Back when I was in sales, I used to tell young sales folks that when they went to a town they had never been in, there was no excuse for not being aware of what was going on locally. With the internet, they could find out what was going on with local college and pro teams, what was in the news locally, even info on impending bad weather.
It made conversation with new customers easier and gave off a “one of us” vibe that helped quicken the relationship. It was 20 minutes of homework that in many cases paid big dividends.
I now offer similar advice to my young sports content creators out there, particularly young Hokies. No, I’m not talking about researching how much snow is going to hit Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan this weekend to make a sale.
I’m talking about Grok.
I say this because I’ve found a lot of young sports journalist types only want to worry about doing a podcast, writing a story, or banging out tweets, and when it comes to the actual website maintenance and design, they take the attitude “that’s somebody else’s deal.”
I get it. This week I finally got around to addressing a complicated issue involving email authentication that resulted in Google blocking any mass emails I sent to tell the world I had new content on my site that had a Gmail address. Reading up on how to fix it included terms like SPF, DKIM, DMARC and adjusting DNS records on my server, and all of it just made my eyes glaze over.
So I asked Grok. He returned a long involved explanation of what to do, but it was in this moment at the end of the answer I realized Grok had access to all information on the web involving my hosted server. He didn’t just say “go find this setting and adjust it.” He knew where all these settings were and simply went step by step telling me which buttons to click on. When code was required, he provided it with a “copy” button next to it.
Grok essentially fixed it for me while I was watching. He just needed me to click on the buttons.
During the game last night, I decided to ask Grok about a long spreadsheet I had with a lot of conditional formatting in it. When a condition was met, the cell should have turned to red type and yellow shading, but in some cases it wasn’t working. Grok immediately explained why this was happening, but as before, then he just provided a long formula and said “paste it HERE.”
It worked.
I say all this because the other day I was talking to a young content creator and I asked how well do you know the inner workings of your website and if it crashed or you wanted to change it to do exactly what you wanted, could you? The answer was more along the lines of “I think so, but the website stuff is handled by somebody else.”
I’m now realizing Grok can easily be that somebody else, which puts more control of what you put out for the world to see in your hands. Try to tinker with your own website, and if it breaks, tell Grok what happened and you’ll learn as Grok tells you how to fix it.
As I told that young content creator, you’re pretty valuable as a writer now. But how much more valuable would you be if you could both create great content AND take care of everything from your stories to the care and feeding of the website?
Much like I told that young salesman years ago, there’s no excuse not to know.
