Chris Norton: 0:04

Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast where you can learn to double your marketing ROI by understanding the mistakes and lessons from the world's top marketers. I'm Chris Norton and today we have an exciting episode lined up with Zohi Mustafa, the founder and head of marketing at Growth Hacker. Zohi's experience in AI-driven marketing strategies will give us an insight into how marketers can leverage the power of AI to tackle multi-channel marketing, personalization and engaging the ever-elusive Gen Z and Gen A audiences. In this episode, we look at a number of different things, including AI, and he tells us so many honest stories.

Chris Norton: 0:45

Now, if you like fuck-ups and mistakes, this show is for you, because he's got everything in here. There's several, including a HubSpot disaster where 450,000 emails were sent out to 1,000 people in under an hour. If that doesn't make your blood run cold, I don't know what is. So, if you like to learn from people's mistakes, this episode is definitely for you. Zohi's so refreshing and honest, but he's also brilliant at what he does. So sit back, relax and let's hear how you can use growth hacking to grow your brand in 2025. Let's get started. Enjoy, zohi Mustafa. Welcome to the show.

Zohe Mustafa: 1:28

Hi, thank you for having me.

Chris Norton: 1:34

Thanks for coming on the show. So I've seen been through your history and you've had a lot of jobs in marketing. First question how did you get into marketing? Because our listeners are all marketers. They're always interested to hear how people got into it. How did you get into marketing?

Zohe Mustafa: 1:45

um, so that's a hopefully interesting story. Um, so I literally shared a post about this on linkedin the other day. Uh, my journey into marketing, uh, I was actually uh, my first foray was uh applying for placement jobs that uh at uni to about 300 different agencies, different advertising agencies. This is before AI, before computers or even decent handwritten letters and applications 300 applications every single one rejected. And I ended up graduating with IT skills and so on, worked in IT for a few years and then, in the sort of e-commerce boom, I decided to start my own business and obviously had to do all the marketing from there, built up a ton of skills from there and ended up getting a job at QVC the TV channel in the marketing team and pretty much progressed from there. So every sort of thing I know from a marketing perspective has been learned on the job, with all the various roles from QVC to Virgin and so on Lots of big brands who had very strict brand guidelines and all that, and it kind of honed my skills in that sense.

Chris Norton: 3:01

And you've said that if you could speak to your younger self, you'd tell yourself to stay at Virgin Media. Why was that then?

Zohe Mustafa: 3:09

They're masters at brand marketing. We all recognize the Virgin brand, whether it's Virgin Airlines or Virgin Media. They have a distinct style, distinct sort of tone of voice and they're just really so good at it. I wish I'd stayed longer, if only. I mean, I learned a lot in the year that I was there. You know, got handed huge amounts of responsibility, large sort of million pound sales for their media products. But had I stayed longer, I think it would have added more credibility to my background. Um, I remember one of my bosses at nokia asking um why I didn't stay longer at virgin media with with the tone of you should have stayed longer and we were at nokia in its heyday when it was everywhere with um trigger happy tv doing yeah, I was there for three years, um, and we were, I was at nokia before apple.

Zohe Mustafa: 4:09

The iphone kind of really stole the show. Um, and you know, I remember the whole management team and all the marketing team kind of trying to figure out how we were going to respond to to apple's onslaught of hitting our sales. We went down the whole app market route. I was responsible for driving downloads of all the Nokia apps. Maybe some people remember them, I don't know. We even had our own app store called Ovi. Yeah, I remember that. So we were in. I was there at the heyDay, but I was also there for the decline.

Chris Norton: 4:46

Okay, interesting. Yeah, because at one time which is unbelievable, there was, yeah, nokia was the number one phone brand, wasn't it? And then, like you say, the iPhone came out and totally shook up everything. With the iPod being on board the iPhone, it was like a game changer wasn't.

Zohe Mustafa: 5:03

I remember when I, when I was there, we had over 40 percent, about 45 percent of market share for devices Nokia at the time, um, and I think 2008, when the iPhone first started to kind of be talked about and I remember some of our management saying, oh, you don't need to worry about iPhone, nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna buy the, the single sort of screen. Uh, you know, you know how you can only have one screen open. Yeah, they thought that would like kill it dead and it was the complete opposite.

Chris Norton: 5:33

Everybody because I was- during that period I don't know if you remember I was working with sony ericsson and I don't know if you remember it was the first, because the iphone hadn't come out yet and nokia was big sony ericsson was on the scene and I helped launch this phone and the revolutionary thing about it was it had a keyboard on the phone, but you slid the screen and you slid it and it had a keyboard so you'd type a bit like a hidden BlackBerry-type thing, and it was like a big game-changer and we could only get 10 or 15 prototypes and they were so new that, um, we could, we had to be really careful who we picked to give them.

Chris Norton: 6:11

This was before influencers, so we were picking like the world's top, top bloggers and we were sending them out to them. But I remember getting the prototype myself. I was very excited, got older one and it fell to bits in my hand so I was a bit, yeah, the same era. I don't know if you remember um, that that all that time, yeah, no, I don't remember my.

Zohe Mustafa: 6:29

My first mobile was an ericsson p800. Um, uh and uh. I remember the, the form factors that you're talking about. Nokia had multiple form factors with sliding keyboards and everything, and we used to do similar things in terms of sending them out to bloggers and influencers, as they were as known as at the time, and they would love it. They would love to get all the free swag, they'd love to create content about it. You know, I would say that was the early days of influencer marketing. Nowadays you have to pay them and all that, yeah.

Chris Norton: 7:04

And so today, then, so you've, you've, you've built, you've built up your marketing experience. You've been at royal mail, you've been at qvc, you've been at virgin, you've been at senshi, you've been at nokia. What a list. I know it's like a hit. It's like a hit list. You've not been at coca-cola, but you know we can't have everything. Um, and today you've got your own, your own growth hacking agency that specializes in growth hacking. And if my mum's listening because she's one of our two listeners that listen can you explain what growth hacking is to the, to the, the layman person? How would you explain it?

Zohe Mustafa: 7:35

uh, the sort of elevator pitch would be um, rapid exponential growth, viral growth, trying to capture and create that. You know, not 10 signups but thousands of signups. Um, using data and ab testing a lot. So rapid iterations of campaigns, uh, maybe not real time, but at least you know reacting quicker to to, as, for example, if you see that a call to action is not really driving the results, change that in real time, send out multiple versions. But the short version, rapid exponential viral growth, is the nirvana that we're trying to achieve for clients.

Chris Norton: 8:19

Okay, and so if I'm a senior brand manager, or a brand manager in some, let's say, I'm in Kent and I've got a, I work on a consumer brand and we turn over about we're not huge, but three, three million pounds a year. I've just made this up, um, and if I wanted to use, utilize your services, what would you help me do?

Zohe Mustafa: 8:39

oh, good question.

Zohe Mustafa: 8:40

Um, I think the first thing I do with with every client is to and it might sound slightly cliche and a bit boring, but um is to analyze and get a complete picture of their digital presence.

Zohe Mustafa: 8:55

Um, so growth hacking works better with online and digital rather than offline stuff, although principles could be applied to offline campaigns, but look for gaps.

Zohe Mustafa: 9:06

I do a 50 sort of 50 metric analysis of every publicly available piece of information about that organization in terms of digital data and this digital footprint so visits, clicks, search results, etc.

Zohe Mustafa: 9:23

And look for, where you know you kind of get a feel, having done this for big clients, small clients what the sort of benchmark is in terms of what you would expect from social, for example, in terms of top of the funnel traffic or email, and where there's small numbers, kind of highlight them in green as an opportunity to improve. And most times you'll see that the low metrics of traffic and conversions coming from certain channels are due to simply the fact that they're not utilizing them that much. And then you can go and verify those numbers by just going to look at their, their company profiles, the personal profiles on LinkedIn, for example, and you'll see they're not posting regularly, or they're posting regularly, but engagement is low. So that's my starting point is build a picture of where there's a gap and then derive solutions to kind of make that stuff go viral. And that's where the content and AI and stuff like that comes in.

Vicki Murphy: 10:23

So I guess data seems to be key for you throughout kind of all of the marketing activities, and obviously you said you started out in a degree in IT and then you moved over to marketing. Was there a period in time or something, any kind of experience that you had, that made you realise how important data was from a marketing point of view to drive growth?

Zohe Mustafa: 10:47

Good question. I mean data has been ever present. I guess that is the beauty of digital marketing is that we have so many different data points being collected. You know, from the website to your social presence. If you were to add up all the collect, all the different metrics you know, from the website to your social presence, if you were to add up all the collect, all the different metrics you know, I'd say easily over a thousand.

Zohe Mustafa: 11:10

Um, I'd say that the earliest kind of uh learnings that data played a big role was was a virgin. You know, we're running. We were spending a million a month on on paid campaigns, uh, 40 on paid search for 20 on affiliates, uh, and so on. Seo, um, and you know, uh, we had to justify every month, uh, that budget free spend. So the accounts guys wouldn't just sign over the budget, um, and we had to show, showcase and prove our case with the results, um, and it wasn't just enough to say, hey, we got you X million in sales or X thousand conversions. They would track me on metrics like the cost per acquisition, you know, and they were constantly getting me to push it down. So, even though I was acquiring customers for them, that generated a minimum of 250 quid per year for them. It cost me 30 40 pounds. With the paid campaigns they still were pushing me to drive that cost down and without that data I couldn't have done that.

Chris Norton: 12:53

Interesting, and so you've put in your notes that, because we often ask people if they've been through a social media crisis, and these bits always give me a little bit of anxiety but also make me reassured that there's other people out there going through social media. So anybody that's out there dealing with a social media crisis, trust me, we've all been there. But you've put one in from Royal Mail which I thought was quite interesting, about the 2012 Olympics. Do you want to share the story behind that?

Zohe Mustafa: 13:19

Yeah, so this was just after the main Olympics have ended. I've joined on a contract at Royal Mail. There's all these big plans to roll out, all these new initiatives, new website, et cetera, new marketing team. We were with the interim team to prepare the, the, the ground for the, the permanent team that would come in, that were being hired. Um, the paralympics, uh, were just beginning to start. I can't remember exactly. Uh, anyway, a row broke out that, um, royal mail weren't going to do any stamps for the Paralympians like they had for the main Olympians and, of course, you know, because they're disabled, et cetera.

Zohe Mustafa: 14:04

This was really like annoying a lot of people. Twitter I think this was, you know, still quite early days of Twitter and it just blew up. Literally, people were saying all kinds of things about us. And how could you leave these people out? Why are you ignoring the Paralympians? Blah, blah, blah. Because we were an interim team, we hadn't set up all our sort of processes and tools. We were literally evaluating a social listening tool called Meltwater. At the time, we hadn't signed the contract.

Zohe Mustafa: 14:37

You're on the free trial. There was no way yeah, exactly, I mean, and we couldn't, uh, we couldn't respond to the flood of uh inquiry. You know, not inquiries, but you know tweets coming through um, so, in case of managing it, the only thing we could do was sit there. I literally sat there on tweet deck just watching all the hundreds of tweets and complaints coming through, and it was just like you just wanted to hide hundreds.

Chris Norton: 15:04

How long did it go on for that?

Zohe Mustafa: 15:07

a normal nine to five work day, I think it. Around lunchtime it kind of blew up and I was sitting there watching it for hours on end. I don't know if you ever use tweet deck, but if you can, you kind of put your feet feeds in and there's lots of tweets going by. Then it's like a. It's just like a film reel or something. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Norton: 15:28

And you couldn't read much.

Zohe Mustafa: 15:31

Had we had something like melt water in place where you can have sort of canned responses, the common themes we could have, like sent something back. Oh, we're sorry, or whatever, we're looking at it or anything, but there was just no response did you not?

Chris Norton: 15:44

did you not issue a statement then saying we're going to come back and deal with this?

Zohe Mustafa: 15:48

I think, yes, the president, the sort of pr guys and all that uh after uh did issue some sort of response, but in that particular period, when it was really like going mad on twitter, there was not a lot I could do so what did your boss say the day after?

Zohe Mustafa: 16:06

it was. It was a collective shrug of shoulders, as in we. None of us saw that coming. Um, but that's the thing I I guess when you're working with a larger brand, the crisis planning was another lesson to be learned, I think. Never assume that you will not be embroiled in a crisis when it comes to social, the bigger the brand you are. Also and this was also when Royal Mail went to the public sector it was just before they went private. So even more scrutiny because it's a public brand and so on.

Chris Norton: 16:39

And talking of mistakes, obviously the show is all about mistakes, and we've got yours on here, um. Before we get into your mistake, though, I'm interested because, um crms right. So you're a data, you're a data man, you're an email try. You test different email formats, you split testing. There'll be a lot of marketers nodding their heads knowing exactly what you do. How do you choose a decent CRM? Have you got one that you prefer over the others? Or is you know what I mean?

Zohe Mustafa: 17:07

Which is your favorite.

Zohe Mustafa: 17:08

In terms of preference, definitely HubSpot. You know there's lots of over a thousand sort of CRM solutions out there. I prefer HubSpot just simply because of number one the UI and the ease of use. If you compare it to something like Salesforce which is, you know, mind-blowing With HubSpot, it's just really easy to use and then it's just got huge capability in terms of you can run five different channels paid email, social, etc. So it's not just an email sort of CRM tool, it's a whole marketing suite.

Zohe Mustafa: 17:47

And then the personalization aspect. So you can have over 300 properties per contact in terms of data on them and if you utilize even 50 of those properties, you can get to some serious level personalization when it goes to the outbound campaigns and stuff like that. So that's my preference in terms of collection criteria. I mean I could probably do another whole podcast, but I've done things where you kind of capture what are the basic requirements of your team and then see how that that crm fits those requirements yeah, a lot of people go through that painful process of moving from one to the other, but we, we use hubspot, so that's quite interesting.

Chris Norton: 18:31

So then, hubspot, you did an amazing nurtured campaign, but it went horribly wrong. Tell us all about it yeah.

Zohe Mustafa: 18:38

so, um, again, I'm supposed to be a hubspot expert, certified, etc. Taking quite a few of the tests. Um, and you know, I guess you you may become a little complacent when you've been used. I think that was, uh, that particular uh role. That was probably my eighth HubSpot build.

Zohe Mustafa: 18:57

So, eighth time of using HubSpot with a different company and launching a campaign. There was a thousand or so of our sort of high value, high powered contacts, major brands, and some of these were like personal contacts of the CEO of the organization I was at and I was setting up a nurture campaign. We were launching a new service, I think one of our sort of AI offerings and stuff like that. And I set up this really intricate. I don't know if you've ever used HubSpot, but there's this workflow section. I know you mentioned you use it. There's a workflow section where you can set up, you know, automated nurture campaigns and so on.

Zohe Mustafa: 19:48

Again, being too clever for my own good, I set up lots of complex branches and if-then statements and if this person does this, then do that, et cetera. So it was already quite complex. And then HubSpot has this auto-enroll feature that will automatically enroll contacts into a campaign. I, of course, switched that off because I had subsequent multi-level branches of conditions of send this email if this happens and send this email if that happens, and I thought, oh, I'm fine, everything will be good. Unfortunately, a HubSpot update went out which meant that the software changed literally overnight and there was an additional setting to unenroll people. Yeah, I didn't know about that, so I just left it on. What ended up happening was 1,000 contacts received 450,000 emails in the space of about an hour In how long?

Zohe Mustafa: 20:54

What time frame? In less than an hour it literally went into a loop. Yeah, luckily I found out in that hour, otherwise it would have been higher. But yeah, I mean, this went out to major brands and you're getting all these pissed off emails coming back to me and my CEO, the ones who were like kind of you know and again I'm talking like major financial institutions in the city and it was just mortifying. It was like the most horrible moment in my marketing career, I think, to date, and I've made tons of other cock-ups, but this one was really up there with screw-ups.

Chris Norton: 21:35

I think if I received 450 emails in an hour from one person, I would be a bit pissed off. You're right, I don't even know how many. That is a minute. Yeah, I need to do the maths on that. That's a lot.

Vicki Murphy: 21:47

I suppose the only saving grace, yeah, the only saving grace is there. You could just potentially try and blame, totally blame the software oh yeah, definitely blame the software it's like there is, you know, a little bit of an outlook. I can see, I can see an email going out saying sorry.

Chris Norton: 22:02

We've had a slight um a software glitch, because I received a an email marketing piece last week and it said hi first name oh, we've all been there, we've all done that media list, everybody out there everybody listening to this has done that. Hi, first name or left or high company name, everybody's done that.

Zohe Mustafa: 22:22

If you haven't, you're a liar, I think, to be fair, they were to be fair, that my boss then said you know you've got to send an apology email. And I was like, oh god, I don't want to send any more emails. But I ended up sending the apology email and the majority 99 who replied were very gracious and said look, it happens to all of us.

Chris Norton: 22:42

Yeah, it does.

Zohe Mustafa: 22:42

And they felt my pain and were empathized, I think an apology is worth a lot.

Chris Norton: 22:49

A personal apology is worth a lot because, yeah, sometimes you just catch people at bad times. We've all unsubscribed from stuff that we don't want because there's so much email crap out there. But everybody's done it. Everybody's done that in marketing. They've sent an email to the wrong list or bcc'd the wrong person, or we've all done it yeah, I actually really enjoyed reading your notes, because there's just so many things that just made me think, yep, been there, we're all in the same boat.

Vicki Murphy: 23:14

I think a lot of these things. One thing.

Chris Norton: 23:15

One thing that we've never done, though, is you talk about a PR campaign. You've done some PR campaigns, and I read this. I thought my God, what have you done here? We asked if you could share a PR campaign. You said that you did a PR campaign, but it got zero coverage, and obviously all our campaigns get coverage. So do you want to explain? Not always not always.

Zohe Mustafa: 23:43

That was a joke, obviously. Yeah, um, so, um, we, we, we were, we had hired this isn't the same organization, by the way, um, I'm not going to mention their names um, we had hired probably the biggest pr agency in the in the uk, I think, uh, I'm not sure, but if not the biggest, then probably you know, the other top top five, whatever, um and um, you know, the goal was brand awareness, press coverage, uh, share of voice, uh, I'd set up this whole tracking software to track our share of voice and how we were going to, you know, really grow really fast and all that um, and yeah, the first sort of four or five months of of working with them were not as successful, uh, as as we'd hoped. I guess. Um, and maybe there was a bit of naivety on our part from a pr perspective, not being pr experts, and that's why we hired the agency.

Zohe Mustafa: 24:31

But, yes, it was racial silence, um, the angles that we were coming out with, the sort of information we were sharing, and these were again prominent publications, you know, ft, et cetera, we were trying to get into. But, yeah, first couple of months we were slightly worried we'd made the right call in terms of partnership and even the content that kind of we were picking to, kind of we were picking to, to kind of feature. Um, I guess you know you guys are probably more familiar with how the pr world works and, um, yeah, nobody was, just nobody was biting on any any of the different, and we tried different types of content. You know, whether it was more technical, a bit more um, sort of about the people, whatever angle we came with was getting limited and you got nothing for how long?

Chris Norton: 25:20

how long was it?

Zohe Mustafa: 25:23

it was at least, uh, the first five, six months, um I mean, whereby, you know, we're planning the campaign every month, producing content to support it. Uh, it wasn't just a case of you know, uh finger in the air type stuff with. There was lots of planning behind it and we created lots of supplemental content to kind of share, you know, pdfs and mini websites and videos etc. And, um, yeah, it just didn't bite. Uh, I guess it may have been unknown brand, you know slightly smaller brand. This was, and we're coming to these journalists despite the fact there was this big agency, but we were unknown, an unknown quantity, and they needed to kind of get used to the sort of stuff we were talking about to eventually pick us up. So it did get better the second half, but the first first half of the year was not so great I think you're being generous there.

Chris Norton: 26:21

Five or six months I mean, I would expect to be fired if we didn't get any coverage for a client. Five to six I we usually tend to say to a client look, if we start on a retainer or on a project, even like we, if you do a project, it's like three months, um, but the first month is usually getting everything up and running. You might not get your first story out till the third week or the fourth week or whatever. So yeah, you can expect the first two months maybe, but after that I'd be like if I didn't get anything by month four, I'd be you, I'd have been sweating if I'd have been that.

Zohe Mustafa: 26:51

Yeah, I mean, even then there was a sort of, maybe a bit of naivety on our part that you know we didn, we didn't press them sooner, as in, you know, shouldn't we have got something by now? I mean, there was like the small trade publication that had, you know, like 10,000 visitors or something. But in terms of tier one big publications, there was Radio Silence.

Chris Norton: 27:13

Right, I mean, yeah, that gives me anxiety just listening to that.

Chris Norton: 27:20

Right. I mean, yeah, that gives me anxiety just listening to that. So in 2024, then you've mentioned that. You do you know? You've talked about the future of AI driven marketing. Every marketer listening to this knows that we love AI. We've talked about it. I actually steer away from talking about it too often because if you want to talk about the future, it's all we can talk about is ai and using ai to create, generate content, etc. Etc. So what? What is it that you bring to the party in terms of ai? What sort of processes do you go through? If a marketer is listening to this and thinking, actually, yeah, we are, we don't use ai at all. What? What do you do? Do you run ai workshops or what is your process?

Zohe Mustafa: 27:59

I have done ai workshops. Yes, um, the the biggest thing I've I guess the learning I've seen from the various organizations that I've done these kind of workshops with is they're because I guess it's still quite new, even despite the fact there's lots of content and coverage about ai out. There is how to implement it into your workflow, uh, quickly, uh and and get that sort of you know, I mean again, it's not huge costs sometimes, um, but to get the best value out of it. Is is kind of where I focus my workshops on um in terms of what tool selection, um, then what parts of your AI, what parts of your marketing process will you hand over to AI, or at least get AI to do the first draft and making it day to day?

Zohe Mustafa: 28:55

Right, we, I guess pre AI, we're used to working in a certain way, probably with agency partners or or in-house teams. Everybody will do their parts for that particular campaign and then, once they've all the materials ready, you'll get that campaign launched. Um with ai, I guess we, because we can do so much more faster. There's that. But then there's the quality aspect and you know you don't. Everybody knows not to use the first draft of ai.

Zohe Mustafa: 29:23

You know you've got to put your human input into it. Um, so yeah, I guess implementing it into their day-to-day workflows is the most common theme of trying to work with AI more regularly.

Chris Norton: 29:40

And so your hot tip. For if you had one hot tip for marketers AI today what would it be? What would you recommend they use?

Zohe Mustafa: 29:49

I think this may apply to B2B marketers a bit more, but probably to B2C. You know how we send out these white papers and PDFs and lead magnets. Sometimes they can be quite long and boring to read. I highly recommend popping that PDF into Notebook LM and letting it generate a podcast for you. It does it in minutes. It is about a thousand times more engaging than having to read this 20, 25 page document. And as a tip for non-marketers or anybody who wants to kind of more sort of on a personal branding type of thing, pop your CV and your LinkedIn profile into Notebook LM and listen to the output that it brings out about you. Believe me when I say that it tells you better than your CV and LinkedIn ever will.

Chris Norton: 30:50

I think I might edit this and put Vicky's on the end of it. We did a show with somebody that recommended a.

Zohe Mustafa: 30:58

Super engaging.

Chris Norton: 30:59

We did a show with somebody who recommended an AI music tool and then we created a song about the show and it was God, it was cringeworthy. Have you heard some of the AI songs? They're so cringe. God, it was cringeworthy.

Zohe Mustafa: 31:11

Have you heard some of the AI songs? They're so cringe. I've created a song with AI and, yes, it was quite funny. But yeah, this notebook thing with your own profile, my mind was blown. I literally did it yesterday and I was like, wow, this is good.

Vicki Murphy: 31:26

That's our afternoon activity sorted.

Chris Norton: 31:29

Yeah, it only our afternoon activity sorted. Yeah, it only takes about five minutes.

Chris Norton: 31:32

Yeah, what do you think is the future? Well, first of all, there's hundreds of products coming out all the time with AI. Do you think Microsoft's Copilot is the best thing to go down? Because you've got ChatGPT, you've got Claude, you've got Gemini, you've got like four or five At Prohibition. We've run a few workshops with some of our clients, we've run several webinars and I do what you do, which is go through processes and we'll look at how we can improve processes. And then we looked at Copilot about five months ago and it wasn't quite as good as the others. It's better because it's inside your ecosystem of what you're doing, but it's not cheap either. It's £25, I think, per user. So essentially, for me it's like rolling out an employee, or everybody gets Copilot into what they do and it becomes part of what they're doing or have you got a cheaper, growth hacking way of getting around that?

Zohe Mustafa: 32:28

So Copilot came out with this latest update the other day. It looks a lot better. It's got the voice feature now too. That's one thing to add. Personally, I don't know if it's a hack or anything, but I use them all, I don't just rely on one. So if you can see my desktop now, I have literally over a hundred different tabs open and I've sectioned them, so all the chatbots are in one tab, although the video, sort of visual, creative stuff, is on another tab and I jump between them. Certain things for certain tasks are better. I I've also created my own GPTs on ChatGPT and so on. Copilot can be extensively customized. The fact Copilot links to your ecosystem is a plus, but then so does the Google stuff.

Chris Norton: 33:20

True.

Zohe Mustafa: 33:21

And I'm a Google man. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft in general, so Copilot is probably the last one I'm going to recommend general. So co-pilot is probably the last one I'm going to recommend um, but it is is getting closer in terms of uh equivalency, but that's what I do. Um I. I have some paid accounts, but you can manage a lot with the free accounts and for certain tasks certain things are better. So, for example, perplexity is brilliant for research. So for me it's a starting point. If I'm creating content, especially because of the annotations et cetera, it verifies its source a lot better. I kind of do my research there, but then I'll push it into other tools to churn out content. If a question comes down to budget, as I said, the majority of tools that I'm using I'm using the free version and I'm getting by just fine.

Chris Norton: 34:22

Good, I've got one question for you. I don't know if Vicky's got another one, but if you were us, you've been on the show now. If you were us, who would you interview next and ask them for their mistakes?

Zohe Mustafa: 34:34

oh, um, there's a guy called charlie hills. He's, uh, I guess, similar background, uh, in terms of marketing and digital and ai. He's sharing a lot of very interesting content I follow regularly.

Chris Norton: 34:51

You've got any additional questions? No, I think that was good.

Vicki Murphy: 34:53

I think it was really interesting to listen to all of those different career highlights and lowlights. We've all got them.

Zohe Mustafa: 35:01

Yeah, no, thank you for having me. It was quite interesting talking about it also.

Chris Norton: 35:05

Zoe, if people want to get hold of you, how can they find you to contact you?

Zohe Mustafa: 35:09

Probably LinkedIn is the quickest and easiest way. Just find me on there. I'm very active on it. I literally spend all day on LinkedIn and post regularly, so you'll probably see me on there.

Chris Norton: 35:22

Is it you, though, or is it an AI?

Zohe Mustafa: 35:30

Well, I have shared content using my AI avatar, so I'm not that happy being on camera live, especially so the AI avatar is a nice way around me not having to be on camera all the time.

Chris Norton: 35:42

Okay, great thanks for coming on the show, zohie, that was really great. I mean wow. First of all, um zoe shared some fascinating mistakes. Not many people are as open and just share. He, he, basically he went all in, didn't he?

Vicki Murphy: 36:01

yeah, I found it quite refreshing because I'm always like, oh, should I say it? Should I not, should I not? But he's just straight in and actually things that you can't some of them you know you've been there, done that, maybe not to that. I mean 450,000 emails in the space of an hour to some of your highest profile clients.

Chris Norton: 36:21

That's bad. That's bad. I mean, we've had some great fails on here, though, like the guy that took the bbc website down, and but, but sending 450 emails in an hour to one, well, to a thousand people, your highest value customers and you couldn't hide it from your ceo because he was copied in and everybody was replying with rants and raving. I mean that was awful. Then there was the pr campaign that went.

Vicki Murphy: 36:45

That went on for six months and they got no coverage, which made me feel great I I was going to say, yeah, we're amazing at our job Made me think well, maybe we're not so shabby after all.

Chris Norton: 36:54

We always have to say bear it in mind when you start a new account. It might take the first six weeks six months.

Vicki Murphy: 37:00

God, easy peasy. No, but it was really good to hear about. Yeah, some of those and, like the Olympics, won olympics won.

Chris Norton: 37:11

Um, you know, there's things sometimes that no amount of planning can prepare you for when it comes from. No, and there'll be people out there listening that have all had a social media crisis, everybody's had something that's gone wrong. Yeah, where social media, the social media shit storm has erupted and all you can do is watch it go ding, ding, ding, and you sat there thinking, oh god, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? And being in the middle of that is great to share it.

Vicki Murphy: 37:30

Yeah, and then we've got a little bit of a tip about recreating our CVs, so I think that's going to be.

Chris Norton: 37:36

I mean you're not going anywhere. You're not allowed to change your CV. But, Zach, you can change yours based on the sound editing that you've done during the show.

Vicki Murphy: 37:43

You go, I go together, uh, yeah.

Chris Norton: 37:52

So, yeah, I thought it was good. I thought it was honest and open. Yeah, I, I I'm intrigued by the growth hacking thing and if you're in marketing out there listening, I think growth hacking is an interesting thing. Being able to make businesses grow revenue based makes sense to me, um, but it sounds like a sometimes it feels like a different specialism yeah, I mean, you know, I've always got questions about it.

Chris Norton: 38:11

So well, everyone's I think a lot of people got questions. It's good to ask the questions. That's what we're to do be curious and ask the questions yeah, that's good. It was good spending time with you yeah, it was great spending time with you, vicky. You're much more entertaining than william.

Chris Norton: 38:23

Thanks for listening everybody. If you enjoyed the podcast, please remember to drop us a message. We've got feedback left, right and centre, you can. We've got a feedback button now, I believe, at the top of our show notes, or yeah, leave us a comment, send us an email, send us a carrier pigeon, a hot air balloon, like and subscribe, a blimp, like and subscribe. Thanks very much for listening and we'll see you next week bye, week, bye.