why ai cannot beat nick power

dissecting nick power’s marketing strategy

I was planning to do another one of my (boring, professional) long form articles, but with some latest case studies. On how marketing teams are or aren’t using AI. And how well it is (or isn’t) going so far.

So I obviously followed some awesome marketing folks on linkedin. Some claim that AI is doing wonders for building a personal brand on social media and then there are others like nick power, who seemingly became a linkedin sensation overnight (by trying hard to prove that he is a human?).

nick is the head of rarketing at noun project, claiming they have “Icons and Photos For Everything”

So I tested. Hmm.

Interestingly, they do have this photo - https://thenounproject.com/photo/siberian-tiger-sitting-on-rocks-in-enclosure-of-montgomery-zoo-v4N2l4/

Trying a bit of marketing myself - @nick I’d highly suggest adding AI Search. I can help you make people SEE that you do actually have icons and photos for everything :D

Okay so back to marketing. Here’s nick as our case study:

For non-marketers like me, what marketing looks like from the outside:

• Create a bunch of exaggerated copy texts on your websites or for your linkedin posts

• Create some fancy videos with nicely shot stock images/videos and emotion instilling background music

• Send All

But here was nick just a month back, trying to peacefully change that perception while marketing the Noun Project.

With a light sprinkle of these one liner posts:

Then something turned…

In his own post after his virality, he shared some of his post impressions stats:

So the rise of the great nick started around Feb 10 -11 and took a crazy ride around Mar 3. Seems like he was pretty frustrated about his dying impressions the week before so he decided to do something drastic. Let’s see what he posted around this timeline:

For the first little bump in the impressions in early Feb, this post took majority of the credit:

For the second sharp curve around Mar 3-5, he broke linkedin - on linkedin - and apparently got rewarded for it - big time - in impressions (not money, obviously). (For all the leaders taking notes, this is how you reward people who poke legitimate holes in your flawed “visions” and ideas.)

And of course, nick, being a great marketer that he is, decided to ride on the impressions wave and post a few more similar format conversational posts to get more attention:

If you would have noticed, these posts had consistently declining impressions. So nick did what any social media guru would do - repeat what sells, and voila!

Anyways, this is what he is up to these days:

And seemingly out of nowhere this trend started:

After doing some digging, I found out that THAT started with THIS nick power fan about a week back:

And the rest (including me) followed:

And now there are countless posts who love or hate nick but both kinds are talking about him. And nick is gracious enough to comment back on each post tagging him, boosting the authors’ engagement and nick’s brand. WIN-WIN!!!

So what worked for nick?

It wasn’t a fancy LLM prompt, nor an AI generated meme or infographic, just sharing the same frustrations that half a billion people on a social media platform had.

Were these frustrations documented anywhere in the training material of LLMs? No.

Were these frustrations something you could fine-tune your model over? Not unless people are already talking about it.

Could AI (alone) have figured out this virality mantra for nick? Not really.

nick gave people what they wanted. People loved his authentic, honest, funny, relatable and short conversational posts and it became a “template” everyone wanted to follow. People are curious about what’s considered different.

Can AI be relatable and different? If an AI template can do that, everyone would follow, and it won’t be so different anymore… Kind of what I talked about in my previous post on Why people hate AI personalised messages.

So, no AI cannot and should not beat nick power’s superpower - being human.

Reminds me of this brilliant ad:

But this in no way means that AI can’t do anything at all. For more updates on what AI CAN do in marketing, stay tuned.

Now Some FAQs (that I am hoping he would answer for himself):

I DM’d him these questions, but haven’t received a response yet. I guess, he only responds via linkedin comments…

1. Why lowercase? Some bonding with Sam Altman over his tweets? Don’t have much time to bother about capitalisation? Being different? Or a non conformist person trying to do opposite of what AI enabled everyone to do so easily (writing with clarity)?

2. Did anyone ask you about the Noun Project after you went viral? Have any stats or page views gone up for Noun Project since then?

3. How are you available all the time on linkedin? Are you using any tools to track your linkedin posts/mentions/impressions?

4. Is power your real last name or all in the name of marketing?

Edit: Here’s nick’s response: