sets the stage for hope. And leaders who can genuinely dispense hope — not spin, not optimism theater, but real grounded possibility — are going to matter enormously in the years ahead.

The agentic economy is here, and most people aren’t ready 

Dan Nestle, Dr. Matt Wilkinson, and Brian Piper built the technical foundation for the event with a live demonstration of what an AI-orchestrated workflow actually looks like end-to-end. They showed how they used Gemini, Claude, and other tools in parallel to explore every angle of a new product launch.

They laid out the technical reality clearly: We are moving from B2B and B2C toward an agent-to-agent economy. Your customers will soon have personal AI agents filtering what they see. You will have agents producing content. The question is whether there’s anything human left in the middle.

Brian introduced what he called the “human-in-the-loop sandwich” — and the image stuck with me. Your unique expertise and stories form the foundation. AI synthesizes and organizes. But human judgment sits at the top, as the final filter. Strip that out and you get what everyone is starting to call AI slop.

Dan made a point I think is genuinely underappreciated: keep your intellectual property separate from your tools. Your brand missions, your frameworks, your SOPs — those belong in a tool-agnostic library you can plug into whatever model is performing best this month. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. The models change. Your thinking shouldn’t have to change with them.

Matt demonstrated a system that turns static buyer personas into interactive AI simulations. Impressive. But he noted something that grounded the whole presentation: the real reason people show up to an event is still the humans in the room. No simulation replaces that.

The scariest AI risk isn’t replacement. It’s surrender.

Dr. Jasmine Gruia-Gray named something I think we all feel but don’t say out loud. She opened with a line that landed hard: “One day I couldn’t tell which parts of my thinking were mine.”

She cited a Wharton study where roughly 73% of participants followed faulty AI advice — not because they couldn’t tell it was wrong, but because the model was confident, and they stopped checking. That’s cognitive surrender. AI doesn’t replace your thinking. It keeps you from noticing you’ve already stopped thinking.

Her solution is a Socratic framework she calls BRACED — boundary testing, reversal from stakeholder, assumption surfacing, counter-hypothesis, disconfirming evidence, decision with tradeoffs. The specifics matter less than the principle. She ran it as a live game called Prompt Arena, where the goal wasn’t to get a better AI output. It was to build better thinking habits. That distinction is the whole ballgame right now.

The body knows things the brain ignores

Nicole Donnelly, the founder of Hello Moxie, gave what I thought was the most unexpected talk of the event. She’s been studying the intersection of trauma, workaholism, and leadership — and her argument is that most of our professional systems reward us for managing our bodies like machines. We optimize for output. We suppress the signals that slow us down. And we pay for it in creativity, in empathy, in the quality of our decisions.

We don’t need to move faster. We need to stop long enough to think. Embodiment is the last moat.

You can see her TEDx talk here.

Safe marketing compounds irrelevance

Jason Dressel, CEO of The History Factory, pushed back on what he called “confidence porn” — the performance of authority that substitutes for actual expertise. The market is correcting for that. People are hungry for real knowledge delivered through real stories.

His framework is simple: great stories need purposeful characters, a three-act structure built around conflict, and what he calls touchstones — the specific language and images that make a world feel real. Stories are 22 times more memorable than talking points. That’s not a preference. It’s neuroscience.

John Kowalski of BYK-Gardner Instruments said something I want to stitch on a pillow: safe marketing compounds irrelevance. He told the story of a company whose bear-resistant trash can failed spectacularly in a field test — and turned that failure into an unforgettable brand. The gap between what an industry expects and what an audience actually craves is where brand equity gets built. He called it the Awe Gap. I’m going to keep using that term.

Emotion is the experience. Full stop.

Stacy Sherman of Doing CX Right made a case that I think is more important than ever. As AI ingests public sentiment at scale, every micro-moment in the customer journey builds or erodes a ledger. The failed QR code. The boring hold music. The email that was obviously a form letter. These small failures accumulate, and AI systems are now reading that accumulated sentiment to rank brands.

Dana Malstaff, CEO of BOSS MOM, added a critical nuance on vulnerability — the kind that actually builds connection versus the kind that undermines authority. Her distinction: share your scars, not your wounds. Processed experiences with a lesson attached. Not active pain that you’re still in the middle of. Amen to that!

Dana also led a session on the future of brand communities, driving home the point that the best communities emerge from a dissatisfaction with the status quo. What do you want to change in the world?

Trust is the only distribution strategy that scales

Sarah Stahl, VP Marketing for Lake.com, shared how a startup resort hit $2 million in revenue on a $30,000 budget by out-trusting rather than out-spending. The mechanism was micro-creators with real proximity to real audiences. Sixty-eight percent of consumers trust a creator over a brand. That number should reorganize your marketing budget.

Chad Parizman of Ader Communications entertained everyone with a brief analysis of predictive markets and the potential dangers of addictive betting markets.

His argument was that prediction markets — platforms where people bet on real-world outcomes rather than company stocks — represent an underutilized seam for brands. 8.5 million monthly users, 25 trades per day. The conversations already happening around these markets are data-rich, audience-specific, and almost entirely untouched by brand strategy. The brands that figure out how to own those conversations are sitting on something.

It was the right mix of mind-blowing information and entertainment to end the day.

The future of content marketing

What an honor it was to sit side by side with the legendary Joe Pulizzi and hold court on the future of content marketing. Over the years, Joe and I have not always agreed but we have always been friends. As always, this was a spicy, energetic, and insightful 90 minutes.

Joe and I talked about what he calls the Trust Portfolio — and I think it’s one of the most practical ideas to come out of the event. Don’t bet everything on a single brand voice. Build a diversified network of employee creators. Give them room to be specific, to be themselves, to be a little weird. The marketing team becomes a media operations hub. The employees become the signal that cuts through the synthetic noise.

Our main debate centered around the most likely role of humanity in an AI-dominant content world. Joe thinks the window is closing. I think human art will persist. We’ll have to meet again in a few years to see what happens.

The future of your brand

Sarah Neely of Signal Swell has presented several times over the years and always has a fresh and relevant message. This year, she updated her core word-of-mouth marketing wisdom with a spin for the AI Age. She introduced a new framework — the Five C’s of AI Discoverability.

• Clarity
• Conversation
• Current
• Credible
• Composition

Mary Lague of Pilot 44 ran a foresight exercise that’s worth sitting with. If AI agents are mediating $3-5 trillion in commerce by 2036, and culture has fragmented into hyper-niche communities, what signals should we be watching now?

She hosted an interactive exercise that let every attendee create a vision of their own brand emerging from a set of megatrends such as brand communities and virtual humans.

But here’s the best part

These highlights are only the tip of the iceberg. Most attendees will tell you that most of the learning came from questions and answers, small group discussions (led by Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez, Lauren Colbert, Alice Ferris, and Chelsea Rae Stuck), breakout sessions on branding and personal branding, and late-night conversations at the bar.

For example, here are some takeaways from several attendees:

“I learned to not just embrace uncertainty, but to be grounded in it.”

“The biggest shift wasn’t a tactic. It was realizing that staying still long enough to understand what’s happening is often more powerful than reacting quickly to what’s changing.”

“Growth starts to feel heavy when nothing is compounding. That was the moment I realized the issue isn’t effort, it’s what the effort is building toward.”

Sarah Stahl, Founder, Market Movers

“Community creates the space for people to feel safe enough to move toward the future.”

“What do we hold onto and what do we release — that is our wisdom.”

Brian W Piper, Founder of AIreFlow Solutions

Melanie Borden, Author, “Theatre of the Mind” · Founder, The Borden Group

Mike Carr, Cofounder of John13.org &  Autism Labs

“When Mary Lague said 44% of Gen Z workers try to sabotage their company’s AI, it reordered my worldview. Leveraging AI is far more than mastering prompts and learning tools. It also involves helping people understand and work through massive change, many fear or don’t understand, so they seek to control it, apparently often to the detriment of their employer.”

“As Mark Schaefer said, leaders dispense hope. And when he exhorted us to create pockets of hope, order, and meaning, it landed as a clarion call to action for me and my business.”

Dan Christ, Owner and founder of Dan Christ Digital Services

“It’s possible not to be completely freaked out and overwhelmed about AI.”

Lisa Kohn, International Speaker, LisaKohn.com

“When you can’t tell if you’ve become part of the AI hive mind, you realize you’ve done it to yourself. Jasmine Gruia-Gray’s session on cognitive surrender was a moment that turned the conversation inward. While every other session was about forces changing the world around us and how to respond, she asked what we might be doing to our own thinking in the process.”

“Mark opened by making the case that uncertainty is the entry point for original thinking, and John Kowalski’s awe gap session reinforced it from a different angle. Safe marketing compounds irrelevance. The seam, the real opportunity, is in the unexpected.”

Elizabeth Humphries, Marketing Strategist, Market Your Marketing

“I was in awe of the people in the room at Uprising! Inspiring and engaging. It reminded me of the importance of presence and being fully present at an event like this will allow you to get the most out of your experience. If you’re distracted and disengaged, you could miss something that could change your life.”

Sid Meadows, President of The Collaborative Network and Host of The Trend Report Podcast

“The jaw-dropping moment for me was when I was encouraged to break through a self-limiting belief about what type of speaking engagements I could get paid for. For the first time in 25 years, I saw a path forward to market myself.”

Mike Garrison, founder of Values Based Mindset and author of Can I Borrow Your Car?

“Leaders dispense hope… giving your team, your customers, and your industry permission to believe something better is possible. When you stop selling features and start offering a vision worth following, you stop being a vendor and become the reason people show up.”

“The sheer volume of knowledge, expertise, and insight in this room was mind-blowing.”

John Kowalski, Disruptive Awe Architect, Disruptive Awe

“Our humanity is being stripped from us. Each talk pointed back to specific actions we can take to be more human, including choosing to be hopeful, more discerning, actively cultivating community by creating spaces where people feel valued, and reframing failure as experimentation. The more we lean into these things, the more we will become the trusted leaders and brands of the future.”

“Nanocommunities of 40 or fewer will be the future! This affirmed our company’s strategy. Scale is not always the answer.”

Nicole Donnelly, Founder, Hello Moxie

“Personal consequence is the real work. The breakout conversations are where ideas become valuable because they become personal. The unique element of The Uprising is that we get to intentionally take the time to unpack it and ask: What does it mean for me now?”

“Malignant Uncertainty” looms over livelihoods. The time needed (and spent) to process this feeling, with other smart folks, became the difference-maker.

“The Uprising had a contagion of bravery and a level of openness that elevated everyone.”

Lauren Colbert, Principal—Strategic Facilitator of Strategy, Innovation, & Collective Intelligence at Filament

“The fireside chat between Mark Schaefer and Joe Pulizzi reframed how I think about trust at scale. Mark mentioned that Cisco had trained more than 10,000 employees to speak on behalf of the brand — certified, equipped, and amplified. Joe called this building a Trust Portfolio. Distributed authorship. Distributed trust. Distributed reach. That changes the marketing job.”

Matt Wilkinson, CEO, Strivenn

“In an era of automation, bots, and synthetic content, care becomes premium. People want guidance, reassurance, belonging, support, and human attention. This made me rethink how I show up online and how I position my own services—not just as a consultant, but as someone who helps people navigate change.”

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez, MBA, Bilingual Marketing Consultant and Founder of Beyond Engagement

“I’m energized by Mark’s idea of ‘uncertainty as fuel.’ It’s a powerful reframe in a time of so much chaos. ‘Negative capability’ is another reframing that speaks to intentionally and patiently pausing to connect new dots. I learned so much over the two days, and I know that I will continue to learn from this circle of smart humans.”

Sarah Neely, Vice President of Strategy at Fuzz and Founder of SignalSwell

“Each courageous moment rewires you to believe in yourself. This is the courage dividend.”

“I appreciated Sarah Neely’s new perspective on the future of discoverability — the S.H.A.R.E. framework (surprising, helpful, authentic, relevant, experiences).”

Jasmine Gruia-Gray, Managing Partner at Strivenn and co-host of A Splice of Life Science Marketing podcast, Product Marketing Tips newsletter

“Courageous actions rewire who you believe yourself to be.’ —Mark Schaefer. I found this particularly pertinent because every time I have taken a leap professionally or personally, it has paid off, and helped me douse some of that imposter syndrome or lack of confidence you get when you’re in a room that you’re not quite comfortable in.”

Stacey Miller, Vice President, Communications at Auto Care Association

“I need more community in my life! (inspiration, empowerment, safety).”

“Trust = safety. Nurture messaging creates belonging.”

Knox Keith, Author of Validated

“I’m inspired by how domain experts forge and build AI solutions. Just as my agency is building AI to address concerns related to accuracy and contextualization, I was so impressed by Dr. Jasmine Gruia-Gray’s work focused on critical thinking and cognitive decline. Her Socratic method-based BRACED framework was excellent.”

“Joe and Mark’s discussion has me completely re-imagining our leaders and employees as characters of our story, and how we tell that story through both company-owned and employee-owned platforms. This will likely be the biggest actionable takeaway in my strategic and tactical shift.”

Jason Dressel, CEO, History Factory

“We shouldn’t treat AI LIKE an audience. AI IS an audience—multiple audiences, in fact.”

“Negative Capability is the skill we need to cope with chaos. Marinate in an issue before acting under pressure to respond, and that’s how insights will be revealed.”

Dan Nestle, Founder and CPIO of Lilypath

“Within the first 15 minutes, I had my first ah-ha moment, when Mark said: ‘Every time I feel afraid, I do it!’ I need a poster of this in my office.”

“We are in the eye of the AI storm, but it also presents so many opportunities. I realized that I don’t have all the answers about how businesses will assimilate or adopt AI platforms, but I do know that the most powerful force in business is still human connection. Spending three days with 39 of the most knowledgeable, forward-thinking leaders in AI and new technologies left me feeling inspired and full of hope. The Uprising was an Executive Education course on steroids!”

Anne Deeter Gallaher, Owner/CEO of Deeter Gallaher Group LLC

“In a world that constantly competes for our attention, we need to ‘control the inputs.’ In other words, be deliberate about how much news we consume, which social media we engage with, whose opinions we give weight to, and how much access the outside world gets to our inner peace. Those inputs shape our focus, our fear, our energy, and ultimately, how we show up at work and in life.”

“We’re living in a time of ‘malignant uncertainty,’ where change isn’t only constant, it’s harder to predict. Companies need to let go of overly rigid plans and pay closer attention to what customers and employees are thinking, feeling, and doing in real time. The brands that earn trust will be the ones that build emotional connection when everything else feels uncertain.”

Stacy Sherman, International Keynote Speaker, Influencer & Podcaster: DoingCXRight.com

“AI is evolving and changing how we operate at a personal and work level faster than ever before. There is opportunity in seeing this ‘seam.’ Uncertainty makes room for me for creativity, growth, and progress.”

Debra Feresten, Debra Feresten Homes

I used to believe more content would grow my business, but now I see that trust is the real currency—and content is just the vehicle to earn it. That changes everything: from chasing reach to building a small, intentional audience that actually cares.”

“My AHA moment was realizing we’re not heading toward a world with better ads—we’re heading toward a world without them. When there’s no ‘skip button,’ only brands that create trust, community, and meaning will survive.”

Yevette Lynn, Kingsport Headshot Photographer and Studio Owner, The Journal

“AI tools become personal. They are like the hammer that a carpenter uses every day. They form to his hand and are customized to his needs. There is beauty in the wear of such tools, but if you were to pick one up, it feels foreign. To use them properly, one must interact with these tools and shape them to one’s personal needs.”

“Being raw in our content gives our community permission to share. But that sharing should come from scars, not wounds.”

“The tension between the obligation to react to the world and the value of marinating in uncertainty is the obligation of leadership.”

Atom Freeman, Founder of Prana DM, Host of Comic Industry Insiders podcast

“Building a personal brand is not a project, it’s a LIFESTYLE.”

“The customer journey is the cumulative effect of every interaction, good or bad.” Every micro moment shapes perception, and people are constantly evaluating, even when you are not thinking about it. What they remember is not necessarily the process, it is how it made them feel. “Emotion IS the experience”, and that is ultimately what defines your brand.

Your most powerful, underutilized influencer channel is already on payroll. Employees are a built-in network of credible, motivated nano-influencers, but only if you replace control with trust and give them a clear, supported way to share. If your own people are not advocating for your brand, why would someone else?

Chelsea Rae Stuck, CEO Craeve, and Host of the Curiously Stuck Podcast

And … back to me.

We can’t stay relevant on our own. Everybody who attended The Uprising has a new set of tools and a professional network to help them navigate the future.

The 2026 Uprising was a call to stop trying to be “safe” and instead build a future where our humanity is our most discoverable and durable asset. I hope you will join us May 04-07, 2027. Registration is open.

Some photographs provided by Yevette Lynn Photography

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Human Renaissance in the Agentic Age: Insights from The Uprising Retreat appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

The most important time of my professional work life was studying under Peter Drucker when I pursued my MBA at Claremont Graduate University. Peter Drucker is considered one of the most influential management thinkers of the 20th century. He was also a kind and generous teacher and mentor.

Dr. Drucker would come into class on a Saturday morning and talk about his books. It was impossible to outline his lectures! His lessons danced and darted around as he talked about the ideas that created modern marketing and management as we know it.

But one of the most interesting lectures was about a book he had yet to write. He gave us a preview of what has come to be known as Drucker’s Five Questions. Many of Dr. Drucker’s lectures are burned in my mind, but this lesson, which was published posthumously as a book in 2008, is always part of my consulting strategy.

I have met a few geniuses in my life, and they all have the same trait. They can distill incredible complexity into an essence. And so it is with the timeless nature of Peter Drucker’s Five Questions.

And yet, so many of my students and customers have never heard of them before. I thought it was time I shine a light on them once more, if for no other reason than to use this post as a reference for my future classes!

Drucker’s Five Questions are:

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

Drucker’s five questions and marketing today

When it comes to marketing, these five questions are still highly relevant and can be used to help develop effective strategies. In fact, they are at the foundation of my process and I pull these out constantly with my clients.

1. “What is our mission?”

This question helps define the overall purpose of the organization and the goals that it is trying to achieve. This is important for marketing as it helps to ensure that the marketing activities are aligned with the organization’s mission and goals. It also helps to define the target market that the organization is trying to reach and the message that it is trying to communicate.

The answer to this question is not as simple as it may seem and more relevant than ever. In my book Belonging to the Brand, this is a central idea when defining the purpose of community-based marketing. You can’t move forward without it!

This is also relevant for personal brands. A personal brand is not about you. It is about serving others. What is the mission?

One of Drucker’s amazing insights was that a company had to be about more than making money. This was a radical idea in his day but obviously important to consider in today’s consumer environment.

2. “Who is our customer?”

This question helps identify who the organization is targeting with its marketing activities.

This is critical as it helps to ensure that the organization’s marketing efforts are focused on the right audience and that the right message is being communicated. Knowing the customer also helps to inform marketing activities such as pricing, positioning, and promotion.

Again, this question is deceptively simple. Even with sophisticated social listening and other analytical tools, I see companies fumbling with their assumptions about customers!

I don’t trust any data before March of 2020. If you haven’t assessed how the pandemic changed your customers, go out there and re-discover them.

3. “What does the customer value?”

This helps zero-in on the needs and wants of the customer. Knowing what the customer values helps to inform the organization’s marketing activities and ensure that the message being communicated is relevant and meaningful to the customer.

One lesson I learned from Dr. Drucker, was “never mistake what you’re selling for what the customer is actually buying.”

Another important step when answering this question is to evaluate how competitors might be already serving these needs. You can’t offer a me-too product.

4. “What are our results?”

Now it starts to get complicated!

One of Dr. Drucker’s most famous quotes is, “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.”

We need to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the organization’s marketing activities. Obviously, this is important as it helps to identify which activities are working and which are not, leading to more informed decisions about future marketing activities.

However, with the speed of change in the world today, we may have to act before we have the measurement fully figured out. Remember, Dr. Drucker’s ideas were forged in the 1980s. Even though he was a true visionary who foresaw the gig economy and many of the realities of today, I do believe he would encourage us to respond to cultural changes with relevant marketing ideas.

“The purpose of a business is to create customers,” he would say. Creating customers today is a jerky process that may elude easy measurement in some cases.

5. “What is our plan?”

The final part of Drucker’s Five Questions is, “What is our plan?” helps to develop a comprehensive strategy for the organization’s marketing activities. This ensures that the organization has a clear plan in place and that the marketing activities are coordinated and effective.

Marketing strategy might seem overwhelming today, but it’s not if you make it through Drucker’s Five Questions. Here’s my secret: If you do the work to answer these questions thoroughly, your marketing strategy becomes obvious. You probably don’t have as many options as you think! If you evaluate the competitive landscape, you only have so many cards in your hands to play.

Beyond Drucker’s Five Questions

Dr. Drucker is still the most quoted business guru in history. I am completely blown away by how prescient his work is. If you don’t know this great man, here are four books among the dozens he wrote that are quite meaningful to me:

Classic Drucker — A compilation of famous essays from Harvard Business Review. A good place for inspiration!

The Five Most Important Questions — An essential book for strategy that I mentioned in this post.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship — This is a book I have read 10 times. It was originally published in 1985 yet provides a fresh and realistic framework for institutionalizing innovation in a company culture.

Post-Capitalist Society — Dr. Drucker was way ahead of his time and this book projects a world of capitalism out of control and what can be done.

Essential Drucker — A summary of sixty years of his most influential writings

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Drucker’s five questions connected to marketing strategy today appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Over the years, I’ve written about how I think humans will survive and thrive in the AI Era, and today I thought I would pull my main ideas together in one post.

Many people are defensive about AI or skeptical that our marketing jobs are at risk. I believe AI will certainly replace many tasks and even entire organizational roles. But there are four pillars of human dominance that will persist:

1. Personal brand
2. Brand communities
3. Experiences
4. Transcendent content

Let’s explore each one in detail.

1. Personal brand

You can’t love a logo, jingle, or piece of branded content, but you can love a person. In many cases today, the personal brand is the company brand, especially in smaller and medium-sized companies.

In an era dominated by deep fakes and misinformation, we will value humans who are the go-to people pointing us toward truth.

When ChatGPT hit the scene, I called tech analyst Shelly Palmer to get his view. “It’s terrifying,” he told me. “I just asked ChatGPT to compose a blog post in my writing style, and it did a great job. I’ve blogged almost every day for 15 years, and it wrote a perfect post in three seconds. I’m 80% replaced.”

While that “80%” quote certainly seems terrifying, a more interesting question is, “What is the 20% that is NOT replaceable?”

It’s his personal brand.

Shelly is known, loved, and respected. In a chaotic world of misinformation and deep fakes, we will always depend on a human being for insight and truth. Shelly has nothing to worry about. He cannot be replaced by AI because of his powerful personal brand.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve added a “100% Human Content” badge to my posts. I want to assure you that this is me. You can count on me. I’m not going away. I still matter.

For the past 10 years, I’ve shouted from the rooftops that your personal brand is the ONLY defense we have against the bots. Are you a trusted and beloved presence cutting through the noise of your marketplace?

It’s not too late to start your personal branding journey. The best place to start is my upcoming Personal Branding Master Class, the finest of its kind.

How do you thrive in an AI world? Your personal brand is your oxygen.

2. Brand Communities

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Belonging to the Brand. It had a bold subtitle: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.

I think I was right. Community was the FIRST marketing strategy. It’s the only marketing strategy people actually WANT in their lives.

SXSW, the largest annual gathering of thought leaders on earth, recently sent me an update that the most popular topic submitted this year was community — even bigger than AI! The need for brand communities and community professionals will increase.

I was recently asked how AI will take over brand communities. I can’t imagine a scenario where that would happen. Community is out of bounds for AI. It is uniquely human, an engine for connection, compassion, and love.

3. Experiences

Over the past 10-15 years, people have been pulling away from one another. We can now entertain ourselves, soothe ourselves, and play games all night long without ever leaving our living room.

But a strong longing for reconnection is evident, and signs of a renaissance in human experience are everywhere. Groups of young people are forming clubs and affinity groups to play board games, watch movies together, and discuss books. The greatest human memories come from shared experiences, not a gaming victory celebrated alone in a dark basement.

Have you ever attended a music event alone? Perhaps it was a pleasant experience. You enjoyed the music.

Now compare that to attending a concert with friends who are singing with you, dancing, and jumping for joy. The difference is a state of awe called collective effervescence, a powerful emotional contagion that occurs when you bring people together in a joyful way.

Businesses can help make this happen. How can we create shared experiences that make people feel our brand in a new way? What would a strategy look like if your goal was to add more awe?

4. Transcendent content

This is the main idea behind my book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.

Creating content that is “competent” is a losing proposition. You’re a commodity. Worse, you’re ignorable.

But we can create from a place of vulnerability and human truth that AI never can.

There’s a lot of anxiety about AI. And there should be. But when it comes to creating content, I’m not concerned. My posts are filled with insights, emotion, story, and Dad jokes that AI can’t replicate. I interpret the human experience in my own way, and that approaches art.

This is a unique time for human content. Most companies will opt-in to the AI slop. It may check a box. But it won’t win hearts and minds. Amid this AI frenzy, true human content is a luxury.

This is a big topic and an important one. My book teaches three methods to disrupt the pandemic fo dull fueled by the bots:

• Disrupt the narrative
• Disrupt how and where the story is told
• Disrupt who tells the story.

Here’s a simple example. I uploaded my book to AI and instructed it to create abstract images from the best stories. I then linked this to a QR code on the book’s cover. If you hover over the QR code with your phone, you will see an endless display of changing designs — the Infinity Cover!

Through this innovation, which cost alomst nothing, I disrupted how the story is told, where the story is told and even “who” is telling the story (it’s the cover!). This is audacious content that transcends the blah.

We are in for challenging times. But it is also a time of magic and endless opportunity. I’m sure these four areas of traditional marketing will continue to rely on human effort. Did I miss something? I’d love to hear from you if you have other ideas.

Need an inspiring keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Four Pillars of Human Dominance in the AI Marketing Era appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I’ve known Ethan Pierse for many years and finally had a chance to meet him in person a few weeks ago. We spent a half day together and over dinner I turned to him and said, “This is the most interesting conversation I’ve had all year”

Both of us lamented that we should have recorded the coversation … so I did by inviting him on the Marketing Companion podcast. You’re in for a treat!

Ethan is a serial entrepreneur who has become an AI innovation authority. As founder of Borderless Ventures he advises AI startups throughout Europe and Asia.

In this show, we discuss

• The rise of the AI solopreneur
• The ROI of AI and the investment bubble
• Practical AI applications
• The unseen evolution of Web3

… and more

To tune in, simply click on this link:

Click here to enjoy The Marketing Companion Episode 326

And here is a text review of the show’s highlights:

The Rise of the AI Solopreneur

At the heart of Ethan’s current work is his passion for “democratizing opportunity” with AI. Through Borderless Ventures, he invests primarily in generative and agentic AI solutions — tools that power not only creators and solo business owners but also small, nimble teams with global reach.

Ethan is also writing a book, The AI Solopreneur Economy, capturing this moment where entrepreneurship is open to more people than ever.

He argues that AI isn’t just for developers or technical founders. Instead, non-technical but entrepreneurial folks can now build tech products without deep coding skills. AI is breaking down traditional barriers and letting more people “create their own future.”

The scale is already astonishing: micro teams — or even individuals — are building seven- to nine-figure businesses, something unimaginable even a decade ago. With AI, a solopreneur can achieve what once took dozens of staff and millions in capital.

No Longer a Game for the Valley Alone

Ethan dismisses the outdated idea that innovation must happen only in places like San Francisco, London, or Tel Aviv. The global pandemic, he notes, accelerated the move to remote work, further eroding geographic boundaries.

Now, founders are building companies from “where they’re at,” whether that’s Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or their hometowns in France. Borderless Ventures itself is based in Singapore and Estonia, reflecting this new, decentralized reality.

While networking and physical proximity still matter for building relationships, huge opportunities are everywhere, especially since digital and AI-powered startups can scale from anywhere. And the cost to start is lower than ever: Ethan recalls when hard drives cost half a million dollars; now, world-class web hosting and AI credits are free or nearly free for newcomers. The barrier to entry for big ideas is almost nonexistent.

The AI Bubble: Hype or Real?

With so much venture capital sloshing around — companies with ten employees are valued in the billions — a debate rages about whether AI is in a bubble. Ethan’s take? Short-term overvaluations are normal for disruptive tech, but what’s happening now is like a gold rush: not just for today’s productivity gains, but for the possibility of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) and even “artificial superintelligence” (ASI).

The tech giants are pouring in trillions to build massive data centers and train ever-larger models. In Ethan’s view, most of this is a race to own the future: whoever reaches ASI first may hold the keys to solving everything from interstellar travel to aging.

But it’s not all sci-fi. Right now, AI is driving real value in automating repetitive, high-value workflows.

Practical AI: Working Smarter, Not (Just) Harder

One crucial point Ethan makes is that extracting value from AI today is less about the tool, and more about learning to “talk” to it — that is, prompt engineering. Those who learn how to properly instruct AI (by, for example, writing detailed product requirements documents or SOPs) will get dramatically better results.

Ethan sees a coming wave where companies won’t fire en masse, but will simply not replace roles that AI can fill. Already, firms like Fiverr and Shopify are saying they won’t rehire unless a position can’t be done by AI. “Our days are numbered,” as one tech CEO put it, making it more important than ever to upskill and learn to collaborate with automated assistants.

The Unseen Evolution of Web3

While the buzz around Web3 and crypto has cooled, Ethan remains bullish on the foundational ideas. The technology stack of Web3 — blockchains, NFTs, and tokenization — matters not because people care about “crypto,” but because it introduces seamless, direct relationships and removes unnecessary intermediaries.

Look past the jargon, Ethan says, and you’ll find real-world use cases—soulbound NFTs verifying Harvard degrees, limited-access smart contracts for music releases, or authenticated logistics chains for wine and luxury goods. What matters is the efficient proof of origin, authenticity, and ownership. As user interfaces improve and blockchain transactions go “invisible,” Web3 will underpin a huge swath of future commerce and digital experiences.

A unique crossover between Web3 and AI? Agentic AIs—digital agents that perform tasks in workflows—can transfer value between themselves using stablecoins (crypto-pegged to dollars or euros). This enables automated micro-transactions at massive scale, with companies like JP Morgan already processing billions internally using their proprietary coins.

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A recent Semrush study found that AI search traffic is projected to surpass traditional search by 2028. That makes now the time to prepare your brand for the future of search.

With Semrush AI Search tools, you will lead this transition.

• Track your AI visibility score: See a single, clear benchmark of your share of voice across AI search platforms.
• Identify AI mention opportunities: Uncover sources where your competitors are cited—but you’re not—including social media, forums, and more.
• Benchmark against competitors: Find the exact prompts, mentions, and sources where your competitors appear in AI responses and you don’t.
• Discover trending prompts: Spot the real questions your audience is asking AI platforms—and build content around them.
• Shape your brand narrative: Monitor the sentiment and context tied to your AI mentions, and make sure your brand is being represented the way you want.

The post The Era of AI Solopreneurship Starts Now appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I recently participated in a research project that gathered input from futurists on how AI will change humanity by 2030. Of course, nobody can foresee what this AI world will be like five months from now, let alone five years from now, but it was a great exercise that yielded some consensus among the experts.

But this pushed my thinking in a different way. If we are to consider how AI is changing humanity, what exactly is humanity?

If we think back to a human existence 200 or 300 years ago, a human adult would have had three primary goals: 1) don’t die, 2) find food/shelter, 3) have babies. Is that how our ancestors would have defined the meaning of humanity?

Today when we think about AI impacting “humanity,” we might reference the impact on our careers, our privacy, or our purpose in life. We might be worried about an AI impact on our schools, democracy, or relationships.

But is that humanity?

Today I want to strip away the pretense of modern life and explore what the intrusion of AI might mean to our humanity, and by extension, our businesses.

What doesn’t change?

In the early days of Amazon, Wired magazine interviewed Jeff Bezos and asked him what new technology excited him the most. Amazon was revolutionizing eCommerce, but Bezos took the interview in another direction.

“Changing technology is interesting,” he said, “but what is even more interesting is what will NOT change, because that’s how you build a business. I find it impossible to consider that in ten years our customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery. Our success comes from focusing on the factors that never change.”

His insight is even truer today as we face the future with our new AI masters. Instead of focusing on change, the most robust businesses will serve the elements of humanity that will not change.

The humanity that remains

There is certainly a lot of hyperbole around AI and its implications. But I trust the view of an insider like Satya Nadella of Microsoft when he says AI is the most profound development in history — more important than fire, electricity, or the internet.

However, just as important as the power of the change is the speed at which it occurs. The improvements are dizzying. So in this hurricane-force environment, how do you build a durable business?

Let’s take a page from the Bezos Playbook. If we strip away the pretense and pressure of the modern world, what about humanity will NEVER change? Here’s a starter list:

• SAFETY
• LOVE
• CONNECTION AND COMMUNITY
• CREATIVITY
• COMPASSION
• CONTENTMENT / PEACE
• HEALTH
• FAMILY
• SPIRITUALITY / SPIRITUAL LONGING
• CURIOSITY
• RITUAL
• AUTONOMY / FREEDOM
• HOPE

I realize this is an imperfect and incomplete list, but give this grace as a thought experiment.

If your business is serving one of these needs, you’re probably in good shape, no matter what happens with AI. Similarly, if AI were to threaten any of these characteristics, you could create a durable business by preserving these aspects of humanity.

Building a durable business

Let’s put this into practice.

What are the new threats to personal safety?

• Deep fakes
• Cyber attacks
• Attacks on the electrical grid or water system
• Hacks into credit cards and bank accounts

These threats will not disappear anytime soon. Why hasn’t somebody invented a hack-proof credit card that can only be activated by a fingerprint or iris scan? There’s a growing niche industry that provides insurance against cyber attacks. That’s smart. Likewise, sales of back-up power supplies are booming because our concern for our safety will never go away.

Let’s try another one: Curiosity

• Why not package a service where AI can make custom novels based on your interests and favorite characters?
• Open a creator hub where people could take classes in ancient arts like glassblowing or woodcraft all in one place.
• I love my app that helps me identify birds by their songs and calls. But it poses such a limit on my curiosity. Why not turn it into a network that can alert me to new bird sightings in my neighborhood or create gamified bird collection teams?

Another way to look at this is to mash up your current products with human needs to reimagine your business value.

Let’s say you own a bakery that specializes in making unique and delicious cookies. How can you position your cookies to appeal to fundamental human needs, such as love, community, creativity, health, or ritual?

You get the idea now.

Building a durable business relies on serving persistent human needs. Strip away the veneers of social performance that have accumulated for centuries and focus on the needs that never change.

This post was excerpted from my new book How AI Changes Your Customers: The Marketing Guide to Humanity’s Next Act.

I think you will enjoy this book!

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Strip humanity to its essence and you’ll build a durable business appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I was recently interviewed about my perspectives on work-life balance and shared the story of my early career, when I juggled family, a demanding job, and an MBA program. For nearly four years, I had zero time for “me.”

The interviewer asked: “If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self who worked so hard to climb the corporate ladder, what would it be?”

I know he was expecting me to look back with regret, maybe even say I’d wished I’d worked less or spent more time at home. But honestly, I couldn’t say that. It wouldn’t be true.

Here’s what I said: I would tell my younger self, “Good job.”

That threw him for a loop. Let me explain my answer.

The chicken and the egg

In his famous book Good to Great, Jim Collins describes his concept of a career flywheel.

“Picture an egg just sitting there. No one pays it much attention until, one day, the egg cracks open and out jumps a chicken!

“All the major magazines and newspapers jump on the event, writing feature stories—“The Transformation of Egg to Chicken!” “The Remarkable Revolution of the Egg!” “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!”—as if the egg had undergone some overnight metamorphosis, radically altering itself into a chicken.

“But what does it look like from the chicken’s point of view? It’s a completely different story.

“While the world ignored this dormant-looking egg, the chicken was evolving, growing, developing, incubating. From the chicken’s point of view, cracking the egg is simply one more step in a long chain of steps leading up to that moment—a big step, to be sure, but hardly the radical, single-step transformation it looks like to those watching from outside the egg.

“It’s a silly analogy, granted. But I’m using it to highlight a very important finding from our research. We kept thinking that we’d find “the one big thing,” the miracle moment that defined breakthrough. We even pushed for it in our interviews. But the good-to-great executives simply could not pinpoint a single key event or moment in time that exemplified the transition.”

The career flywheel

Jim Collins famously described this as the flywheel. What creates personal transformation and career momentum? Is it one big push that creates velocity? One class, one connection, one stroke of luck?

No. He found it was a combination of small pushes that created momentum for both careers and businesses. You push and push and push, and that work accumulates to create momentum (I describe this in my book Cumulative Advantage).

Early in my career, I was motivated by money. I would not say I grew up poor — I never went hungry. However, if I wanted to have a bike, new clothes, or a baseball uniform, I had to earn the money myself. Likewise, I had to pay for my own college education and subsisted on beans and cheap pasta for years.

After years of scraping by, I wanted some financial freedom. I was so tired of being broke. And my flywheel was already in motion.

Beginning the momentum

In college, I was part of a marketing student group, and my job was to get guest speakers for our monthly meetings. I researched the largest companies I aspired to work for one day and invited their executives to campus. I was their host for the day, which allowed me to build personal relationships with people who could potentially hire me.

In fact, I secured an internship through a connection with one of these executives. By the time I graduated, I had three corporate internships under my belt. Each internship was bigger than the last, and they paid more because I was building on the momentum of the previous job.

By the time I was a college senior, I had an impressive resume and landed a corporate communications job with a Fortune 100 company. Problem was, I wanted to move into marketing, and that would require something more.

From sales to marketing to momentum

My first move toward a marketing career was to spend time in sales. I was transferred to our Los Angeles sales office and learned about a special MBA program that allowed students to study under the legendary Peter Drucker. I applied twice and was turned down because I was too young for this elite experience. Finally, I met with the dean and explained how my youthful perspective would add to the diversity of the program. He laughed, but let me into the program as the youngest student ever admitted.

This brings us back to where this blog post began. I now had a challenging career, two toddlers, and an MBA program to balance. This was the most demanding period of my life. It took me four years of nights and weekends to get that degree. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

If you know me at all, you know I’m great with kids and adored being a father, so I always kept this in front of me as job number one.

All of this was part of my career flywheel. I moved up the company, and, long story short, gained the knowledge and experience that have enabled me to have the career I have today.

And this is why my answer was so unexpected and not-so-politically-correct. I don’t regret working hard to build momentum in my career because it has led to a lifetime of benefits and financial freedom.

Simple math

Let’s put this in simple terms.

Because of the “flywheel work” I did in college, let’s say I could get a job that paid $60,000 while my less aggressive friends earned an entry-level job of $45,000.

If we both received a 5% annual raise for the next 20 years, my flywheel-enabled salary would be approximately $152,000, compared to $114,000 for the other person.

And of course, there is more than money. The flywheel momentum also led to promotions, travel, more time off, and opportunities for my children that I had never had before.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying that everybody needs to work hard, build momentum, and make money. I hope you’re happy in whatever you do.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path. But for me, the hard work I put in early built momentum that changed my life –and gave me more freedom, not less, as the years went on.

If you’re working on your flywheel, keep going. Step by step, you’re building something bigger than you can see right now.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy Mid Journey

The post A contrarian view to work life balance appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

My podcast features an unusual format: a rotating band of six co-hosts. This allows me to have smart, reliable guests, but on the rare occasion that somebody has a conflict, I get to bring in a surprise guest. In the latest episode, I was joined by my dear friend Gini Dietrich, a true legend in the world of PR, communications, and marketing. Our discussion spanned the evolution of social media, the enduring significance of relationships, the impact of AI on the attention economy, and, of course, Gini’s seminal creation: the PESO Model.

In this episode we cover:

1. The Evolution (and Challenge) of Social Media

Gini brought remarkable insight into how social media has changed since those early, “anything is possible” days. Social channels used to facilitate genuine relationships, connections, and organic reach—the building blocks of so many enduring professional and personal relationships. Now, the landscape feels more fragmented and transactional, with true organic reach having all but disappeared.

As Gini put it, “We had the ability to reach people around the globe that we never would have had access to in other ways. We were building relationships … that doesn’t exist today, which I think is really sad.”

2. Fractured Attention Economy

One of the most thought-provoking points in our discussion was the nature of the attention economy: it’s scattered across dozens of platforms, formats, and delivery mechanisms. The days of everyone reading the same publication or gathering around the TV are long gone. Now, as Gini noted, “there are really 12 distinct places that people are getting information.”

This is why her PESO Model (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned) is more relevant than ever. It offers a framework for creating a unified brand voice across all these channels. The real magic, Gini emphasized, isn’t in dabbling randomly in a little of everything, but in *integrating* messaging and strategy across media types.

3. The PESO Model’s Enduring Relevance

It was a delight to hear Gini tell the origin story of the PESO Model, as developed in her book “Spin Sucks.” What began as a way to organize and demonstrate the evolving role of PR and communications has evolved into a respected global framework, taught in universities and utilized by Fortune 500 teams.

This is a great story that illustrates how a bit of luck is at the root of almost every business success.

4. Navigating AI in Communications and Marketing

Of course, we couldn’t have a marketing discussion in 2025 without talking about AI. Gini shared practical, real-world examples of how AI is being cautiously (and creatively) woven into client work.

There is undeniable momentum: “the horse is out of the gate,” as Gini wisely noted. Yet legal, ethical, and practical questions abound.

5. Breaking Bad Rules in PR (and Marketing)

Finally, I had to ask: what’s one “bad rule” in PR that desperately needs breaking? Gini’s answer was swift: the tired practice of measuring impact by media impressions and advertising value equivalencies. It’s time to move beyond archaic metrics and embrace more meaningful measurements aligned with business outcomes.

My conversation with Gini was a reminder of how quickly our field evolves—and how much wisdom we can gain from those who have shaped its evolution.

This is a fun, memorable conversation between marketing friends, and you won’t want to miss it. Just click here!

Click here to enjoy The Marketing Companion Episode 320

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Now, any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customers to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence to strengthen their customer relationships.

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I’ve been working on an AI-fueled MarkBot that I’ll make available to you one day soon. I’ve been testing it and asked it to dig deep into all the content on the internet about me, providing me with interview questions I’ve never been asked before — questions I would love to answer.

The result was fun and inspiring. The bot provided questions that were surprising and wonderfully thought-provoking. So, today, I am answering my own questions. Why not? If these ten questions from my MarkBot amused me, maybe they will entertain and inform you, too.

This is a first for me, maybe a first for anybody. I suppose I am interviewing myself.

Here we go with the AI questions and my answers:

1. If “brand community” were a person, what kind of personality would it have?

It would be like Mr. Rogers.

Fred Rogers was an iconic American TV personality who hosted a long-running children’s TV program. Fred Rogers always led with love. Didn’t judge. Offered new wisdom every day. Didn’t hide from tough topics. And he never pressured you to buy anything.

2. “You write often about belonging as a marketing force. But what role has belonging played in your own life?”

I do not make friends easily. I wish I had more close friends, and I am working on that.

A great benefit of hosting my online marketing community is that day after day, I have significant conversations with people that turn into real friendships.

So although I have had a lack of belonging in my life, I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time getting to experience the connections through an online community.

You can learn more about the RISE community here and I hope you will join us. Maybe we’ll even become friends!

3. “You’ve warned about ‘content shock’ for over a decade. Is it possible that we’ve now entered an era of insight shock where even wisdom is becoming a commodity?”

To level-set new readers, I coined the term “content shock” in 2014 to explain why, in the long run, most content marketing is not economically sustainable. While considered controversial and even inflammatory at the time, this prediction certainly came true as the cost of competing in an oversaturated marketing world sank in.

Now, we’re in a world where content is a commodity. Not just content, but intelligence. Through AI, the economic value of intelligence is approaching zero.

Perhaps we are becoming numb to the magic of AI, but a few years ago, the idea of a computer coming up with these relevant and provocative questions would have been unthinkable.

I could argue that wisdom (knowing the correct answers) is a commodity. But that’s not the same as insight. Insight is a human revelation. It’s connecting the dots in a new way. And that is something AI will never be able to replace.

4. “You speak of ‘seams’ in Cumulative Advantage — brief openings for momentum. Have you ever overlooked a seam in your own career? What did it teach you about timing or regret?”

I have missed many seams … intentionally. Here is an example.

In 2012, I published the first book on influencer marketing, Return On Influence. This book was years ahead of its time. The term “influence marketing” was not even a mainstream concept. I was forecasting a seam: power was shifting in our world from established media channels to creators building passionate audiences.

With this insight, I could have become the “go-to” guy for influence marketing. I could have created an influencer marketing agency and plowed right through that seam.

But I decided not to because I would have been bored out of my mind. I don’t want to work on the same thing every day. I had no desire to build an influencer agency with a staff of employees.

I have carefully selected my seams, and I don’t have any regrets about missing out on any particular opportunity.

5. What do you admire most about your younger self’s marketing mindset? What do you shake your head at?

To put it mildly, I was a very “heart-centered” young man in high school and college. But when I entered the world of business, numbers and financial performance usually took precedence, and I had to learn that hard lesson. Thankfully, I had an understanding and nurturing boss who helped guide me on a more analytical path.

Eventually, I was part of a program to groom me into one of the top leaders of a Fortune 100 company. But once I had children, I felt that the sacrifices required to keep going up the corporate ladder were too great, and I needed to find my heart again.

I once had a teacher who told me, “there is no weakness, just over-done strengths,” and I believe that is true. It’s good to be heart-centered, but if that is all you have to offer, you might not make the best business decisions. You must have a keen appreciation of business realities to succeed. Today, I think I am pretty balanced between my heart and my head.

So I love the heart of my younger self, and I’m glad I have revitalized it.

6. “In the book KNOWN, you help others build influence. But what’s the one part of being known that no one prepared you for?”

Many years ago, a young man nervously approached me at a conference and said, “It took all my courage to come up and talk to you.”

That just broke my heart. I think I am an accessible person. I never want to send out an elitist celebrity vibe. I cut my own grass and do my own laundry like most people, for goodness’ sake. I never, ever want people to be nervous or intimidated around me. I was unprepared for that kind of reaction and have always felt weird about it.

7. What’s something your non-marketing friends or family understand about your work better than some marketers do?

Nothing. As far as I know, none of my friends or family members understand what I do (other than my wife). I don’t think they read my blog or books. Probably don’t even know I have a podcast. That’s fine with me. What I do seems irrelevant to personal relationships.

8. What’s a moment of unexpected joy you’ve experienced on stage or with a reader that you’ll never forget?

There are so many. It’s hard to pick just one!

There was one moment, though, that put wind beneath my wings.

If you’ve read my book on personal branding, KNOWN (hey, you’re my Bot… of course, you’ve read KNOWN!), in the first chapter, I tell a story about the beginning of my personal branding journey. I was at the lowest point in my life. My darkest years.

At the end of the book, I could report some of the benefits of that long journey to become known. After a speech in Scotland, a young woman approached me with tears in her eyes. “I just wanted to see you and tell you that I am who I am because of you.”

And then, there were tears in my eyes, too. For the first time, it dawned on me the type of impact I was having on my readers.

9. You’ve seen the rise of social media, influencer marketing, and AI—what’s a trend you once believed in that didn’t pan out?

I’ve had a decent track record when it comes to forecasting what’s coming next, but I had one memorable miss.

I thought voice assistants like Alexa would become the future of e-commerce. And, perhaps they should be. Perhaps, they will be one day — with AI assistance.

But it’s been a bomb so far. I thought Alexa would open up a dominant new marketing channel.

10. If all your books were wiped out tomorrow and you could only save one sentence from everything you’ve written, what would it be?

That’s easy.

“The Most Human Company Wins.”

That nails it for me.

What do you think of this interview? Does it give you ideas of how you can use AI for your own content and marketing ideas?

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Image courtesy Mid Journey

The post My All-time Best Interviewer Was an AI Bot appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

One of the most underrated yet transformative tools in your business arsenal is the simple AI assistant. A custom GPT is so easy to create that even a non-technical person like me can do it. Recently on The Marketing Companion podcast, the brilliant Dana Malstaff (of Boss Mom and Nurture to Convert) explained how entrepreneurs — even those who aren’t coders — can leverage AI bots to accelerate growth, foster community, and reclaim those precious, creative moments of freedom we’ve all been missing.

Dana’s journey began out of necessity—a messy year filled with personal challenges that demanded her to be “on” for her business even when life was falling apart. Out of that chaos sprang something unique: personal AI bots tailored to her needs.

Here’s what I learned from Dana’s fearless embrace of AI and why you should seriously consider building your own digital sidekick.

From Therapy Bots to Future-Self Coaching

Dana first dreamed up what she called a “therapist bot” (affectionately named Atlantis) because traditional support systems weren’t always available at midnight when she needed them. Her bot became a judgment-free zone, combining the endless patience of AI with personalized prompts and questions designed to nudge her forward, both emotionally and in her business. That little experiment snowballed.

The next step? A “future self” bot. Dana structured it as a kind of time machine. She programmed it to act as the version of herself ten years down the line, having already achieved her goals, dealt with her hang-ups, and built out her business vision. The bot guides her (and now, her community) by asking not only what she wanted, but why she hadn’t achieved it yet, what she feared, and who she might need to let go of in the process. This wasn’t just surface-level affirmation; it was deep, sometimes uncomfortable self-inquiry that led to action.

And it works. Her clients, who used the bot built into ChatGPT, reported significant boosts in productivity, clarity, and decisiveness. Bots didn’t replace thinking — they supercharged it.

AI Assistant for Systems, Scale, and Speed

Dana’s not stopping at mental health or personal empowerment. She’s bringing bot-powered systems right into the core of business strategy and marketing implementation.

She is creating a truly AI-first business with an AI bot strategy built into the core of her business model.

It’s not about skipping the work, it’s about skipping the friction. Dana’s mantra: “The clarity is in the doing.” Bots help you get into “doing” mode faster, making it possible to implement, iterate, and improve at lightning speed.

You Don’t Have to Code—You Just Have to Ask

Maybe the most empowering nugget of the whole conversation: Neither of us are coders, and that’s irrelevant. The “coding language” of today is simply good communication. If you can type thoughtful prompts and questions in English, ChatGPT (and similar platforms) will do the heavy lifting.

Dana’s advice for entrepreneurs and marketers: Just try it. Start a conversation with ChatGPT about your goals, your hang-ups, your tasks. Let it guide you with more questions, and keep refining as you learn. The bot isn’t perfect, but it evolves with you. And as your needs become more sophisticated, so will your prompts—and your results.

AI Leaves Room for Creativity

There’s an elephant in the room with all this talk about clones, bots, and AI-first strategies: Am I putting myself out of a job?

Dana’s answer is clear-eyed and optimistic: Absolutely not. Bots make the real you more valuable. They enable you to be “present” for your audience 24/7, democratize access to your expertise, and free you up to do what only you can do: reflect, innovate, mentor, and create real change.

In fact, as bots take over the repetitive or easily systematized aspects of life and business, what remains is space—potentially, for the first time in years—for boredom. And out of boredom comes creativity, innovation, and those big, bold ideas that actually move you and your business forward.

AI, in this manifestation, doesn’t replace humans; it supports us so we can dig deeper, go further, and do work that really matters.

What’s Next? Cloning, Community, and Creativity

Where is this all heading? Dana has her sights set on cloning herself via AI for both Boss Mom (providing life and business advice) and Nurture to Convert (offering strategic marketing coaching). It’s not about making herself obsolete; it’s about expanding her reach and serving her community, even those who can’t afford private coaching.

And, crucially, as our routine tasks get handled quicker and with more precision, we finally earn back the gift of time—time to think, to be creative, to dream up what’s next.

Marketing, business, and personal growth hinge on helping people get what they want faster, with less friction. Dana’s fearless steps into AI-driven coaching and business systems offer a roadmap for any entrepreneur ready to embrace this new world.

So here’s my challenge: Don’t just read about bots — build one. Start small. Play with prompts. Get curious. Let AI shoulder some of your cognitive load and see what opens up for you.

A great place to start is by listening to this inspiring discussion with Dana!

To listen in, just click here:

Click here to enjoy The Marketing Companion Episode 319

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