We’re wrapping up a very busy, very eventful 2022. I suspect you are too. And the two defining characteristics of the year, from my perspective, were:

1. Operating in an exceedingly weird economy
   
2. Keeping a clear focus on the future
   

That’s what the data tells us. Your listens, likes, shares, and comments on social and in email kept revolving around those two topics. As such, we’re recapping 2022 by looking back at the podcast episodes that focused on those two topics, from executing in a weird economy to deep dives into the future of digital. And along the way, we provide some guidance on where we might be headed in 2023.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

How to Drive Business Using Digital in 2023 — Headlines and Show Notes
Show Notes and Links
Future trends

• The Future Digital Trends You Must Think About Today (Thinks Out Loud Episode 342)
  
• What Does "Digital" Even Mean Right Now (Thinks Out Loud Episode 343)
  
• Will ChatGPT Kill Google? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 367)
  
• A Far Too Quick Look at the Metaverse, web3, and the Future of Digital (Thinks Out Loud Episode 349)
  
• The Future of the Metaverse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 363)
  

How to Compete with the Frightful Five

• Revisiting Day One at Amazon and Developing a Digital Culture (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates
  
• Revisiting "Are You Destined to Lose to the Frightful Five?"
  

AGFAM Earnings Recaps

• What Do the AGFAM’s Earnings Tell You About the State of Digital in Q2? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 348)
  
• The Sky is Falling for Digital… or Is It? Big Tech’s Earnings Q2 2022 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 357)
  
• The Sky is Falling? The State of Digital — Q4 2022 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 364)
  
• What We Learned About Digital from Frightful Five’s Q4 2021 Earnings (Thinks Out Loud Episode 338)
  

The State of the Economy

• Doing Digital in the Weirdest Economy Ever (Thinks Out Loud Episode 355)
  
• Marketing in Uncertain Times (Thinks Out Loud Episode 352)
  

Management and Hiring

• Revisiting How to Build a Digital Team (Thinks Out Loud)
  
• How to Build the Business Case for Digital in Your Budget (Thinks Out Loud Episode 353)
  
• How to Build a Digital Team (Thinks Out Loud Episode 344)
  
• How to Drive Business Using Digital (Thinks Out Loud Episode 368)
  
• Why Would Anyone Want to Work For You? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 337)
  

Content Marketing

• Content Marketing in Action: 10 Years of Thinks Out Loud (Episode 359)
  
• The Future of Content Marketing is Already Here (Thinks Out Loud Episode 350)
  
• Revisiting "Content Distribution Concepts to Help Your Content Marketing Succeed" (Thinks Out Loud)
  
• Revisiting Content Marketing in Action (Thinks Out Loud)
  
• The Future of Content Marketing is Already Here (Thinks Out Loud Episode 350)
  
• Where Content, Community, and Customer Experience Meet (Thinks Out Loud Episode 346) – Tim Peter & Associates
  
• What Netflix’s Struggles Can Teach You About Your Digital Strategy (Thinks Out Loud Episode 347)
  

Customer Experience

• How Lively Demonstrates Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode Episode 339)
  
• Your Employees — and Customers — Live in a Different World Now (Thinks Out Loud Episode 362)
  

Commerce

• Revisiting "The Lost Art of Value Adds in Marketing" (Thinks Out Loud)
  

Leadership, Inspiration, and Personal

• We Owe It To Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 361)
  
• You Get to Make it Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 341)
  

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
  
• A Brief Introduction to Thinks Out Loud. As a bonus, we’ve also included this PDF document that highlights some of our core episodes to help you dig into what the show is about. We think it will help you capture the show’s essence while you’re working your way through the 300-plus episodes published so far. Download it here.
  
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
  
  • Customer Focus
    
  • Strategy
    
  • Technology
    
  • Operations
    
  • Culture
    
  • Data
    
  
  

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Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks
Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 15m 47s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Transcript: Recapping 2022 (Thinks Out Loud)

Well, hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud. Your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 369 of the Big Show. It is our last new episode of 2022. We are wrapping up a big, crazy year . I don’t know about you all, but I mean, it’s been a wild year with lots of stuff going on and I know I’m looking forward to a little downtime.

There will not be a new episode next week. We will be posting a repost of a prior episode as we do from time to time as I take a little downtime with family and the rest of the team take some time off as well.

What I do want to do this week though, is I do want to kind of recap some of the things we’ve learned this year, at least in part from what the data about the show tells me, what the data that you kind of tell us, what are the most important things.

And we talk about a lot of different things on the show, I talk about a lot of different things on the show. So, yeah, there is some self-reporting bias here. There’s nothing in the data that says anything about the things that Ihaven’t talked about; I’m fully aware of that.

But I would say that there are two big trends that emerged over the course of the year around the kinds of content that were important to you and the kinds of topics that are important to you.

As I said a moment ago, you know, I talk about a variety of different things here on the show, and it’s pretty clear looking at the episodes that got the most listens, the episodes that got the most shares, the episodes that got the most comments, that there are two big topics that were front and center for everybody this year.

The Future

And the first of these is a pretty traditional one for the show.

We always see a fair bit of activity. We get a lot of listens, we get a lot of shares, we get a lot of likes, we get a lot of comments, things like that on any show that delves deep into future trends.

Where are we going to be down the road? Where are we going to be six months from now? Nine months from now? 12 months from now? 18 months from now? And this year, that’s stayed true. Five of the biggest episodes of this year were heavily focused around the future.

Future Digital Trends

That goes all the way back to one of the earliest episodes of the year that talked about the future digital trends you must think about today. And I would suggest that all of those trends, cuz we’re talking about the future, still have a lot of relevance.

The Metaverse

I’d still see most of those topics being pretty important as we head into 2023. There was obviously a lot of interest in posts about the metaverse, podcast episodes about the metaverse. We took what I called “a far too quick look at the metaverse, web3, and the future of digital” in episode 349. And we did an even deeper dive on the metaverse in an episode called the future of the metaverse in episode 363.

ChatGPT

We also looked at pretty recently will ChatGPT kill Google, just a couple of weeks ago, in episode 367. That also was incredibly popular. I’ve gotten lots of feedback about that episode in email and the like over the last bunch of weeks, as well as shares on social media and the like. So clearly there’s a lot of interest in that topic and it’s something I’m pretty confident we’re going to return to a lot.

Where Digital Is Headed

As we come into the early part of 2023 and maybe beyond, but as I talked about in an episode called “What Does Digital Even Mean Right Now?” The definition of digital continues to evolve. There are lots of changes afoot, lots of changes out there, that we need to pay attention to. We as marketers, we as digital strategists, we as business professionals, need to keep paying attention to that, because the definition of digital will continue to shift, will continue to evolve all through 2023.

The Economy and Execution: Running Your Business Effectively in a Weird Economy

Now, the other big trend that we saw this year was really about the economy and what that means for your business going forward. There were two episodes, one called “Marketing at Uncertain Times,” and one called “Doing Digital in the Weirdest Economy Ever” that were hugely popular.

And we saw a lot of activity around the practice of management because of the economy. Now sometimes that had to do with a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is how you compete with Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft — You know the AGFAM, as I call them or the Frightful Five. We look at their quarterly earnings each quarter and all four of those episodes were really big. We saw that with things like “Revisiting Day One at Amazon and Developing a Digital Culture,” and “Are You Destined To Lose To The Frightful Five?” Again, I will link to all of these episodes in the show notes all doing well.

Hiring and Management

We also saw a lot of focus on really, really tactical information. You know, how do you handle management and hiring? There was an episode called “How to Build a Digital Team,” one called “How to Build the Business Case for Digital In Your Budget.” Another called “Why Would Anyone Want To Work For You?” And of course, last week’s episode, “How to Drive Business Using Digital” that were just super popular.

There’s clearly a lot of information that people are looking for that folks like you are looking for around how do I do this successfully all year round.

Content Marketing

Other big topics in that same category were things around content marketing. You know, we had episodes about the future of content marketing and how it’s already here. Episodes about where content, community and customer experience meet. Episodes about content marketing in action. Episodes about what Netflix’s struggles can teach you about your digital strategy and about your content strategy. You’ve heard me say many times that content is king, so that doesn’t come as a big shock.

Customer Experience

You’ve also heard me say that customer experience is queen, and a couple of episodes around customer experience were really popular as well. One about how Lively demonstrates customer experience is queen. And one called your employees and customers live in a different world now.

So those all clearly resonated with you.

Around how to do digital more effectively, how you focus on management and hiring, how you focus on content marketing, how you focus on customer experience and commerce.

Commerce

An old episode that we reposted called “The Lost Art of Value Adds in Marketing” connect the dots between content marketing and customer experience and commerce. How do you take this traffic and turn it into business for your business? How do you turn it into revenue? How do you turn it into profits?

And I can tell you, we are going to continue to focus on how you can hire, how you can build a team, how you can deal with a strange economy, because it looks like we’re going to be dealing with a strange economy for quite a while.

You Can Compete with the Frightful Five

How you can use your content, how you can improve your customer experience, and how you can connect those with commerce to compete successfully with the Apples and the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks and the Microsofts of the world. They are not destined to win. You are not destined to lose to these guys.

Sure, they have advantages. It’s a fact. You have advantages as well. You have ways to compete that we’ve talked about many, many times in terms of how you can differentiate yourself and how you can move in a more agile fashion. How you can create content that speaks to the needs of your customers, And how you can use a hub and spoke strategy where the hub is your website and your email list and your community. And the spokes are social networks and distribution channels and the like to get that message in front of a customer base who cares about you,

We are going to talk about that all the time as we head into next year, all throughout 2023. I’ve talked about this in the past most recently, not that long ago, about how we owe it to our customers to make their lives better, and that you have the ability to do that. You have the tools in which to do that, As you think about how you, you know, create the right content marketing and put it in front of your customers, as you think about your customer experience and how you improve that for your customer. You have the ability to make it better. You have the ability, you have the tools to make a better experience and better content, and just better integration, better community for your customers.

Conclusion

So if you’re taking a little downtime over the course of the next week, week-and-a-half, check out the show notes for today’s episode that will have links to some of these past episodes. And feel free to listen to the ones that resonate the most with you or where you feel you need the most support right now.

These are all topics that are changing pretty frequently. But there are also topics that we talk about enough that there’s enough information and insights there to help you move forward with content marketing, with customer experience, with commerce, with management of your folks, with adapting to an evolving economy so that you are set up for the future.

Because those two larger trends:

1. The fact that the future is kind of here and continues to arrive every single day, isn’t going away anytime soon.
   
2. And the second that if you take care of doing the things that you need to do, if you execute against your plan with the right content and the right customer experience and the right team, you’ll be set up to succeed no matter what the future brings.
   

As I said a moment ago, you get to make it better. That’s the key. So take a little time, take a break, relax a little bit, get yourself ready for where we’re going to go in 2023, and I promise you we’ll be there to support you all along the way.

Show Closing and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this.

I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to TimPeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s TimPeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 369.

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Show Outro

With all that, I really just wanna say from the bottom of my heart you know, here we are wrapping up 2022. I would not do this show if you weren’t tuning in every single week. It means so very much to me. I mentioned we’re going to have a repost episode next week, but I wanna promise you I will be back right after the first of the year with all new content, all new episodes, and I just can’t wait to continue the conversation with you.

So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I hope you have an amazing, safe, healthy, happy, holidays, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well be safe, and as always, take care of everybody.

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