Mediaboss Marketing

Do you go to work every day hoping to make an impact? I know I do .

Sometimes, our ability to make the impact we want can be hindered. Our drive to do well can sometimes cause conflict and can stop us in our tracks.

This article explores tools and perspectives backed by behavioral psychology to get buy-in for your SEO strategy.

Well look at how we can be more human, remove friction and add more empathy to how we work with our colleagues.

Ill start by telling you a story, so make sure you are comfy and ready to be taken away.

Were going on a journey to a digital agency. It can be any agency. You know the type brightly colored offices, bean bags, table football.

Alongside all of the fun, a lot of hard work happens in the agency. One day, they are about to go and present their SEO strategy to five key contacts at a large client they have just won.

The team is on a high. They finished the deck about midnight the night before and are so proud of it.

It is quite a big transformation for the client, but they said they wanted to be challenged so everyone feels ready. Plus, the data speaks for itself. The opportunity and projections are amazing.

Off they go to the meeting with a bounce in their steps. A few hours later, they return looking rather glum, not what the rest of the team expected.

The strategy director launches into telling everyone what happened

They just didnt get it.

Their brand director said it was too far off brand.

They liked the numbers we shared but said it couldnt happen as it was too much of a push.

They said we definitely couldnt focus on xx keywords but they really want to rank for them!

The list went on the team spent the next few days dissecting everything that had happened and all the feedback and quite quickly realized it wasnt as bad as they thought at first.

They just had to put themselves more in the brands shoes, thinking a bit more commercially, giving them a different perspective.

So after a few more late nights, some education and negotiating, there was a fairytale ending and the strategy was signed off.

But havent we all been there?

Agency side or in-house, when your boss doesnt get it or cant sign it off, and yet you wholly believe it is the right thing to do.

My 15 years of experience in digital marketing have given me more than just the lines on my face. I have a catalog of examples, scenarios and moments of hindsight, coupled with an understanding of behavioral science

Now, I can share some lessons I wish I had known when I was just starting out. We will use behavioral psychology and, in particular, a toolset known as nudges.

Based on the earlier works of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the nudge theory was popularized by Thaler and Sunstein in their book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Nudges are psychological techniques that make a particular option more appealing.

They are not mandates but shortcuts to frame a pathway while still allowing people to make a different choice.

If we dont speak the same language or have a common understanding, it will always be hard to agree on concepts, strategies and ideas.

Ensuring all parties are well-educated on fundamental concepts is essential.

A key point is that education is done early, ahead of any key decision points that might lead to opposing views. Otherwise, it could be taken as condescending. It is also imperative that this education is on both sides.

From the SEO perspective, you want to ensure the person you need to get buy-in from understands the basics, keywords, search volume, search behavior and how this plays into your personas.

In many cases, the person you will be needing to get buy-in from will be a marketing or brand leader, so therefore you want to bring the language back to the terminology they are used to.

Using personas to outline our case shows we truly understand the audience and moves away from this being your idea to being what Frankie needs.

A nudge known as the identifiable victim effect states that an identifiable individual described in great detail evokes deeper emotions than a large group of anonymous individuals.

In SEO, we often use big numbers such as 10k searches a month.

But this isnt always as easy to grasp as putting you and the audience in the shoes of Frankie and how his search journey plays out.

If you get too wrapped up in trying to impress with specialist language, you can lose people and then they wont have the facts they need to say yes.

Using the customer journey to bring your strategy to life will make it so much more accessible for anyone at any level to understand.

It also makes it much easier to loop in other channels and show how they can play together to convert the user.

When it comes to education, do not just think about the what and the detail of the activity that needs to happen, but go wider think about the how and the impact.

On the flip side, you must understand the brand to put together the best SEO strategy you can.

What does the brand stand for, what does it care about, and who are the perfect customers?

Why not ask the brand guardian to take you through the brand guidelines actively?

Be inquisitive, ask questions and aim to understand the thinking that has gone into developing the brand.

Now you might think Ive lost it but stick with me. Mind reading is possible.

We want to be able to spot potential issues before they become an issue.

This is where we need to have two more hats in our armory, aside from our SEO hat:

So how, how do we become mind readers?

The more you know about how the brand owner thinks and what gets them excited or what annoys them the most, the more chance you have of being able to think like them and push their good buttons, not their bad ones.

This is a great starting point, but we can all be affected by availability bias. We put undue weight on things that easily come to mind.

So picture this, you do this awesome training on both sides SEO and brand and then never revisit it.

Its then 12 months later, you are about to present your new strategy. You have forgotten everything they really care about and they have forgotten everything you taught them.

We must ensure we keep training regularly like you would to stay fit.

You could make it a part of monthly meetings, even a 10-minute share on each side to talk about whats new, etc. Keep abreast of what is critical to the brand team.

Another psychological nudge that would work well is the endowment effect. This is the idea that we overvalue what we own.

Thinking back to things the brand owner cares about, one being the brand guidelines.

Is there a world in which you could merge some of the SEO thinking into the brand guidelines?

Could you plant this as their idea and almost give them ownership over it?

This starts to formalize how SEO and brand work together and creates a tighter partnership, allowing that person to feel more connected to SEO.

From a mind-reading perspective, you know that SEO is always part of the brand agenda, and you have mutually agreed on what that looks like, be it set keywords, themes etc.

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The meeting and strategy presentation is a small part of the overall process of getting buy-in.

But this part is what people will remember and where a yes or no can happen.

Regarding the presentations format, think about who you are presenting to and what they would like to see.

You can have your own, more detailed strategy document with all the intricate details you need, but that is rarely the document to share with others.

Preparation is everything when it comes to presenting your case. Hopefully, you have been prepping for this for months.

I would always recommend sharing nuggets along the way. Dont leave it all to the day. Talk to the key stakeholders beforehand; do not wait until the meeting.

If you are in a meeting sharing your strategy and it isnt going as you hoped, just keep your cool as. When the dust settles, you will be able to see their point of view.

When building your presentation, remember to think like an SEO, a brand owner and the business owner.

Take a research-driven approach and do not make the strategy in any way about you.

Here are a few things to look out for and to be prepared for:

People analyze and search for information in ways that support their current ideas.

Anyone in the room that arrives not on board will be looking for reasons that support their preconceived ideas.

Put those hats on and use your mind-reading skills to think about what you are proposing from all angles so that you can be ready for them.

Stress test the validity of your strategy. You dont want that done by your peers or the stakeholders in the room.

People tend to do what other people do. We see this all the time, so there are a couple of angles to come at this from:

People tend to ignore what they give up when they make decisions.

Your job is to make it unignorable what they will miss out on by not saying yes.

Make this snappy and to the point. Use the data.

Focus on:

A straight yes can be rare, we often hear a yes but

To prepare for this, think creatively and have ideas ready to go. It is all about balance.

We had a client many years ago that sold apartments, not flats. Never could they be called flats.

We saw this coming a mile off and addressed it as part of the strategy.

We went headstrong to begin with, as ultimately, that was our favorite outcome and they would say yes to us using flats across key pages on the website.

Sadly, despite all the education and storytelling from personas and data, we still couldnt get a yes, but we had a plan B.

We planned to launch content on deeper areas of the website, using it as parts of blogs, etc.

And luckily for us, not long after this, Google had made improvements to their algorithm that meant the words were pretty interchangeable anyway.

You must be prepared to find the balance and, when you do, document the decision-making process so there is absolute clarity for everyone involved in the process.

Behavioral science must be used as a superpower for good. The advice above is not about conning people into doing something they dont want to do.

This is about empowering you to get the yes quicker and more efficiently to accomplish more impactful work.

Often, we all want the same thing, we just see different pathways.

When we understand humans, we can format our actions and communications better to make them easier to digest and remove barriers to getting buy-in.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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How to win SEO allies and influence the brand guardians - Search Engine Land

ChatGPT can pass the bar.

GPT gets an A+ on all exams.

GPT gets through MIT entrance exam with flying colors.

How many of you have recently read articles claiming something like the above?

I know I have seen a ton of these. It seems like every day, theres a new thread claiming that GPT is almost Skynet, close to artificial general intelligence or better than people.

I was recently asked, Why doesnt ChatGPT respect my word count input? Its a computer, right? A reasoning engine? Surely, it should be able to count the number of words in a paragraph.

This is a misunderstanding that comes up with large language models (LLMs).

To some extent, the form of tools like ChatGPT belie the function.

The interface and the presentation are that of a conversational robot partner part AI companion, part search engine, part calculator a chatbot to end all chatbots.

But this isnt the case. In this article, I will run over a few case studies, some experimental and some in the wild.

We will go over how they were presented, what problems come up, and what, if anything, can be done about the weaknesses these tools have.

Recently, a team of undergraduate researchers wrote about GPT acing the MIT EECS Curriculum went moderately viral on Twitter, garnering 500 retweets.

Unfortunately, the paper has several issues, but Ill review the broad strokes here. I want to highlight two major ones here plagiarism and hype-based marketing.

GPT could answer some questions easily because it had seen them before. The response article discusses this in the section, Information Leak in Few Shot Examples.

As part of prompt engineering, the study team included information that ended up revealing the answers to ChatGPT.

A problem with the 100% claim is that some of the answers on the test were unanswerable, either because the bot didnt have access to what they needed to solve the question or because the question relied on a different question the bot did not have access to.

The other issue is the problem of prompting. The automation on this paper had this specific bit:

The paper here commits to a grading method that is problematic. The way GPT responds to these prompts doesnt necessarily result in factual, objective grades.

Lets reproduce a Ryan Jones tweet:

For some of these questions, the prompting would almost always mean eventually coming across a correct answer.

And because GPT is generative, it may not be able to compare its own answer with the correct answer accurately. Even when corrected, it says, There were no problems with the answer.

Most natural language processing (NLP) is either extractive or abstractive. Generative AI attempts to be the best of both worlds and in so being is neither.

Gary Illyes recently had to take to social media to enforce this:

I want to use this specifically to talk about hallucinations and prompt engineering.

Hallucination refers to instances when machine learning models, specifically generative AI, output unexpected and incorrect results.

I have become frustrated with the term for this phenomenon over time:

GPT hallucinates because it is following patterns in text and applying them to other patterns in text repeatedly; when those applications are not correct, there is no difference.

This brings me to prompt engineering.

Prompt engineering is the new trend in using GPT and tools like it. I have engineered a prompt that gets me exactly what I want. Buy this ebook to learn more!

Prompt engineers are a new job category, one that pays well. How can I best GPT?

The problem is that engineered prompts can very easily be over-engineered prompts.

GPT gets less accurate the more variables it has to juggle. The longer and more complicated your prompt, the less the safeguards will work.

If I simply ask GPT to audit my website, I get the classic as an AI language model response. The more complexity in my prompt, the less likely it is to respond with accurate information.

Xenia Volynchuk exists, but the site does not. Yulia Sapegina doesnt appear to exist, and Zeck Ford isnt an SEO site at all.

If you underengineer, your responses are generic. If you overengineer, your responses are wrong.

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Every few months, a question like this will go viral on social media:

When you add 23 to 48, how do you do it?

Some people add 3 and 8 to get 11, then add 11 to 20+40. Some add 2 and 8 to get 10, add that to 60 and put one on top. Peoples brains tend to calculate things in different ways.

Now lets go back to fourth-grade math. Do you remember multiplication tables? How did you work with them?

Yes, there were worksheets to try and show you how multiplications work. But for many students, the goal was to memorize the functions.

When I hear 6x7, I dont actually do the math in my head. Instead, I remember my father drilling my multiplication table over and over. 6x7 is 42, not because I know it, but because I have memorized 42.

I say this because this is closer to how LLMs deal with math. LLMs look at patterns across vast swathes of text. It doesnt know what a 2 is, just that the word/token 2 tends to show up across certain contexts.

OpenAI, in particular, is interested in solving this flaw in logical reasoning. GPT-4, their recent model, is one that they say has better logical reasoning. While I am not an OpenAI engineer, I want to talk about some of the ways they probably worked to make GPT-4 more of a reasoning model.

In the same way that Google pursues algorithmic perfection in search, hoping to get away from human factors in ranking like links, so too does OpenAI aim to deal with the weaknesses of LLM models.

There are two ways OpenAI works to give ChatGPT better reasoning capabilities:

In the first group, OpenAI fine-tunes models on top of each other. Thats actually the difference between ChatGPT and regular GPT.

Plain GPT is an engine that simply outs the likely next tokens after a sentence. On the other hand, ChatGPT is a model trained on commands and next steps.

One thing that comes up as a wrinkle with calling GPT fancy autocorrect is the ways these layers interact with each other and the deep ability of models of this size to recognize patterns and apply them across different contexts.

The model is able to make connections between the answers, the expectations of how and contextually different questions are asked.

Even if nobody has asked about, explain statistics using a metaphor about dolphins, GPT can take these connections across the board and expand on them. It knows the shape of explaining a topic with a metaphor, how statistics work, and what dolphins are.

However, as anyone who deals with GPT regularly can tell, the further you get from GPTs training materials, the worse the outcome gets.

OpenAI has a model that is trained on various layers, relating to:

Anyone who has spent time trying to get GPT to act outside of its parameters can tell you that context and commands are endlessly modular. Humans are creative and can devise endless ways to break the rules.

What this all means is that OpenAI can train an LLM to reason by exposing it to layers of reasoning for it to mimic and recognize patterns.

Memorizing the answers, not understanding them.

The other way OpenAI can add reasoning capabilities to its models is through using other elements. But these have their own set of issues. You can see OpenAI attempting to resolve GPT problems with non-GPT solutions through the use of plugins.

The link reader plugin is one for ChatGPT (GPT-4). It allows a user to add links to ChatGPT and the agent visits the link and gets the content. But how does GPT do this?

Far from thinking and deciding to access these links, the plug-in assumes each link is necessary.

When the text is analyzed, the links are visited and the HTML is dumped in the input. It is tough to integrate these kinds of plugins more elegantly.

For example, the Bing plugin allows you to search with Bing, but the agent then assumes you want to search far more often than the opposite.

This is because even with layers of training, its hard to ensure consistent responses from GPT. If you work with the OpenAI API, this can come up immediately. You can flag as an open AI model, but some responses will have other sentence structures and different ways to say no.

This makes a mechanical code response difficult to write because it expects a consistent input.

If you want to integrate search with an OpenAI app, what kinds of triggers set off the search function?

What if you want to talk about search in an article? Similarly, chunking inputs can be difficult because.

It is hard for ChatGPT to distinguish from different parts of the prompt, as it is difficult for these models to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Nevertheless, the easiest way to allow GPT to reason is to integrate something that is better at reasoning. This is still easier said than done.

Ryan Jones had a good thread about this on Twitter:

We then return to the issue of how LLMs work.

Theres no calculator, no thought process, just guessing the next term based on a massive corpus of text.

My favorite case for this kind of thing? Childrens riddles.

One of the four words from each set does not belong. Which word does not belong?

Take a second to think about it. Ask a child.

Here are the actual answers:

Now lets look at some responses from GPT:

The thing that is interesting is that the shape of this answer is correct. It got that the correct answer was not a primary color, but the context was not enough for it to know what primary colors are or what colors are.

This is what you might call one-shot querying. I dont provide additional details to the model, and expect it to figure things out independently. But, as weve seen in previous answers, GPT can get things wrong with over-prompting.

GPT is not smart. While impressive, it is not as general purpose as it wants to be.

It doesnt know the context for what it says or does, nor does it know what a word is.

To GPT, the world is math.

Tokens are simply vectors dancing together, representing the web in a vast array of interconnected points.

The lawyer who used ChatGPT in a court case said he thought it was a search engine.

This high-visibility case of professional malfeasance is entertaining, but I am gripped by fear of the implications.

A lawyer a subject matter expert doing highly skilled, highly paid work submitted this info to court.

All over the country, hundreds of people are doing the same thing because it is almost like a search engine, it seems human and looks right.

Website content can be high stakes everything can be. Misinformation is already rampant online, and ChatGPT is eating whats left.

We have to collect metal from sunken ships because it hasnt been irradiated.

Similarly, data from before 2022 will become a hot commodity, because it stems from what text is supposed to be unique, human and true.

A lot of this kind of discourse seems to stem from a couple of root causes, those being misunderstanding of how GPT works, and misunderstanding what it is used for.

To some extent, OpenAI can be held accountable for these misunderstandings. They want to be developing artificial general intelligence so much that accepting weaknesses in what GPT can do is difficult.

GPT is a "master of all" and so cannot be a master of anything.

If it cannot say slurs, it cant moderate content.

If it has to tell the truth, it cant write fiction.

If it has to obey the user, it cannot always be accurate.

GPT is not a search engine, a chatbot, your friend, a general intelligence, or even fancy autocorrect.

It is mass-applied statistics, rolling dice to make sentences. But the thing about chance is sometimes you call the wrong shot.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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How relying on LLMs can lead to SEO disaster - Search Engine Land

Laying the foundation:The programmes first year focuses on essential skills such as writing,working on CMS, creating SEO-friendly content, and developing asound understanding of audio and video production. By mastering these skills, students will be equipped with the tools to craft compelling narratives and optimise content for different media platforms.

Exploring new horizons:In the second year, the curriculum introduces students to the exciting world of podcasting and mobile journalism. Students will gain experience in producing podcasts, conducting interviews, and storytelling through audioand video. Additionally, they will be exposed to the world of advertising and marketing to understand how to reach and engage audiences in the digital age effectively. This comprehensive training ensures students have a versatile skill set and the ability to adapt to the evolving media landscape.

Specialisation and internships:Theprogramme's third yearis all about specialisation and gaining practical experience. Students can choose from a range of specialisations, including audio, video, social media, digital marketing, advertising, and public relations, in their final year. This specialised training will allow students to gain expertise in specific domains, making them sought-after industry professionals. Students are encouraged to apply for internships, allowing them to apply their knowledge in real-world scenarios. These internships serve as a stepping stone to a successful career in the media.

Times Group advantage:Bennett University takes pride in providing state-of-the-art digital studios equipped with cutting-edge technology,co-designed with Times Group professionals. These studios offer students hands-on experience in creating high-quality video and audio content, allowing them to hone technical skills and unleash their creative potential. By working with industry-standard equipment, students will gain practical experience and develop a professional portfolio to showcase their talent.

Going global:Through its international tie-ups, the Times School of Media offers students unique opportunities to interact with renowned media professionals, participate in international workshops and conferences, and engage in collaborative projects with their peers worldwide. The school has potential tie-ups with eight international universities, and some others are in the pipeline. This exposure enhances understanding of global media trends and practices for students.

Pursuing higher education in the Times School of Media at Bennett University offers a unique and enriching experience for aspiring media professionals. So, it is time to unlock the creative potential and embark on an exciting journey towards a rewarding career in the media industry.

For admission-related queries, please visit -www.bennett.edu.in

(The author is Dean, Times School of Media, Bennett University, Greater Noida)

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Become the next generation of multimedia content creators and ... - Education Times

Fiona Brindle is head of SEO at TrunkBBI.

Headquartered in Manchester, the creative and activation marketing agency opened a third office in Leeds last year as part of its growth plans.

Since forming last April following a mergerbetween agencies Big Brand Ideas and Trunk, TrunkBBI was named one of Prolific Norths Top 50 Integrated Agencies for 2023.

Here, Brindle shares a recent week in her life

Monday

Our operations meeting kickstarts every week. Department heads and senior management regroup to reviewwhats happening in the agency that week. Since stepping up to department head last year, meetings like these have given me insight into other business areas and how I can support them. Plus, they allow me to speak up about any help my team needs.

Between client WIP calls I compile a couple of SEO content briefs for an automotive brands product and category pages to send to our copywriters. Content briefing involves exploring search results for each set of target keywords. It also includes analysing competitor performance and drafting an outline of the headings and FAQs needed in the body copy. Call me an SEO nerd, but I love content briefing.

Tuesday

Tuesday is usually one of my days in our Manchester office. After a short walk to the station and a train journey to Manchester Piccadilly, Im at my desk, glancing out the window and admiring the ever-growing city skyline. Manchester gets a bad rep for being dull and grey, but not to me.

We start every Tuesday morning with an Activation/Performance Scrum call. This gives our organic search, paid media, and client services team a 15-minute window to shout up if they need support. Next up, its our regular SEO team meeting. I catch up with the team and talk through client campaigns and projects, as well as any urgent priorities and requests. Individual 1 to 1s for my team is next in my schedule. I catch up with all my team separately about how theyre feeling and progressing against objectives. I also see if there are any training requests or issues theyd like to discuss.

After lunch, I head into a website workshop for an insurance brand. Weve been working with this client for a few years, but their website is getting a refreshed design. Im there to advise on SEO best practices, ensure that new plans align with organic objectives, and recommend on content requirements.

Despite an action-packed day, I always head off on time. On Tuesday evenings, I volunteer with Girlguiding, leading my local unit. So, I need time to decompress from the working day, make dinner and finalise any activities for the Guides. The latter usually involves me scouring the house for random items for the nights craft activities (pipe cleaners, anyone?).

Wednesday

Wednesday day is a day of two halves. I spent the morning working on an organic forecast for an insurance brand. This helps show organic searchs potential in their market and how a well-executed SEO strategy can bring impressive ROI. It involves reviewing target keywords, current organic rankings, search engine results page (SERP) analysis, and traffic predictions. Its a mammoth but much-needed task as it allows the team to fully understand a brands organic landscape before delving into strategy and tactics.

This afternoon, Im taking my monthly life balance half day off. Last year TrunkBBI introduced an extra half day off on top of our annual leave allowance to help maintain our work-life balance. Im spending mine at the hairdresser today to get a fresh cut and colour. It may seem a little trivial, but self-care acts like these help me reset and feel calmer.

Thursday

Its Thursday and Im back in the office. We have a couple of interviews for a budding Senior SEO Executive. Someone we interviewed impressed us with their knowledge, and it feels like theyd be a good team and culture fit, so we hire them.

In the afternoon, we have a strategy session with a pharmaceutical brand to generate more app registrations and reduce their reliance on paid media through organic search. Its a productive meeting; we examine and demonstrate the importance of EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, trust) and YMYL (your money, your life) in the medical sector. My inner SEO nerd is bouncing off the walls about the content ideas and variety of their keyword landscape.

Friday

Friday is usually a work-from-home day, but not this week. Ive got a super-early start this morning as Im taking the 6.30am train from Manchester to London. Im travelling with two colleagues from our SEO and PR teams to attend the Women in Tech SEO Festival. Im not the biggest fan of early starts (the eye bags are real!), but the coffee is strong, and were excited about the day ahead.

We arrive at Euston, then head to the Barbican for the conference. We hear from 10 amazing women working in SEO, PR and digital marketing throughout the day. The talks cover everything from creating content and natural language processing to data storytelling and levelling up your SEO career. After a post-conference drink in the leafy Barbican Conservatory, we head home.

Leaving London, my brain is still brimming with new ideas, but its also hit maximum capacity. I had planned to spend the journey home typing notes from the conference, but instead, I decided its best to close the laptop and debrief with my teammates.

Original post:
A Week in My Life: Fiona Brindle, Head of SEO, TrunkBBI - Prolific North

A group of five Auburn University alumni who were tired of the hassles and headaches associated with tax preparation and who wanted to improve access and efficiency for underserved communities have teamed together to create the software development company SmartWiz.

The talented Auburn graduates developed the first-ever all-in-one tax software for tax professionals, and their efforts caught the attention of technology behemoth Google. Recently, Google awarded SmartWiz $150,000 in developmental funds to advance and distribute their tax accounting software to millions of Americans through of the 2023 Google for Startups Black Founders Fund and Latino Founders Fund awards.

Auburn helped bring us together, and now were working to help people everywhere, said co-founder Bre Johnson, a Raymond J. Harbert College of Business graduate. We were tired of seeing people struggle to obtain and manage their documents, and we feel our software will help increase efficiency and expand access for those who may have not had anyone at their side throughout the tax prep process before. SmartWiz wants to impact lives and improve the experience for everyone involved, and we believe our revolutionary software does exactly that.

Samuel Ginn College of Engineering graduates Olumuyiwa Aladebumoye, Tevin Harrel and Jordan Ward, as well as Johnson and Justin Robinson from the College of Sciences and Mathematics, founded the Birmingham, Alabama-based SmartWiz in 2018 and have grown it into a trusted service-based tax business. The company is a tax professional software and digital accounting firm that optimizes accounting, tax management, legal and consulting services.

SmartWiz has used artificial intelligence (AI) and modern integrations to create the innovative software for tax professionals serving underserved communities. SmartWiz is one of 46 U.S. recipients of funding, and the company is riding a wave of momentum. Its software was approved by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) last year, and the company also recently spent three months in Los Angeles as part of a TechStars cohort.

Our team is very big on strategic partnerships, said Johnson, a 2018 graduate who played on the Auburn womens basketball team. We are big on working with partners who understand our vision to change the world with the way taxes are done forever, and Google has offered such amazing resources and opportunitiesto us. This funding means tous theability to build our product faster, scale our organization and really take over the digital space with improved support on how we market our software using Google SEO.

The six-figure Google for Startups investment will allow SmartWiz to impact the way millions of Americans file their taxes. The funds are equity-free, and SmartWiz also will receive sales and fundraising training, technical support from Google mentors, up to $100,000 in Google Cloud credits, mental health coaching from a team of Black and Latino therapists and participation in the funds interactive community.

As we build out our engineering team, we now have the ability to really focus on improving thetechnology and AI capabilitiesto bring tech to the tax industry, said Johnson, who was named to the 2017 SEC Academic Honor Roll. We will be giving our users a more innovative, fun and revolutionary approach to tax preparation while ensuring every single person who gets their taxes done by someone using our software will have an improvedexperience every singleyear. Being Black founders, and even me being a woman, we dont take this opportunity for granted because we know it is a blessing from God to be chosen by Google for Startups to be a part of this journey.

Since 2020, the Google for Startups Founders Fund has provided more than $45 million in funding to more than 500 Black and Latino founders, and past recipients have raised more than $400 million in investments after their selections in the fund.

SmartWizs founding quintet graduated from Auburn between 2014-18 and created the company shortly after their days on the Plains.

We are five founders from Auburn University, and we graduated from three different colleges, Johnson said. That just speaks to the education and opportunity at our university on all levels to develop and grow into a business owner and have the skills in any industry to be successful.

Originally posted here:
Preparing the underserved: Five Auburn University alumni ... - Office of Communications and Marketing