Goodmorning!! A new edition with all the news that took my attention last weeks and that I think is worth saving or sharing. Soon experiences from my trip to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipe! Stay tuned.
🇩🇪 Meanwhile in Germany: negative reviews get removed
In Germany, negative reviews get removed (a lot).
That’s down to how German law protects a company’s commercial reputation. a business can demand takedown of a review if it says to contain false facts or even an opinion can be taken down if it isn’t factually justified. That bar is low: Google’s own help page admits German courts set a low threshold, and that a business can simply claim the reviewer was never a customer.
For consumers, I think that’s not good. nobody ever files a defamation complaint about a fake 5 star, so the deletions only ever point one way.
You end up with a wall of positives and no idea what wasn’t good.
Now the fun part is what people build in response to this. Take Levelsio for example, he created: https://hotelist.com/.
His argument: Airbnb removes negative reviews, google maps removes them in a lot of countries (hi Germany) as defamation, and booking platforms have every incentive to keep hotels looking good: so everything ends up at 4.7.
His hotelist.com site pulls ratings from all the booking platforms and normalizes them, So if a site's hotels all sit between 4 and 4.7, that range gets stretched back out to a real 0–5. On top of that it runs vision models over the actual room photos, and crawls blogs and reddit for what people say when they're not writing a review. Cool, right? It’s free to use.
So what I take out from it? I really like levelsio’s mindset, I try to copy that: thinking in opportunities. Test and try to play with technology like API’s and MCP’s and see how you can create something powerful with limited resources.
I can only encourage others to also try and build things. Read, test, try and learn!
Note: I think it’s also worth remembering if you work in an international company and you compare reviews across countries, normalise or adjust the German figures!
Details: https://hotelist.com/
More details on Germany: https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/google-reviews-removal-defamation-in-germany/
😀Musk on productivity rules : I hope others follow
Maybe a bit older the letter itself, but still I think it’s very, very good. And because I think it’s good I share it.
I wish more companies would follow at least a bit of the principles explained by Musk in 2018 already, but recently went viral. It comes down to this:
Elon Musk sent every Tesla employee a memo that took authority away from their managers and handed it to them. He never asks for more hours. Every rule moves a decision closer to the person doing the work.
“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.” Companies have a role for everyone who creates process and no role for anyone who removes it.
Meetings and approval chains survive because removing them was never anyone’s job. Musk: “Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value.” Attendance has always been treated as proof of commitment. He made it worthless, and contribution became the only thing that counts in the room. “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.” Great advice and I think the opposite should also be true, if you can add value in a meeting, but you are not invited, you should be able to do so!
Ordinary manners protect whoever called the meeting. He moved that protection to everyone else sitting quietly with real work waiting on them. “Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes at Tesla. Anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication.”Internal vocabulary converts knowledge into status and charges every newcomer a fee to participate. A company that speaks plainly can absorb talent at full speed.
“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the chain of command.” Most good ideas die in transit, three levels below anyone with the power to act on them. Wow this one is so sharp and I can 100% confirm it! Very much true!
“Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.” The only threat in the entire memo.
A manager who insists on being routed through is buying his own relevance with everyone else’s time. Musk put a price on it. Musk: “Always pick common sense as your guide. If following a company rule is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, the rule should change.”
I 100% support these principles because they represent the exact opposite of everything that frustrates me about work culture (in some companies).
So I hope when people in charge read this memo from Musk, they give it some thoughts.
It’s the counter argument to the “I only decide or communicate via my direct reports” remark!
🇨🇳 41Caijing: shift brands "from waiting for users to search for them to being proactively recommended by AI.
Now lets take a look at a press release I found from 41Caijing (a company who helps Chinese sellers sell abroad). They now basically make a very strong move towards AI optimization.
In short: they want to make sure the products they represent for their clients are being recommended by AI.
They do that with an AI operating system. Six agents that work together:
Dijiang strategy assistant: brainstorms campaigns, summarizes research, and spits out the actual assets (decks, spreadsheets, posters, videos).
Qingniao content workstation: writes the multilingual output press releases, reviews, social posts for each target market/language.
Zhulong this is the interesting one: GEO diagnostics (Generative Engine Optimization). It monitors how visible your brand is inside AI assistants and tracks competitors in real time.
Bifang operations: finds trending content, clones what’s working, and auto-publishes + reviews performance.
PR Agent pushes the content out across their ~1 million media/KOL contacts.
Email Agent targeted cold outreach and managing the conversion funnel.
I think its very interesting and many things can be learnt from this (a bit bold) move at this time.
For years the game was SEO and paid ads get your product to show up when someone types for example “best budget 3d printer” into google.
But more and more people don’t type into google anymore, they ask chatgpt, gemini or perplexity. The AI doesn’t show ten blue links, it names one or two products. if you’re not one of them, you’re invisible there’s no page two to scroll to.
That’s the shift they are betting on. Instead of fighting for a ranking, they’re trying to shape what the AI says about a brand. and it makes a lot of sense that Chinese sellers move first here: they’ve always been the most aggressive and systematic about whatever channel is winning: marketplaces, tiktok, live selling and now this field. They scale their AI visibility before Western brands even start with it.
This direction makes sense to me.
What we can learn from it, as people working in digital commerce, is also to step up the efforts on this topic. Lot’s of first mover advantages, I think.
Sidenote: if you read it the piece linked below, and think a bit more about it, it might be the way large parts of international marketing departments will work in the pretty near future.
✅ Attention scrum teams: The five user challenge: give it a try this week
Take a look at the screenshot above. Very good advice from Murat! A challenge for every product owner or scrum team next week. I think he is very much right. As Murat writes:
The more you know about your product...The harder it becomes to imagine not knowing it. It’s called the curse of knowledge.
Your product isn’t what you built. It’s what your customer experiences. Those are rarely the same thing. The best founders aren’t the ones who know their product the best. They’re the ones who remember what it’s like not to know it.
That’s where great products begin.
So start this week with the “five user challenge”. See what new insights you get.
(thanks Murat Kahraman )
Details:
👨💻ChatGPT rebuilt Its Search Tool check out the details
If you are like me and you want to dive into algorithms, how they work and how you can optimize, you like this post from “suganthan”.
It dives into ChatGPT and how it’s search behavior changed recently.
Based on this post, I myself, also tried to figure things out.
Many tests that are written in the post you can figure out with “developer tools” in your browser.
Besides learning on how these things work, I noted these takeouts:
A closing line like length|long that seems to control how much text comes back per result. This matters most likely because ChatGPT appearantly often pulls a bounded excerpt, not the whole page (as we often think).
Freshness is important. So if you create for example, a comparisment posts for products, update it 30 days later.
With these guidelines or “tricks” you can see if your brand is in Chat’s persistant memory already. If not go act on it!
For a while , using Reddit for LLM visibility was a known growth hack. Seems to be much less after this update. ChatGPT was not asking Reddit who the winners were. It was asking what people say about a shortlist it already had.
Details : https://suganthan.com/blog/chatgpt-new-search-language/
🇸🇬 Grab Singapore: how reviews are embedded in a campaign
I like campaigns where they don’t “broadcast” a message but where they actually tell something useful (or funny). For example the “Kayak” campaign, I wrote about earlier:
Now let's move on to Singapore. this campaign from Grab (the superapp from asia) I think is very nice and worth a watch. They use actual reviews in it and exaggerate so called 'keyboard warriors', who often complain about small things.
The background: Grabfood launched a badge called 5-star eats, given to restaurants with thousands of exceptional reviews. To promote it, They took three real reviews from Singaporean diners and filmed them. One person lowered a star because the crispiness wasn’t consistent😅. One because the dish needed more chilli and one because they had to peel a single prawn themselves😅😅.
It’s fun to watch but it also reminds me again, of the fact that there is so much content you can use in campaigns (or content) already in databases within organizations, So valubale. It can be reviews, like in this example, or as I wrote a few weeks ago, simply in customer service communication. And with AI its easier to discover then ever.
Bottom line of this campaign: If these critical people, those keyboard warriors who complain about the tiniest of things, if these give fie stars to a diner, it must be really good.
⚙️Tip: DEJAN’s chat protocol for better AI responses
I am also testing this DEJAN chat protocol in CoPilot (at this moment):
We all know it by know. Ask something simple to an LLM and you get a loooong answer.
It’s sometimes funny, but usually annoying when you just want a quick answer or direction, you need to scroll up, down and up again to get what you want.
Now DEJAN has created a potential solution for that and it’s very easy to use and try.
I can encourage everyone to use these kind of techniques to optimize their LLM. Dont just copy paste try to understand and improve it even. All details in the link below:
https://dejan.ai/blog/introducing-dejan-chat-protocol/
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