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Happy holiday season! It’s that time again to look back at the Work, Wine, and Wheels posts over the past year.

The publication cadence continued to decline as I was busy running my StoryTech Consulting business. However, as you can see from the graphic above, traffic to the site actually increased in 2025; in fact, it was the highest since 2022. Part of that may be due to subscribers, and if that’s you I give my humble thanks.

The other factor is the surprisingly strong Google juice that many of my BMW-related posts continue to maintain. Of course, a strong organic ranking on a SERP page is no longer a guarantee of traffic, as Google has added features such as AI Overview, People Also Ask, and other paid placements. Google is now a walled garden, under assault from users turning to AI chatbots for search.

All that said, it sends regular traffic to the Triple W. The most popular post this year, by a wide margin, was published in 2017 and described how to install a new battery in an E46 M3. Google Search Console shows that my post has an average position ranking of 1.9, meaning the link is shown on page one right under all the paid options:

For my oenophile followers, the most popular wine post was on Central Coast California wines. This content resulted from one of the wine seminars put on by the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which runs a number of places in Northern Virginia. The enthusiasm of NRG’s wine purchaser Erin Dudley is infectious, and she includes some history with the grape talk, such as how California’s wine industry was created by Italian immigrants in the 1890s.

LinkedIn remains a more logical place for work-related posts. However, my post providing tactical tips for using AI in B2G marketing attracted a strong readership. In it I shared highlights from an informative training I attended in late 2024. The post is based on an overview I shared with my GovCon Ideators organization, and the full download is available in the post.

So that’s another year in the books. I wish you a very merry New Year and a prosperous 2026!

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It seems like it’s all AI, all the time recently in Washington D.C. A flurry of executive orders and the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan were announced last week. Coverage I’ve read explains that the plan focuses on encouraging innovation, speeding infrastructure development such as data centers, and implementing export controls on technology such as semiconductors. It differs significantly from the more cautious approach to AI by the Biden Administration.

The latest headlines reminded me I hadn’t posted a presentation I gave to my GovCon group on the first AI Executive Order, EO 14179, issued in January. Fellow GovCon Ideator Kathy Swacina presented with me on 4/29. We take a deeper dive into the EO language, highlight the differences from past EOs on AI, and suggest a possible model for AI development. An effective option is the TAIMScore model from the Holistic Information Security Practioner Institute (HISPI).

I reached out to a couple of IT clients for their views of EO 14179:

“I’ll first take the glass is half full attitude on this memo. it addresses a lot of the needed “how” that was ambiguous before as far and processes and procedures. It specifically calls out driving the
departments mission vs just efficiencies in the department. it will give teams a lot of opportunity to move forward with POC’s.”

“On the glass is almost empty side of the equation. There is no significant change to actual level of risk tolerance, governance and mitigation that must be performed. There is still plenty of
opportunity for a risk adverse Sr Manager at a department to say no.
As before the adoption of of AI will come down to agencies with leadership and actual desire to solve problems with AI.”

Here are the questions left unanswered in EO 14179, and which still are after the recent Action Plan:

• How do we safeguard industry proprietary information?
• How do we protect American citizen PII?
• How do we ensure the industry partners are following safe, ethical, trustworthy and transparent development processes?
• How do we close the gap between federal and state AI regulatory regimes?

You can download the full presentation here.

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Last month I attended a workshop focused on how to use AI technology to boost productivity. The workshop was put on by Juliana Slye and Natalie Lambert, the first in a continuing series. I’m a ‘learn by doing’ type of person and I found the workshop worthwhile.

Natalie formerly worked at Google and brings a lot of practical knowledge about AI tools and how to use them. Juliana founded Government Business Results and ties tactical AI into her patented GovBuyer’s Journey methodology. They gave a high-level presentation on this topic at the GAIN conference in October, and the workshop went into much more detail.

Each attendee needed to bring a laptop and have some kind of subscription to an AI tool. Even for things that seem staightforward – the better you prompt the better the outcome – actually doing it real-time made a big difference. Natalie turned prompt into an acronym, standing for Persona, Request, Outcome, Market/Audience, Process, Template/Example. Give your AI tool all that and the response should be a helpful one.

Here’s what that prompt looks like, asking ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post for StoryTech Consulting:

Some things I learned in the session:

• • Understanding the token limit in your AI tool

• • Using ChatGPT Search to make sure you’re capturing up to date information

• • How useful AI can be for competitive research

• • How quickly new functionality is being added – my ChatGPT subscription now includes the video tool Sora

AI is a tool that marketers need to understand and leverage. I still have concerns about the spread of AI and true originality of thought that I wrote about last year, but that’s what the human in the equation must deliver. AI can give us more time to focus on that while lifting a lot of manual and administrative burden off the B2G marketer.

Juliana graciously approved me giving a high-level presentation to our GovCon Ideation group about my experience. You can download that deck by clicking the image below.

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Happy Holiday season! With 2024 almost over I’m resurrecting the Work, Wine and Wheels annual retrospective post. Back in the day, WordPress sent an annual report to me. I don’t know if everyone got one or if a certain traffic level needed to be met. The 2012 report is where I got the main image for this post, with a bit of crude editing.

My publishing cadence continues to decline due to the time it takes running my marketing consulting firm, but I’ll always keep the Triple W going. This year the most popular post in the Work category was my piece on original thought in the age of artificial intelligence. Large language models train on immense quantities of existing content. If they are then tasked with creating “new” content, how original will it be?

That’s where human involvement is critical. Since writing that piece in March I’ve attended AI workshops and have learned how to implement AI technology into client work in a way that combines the artificial with the human for the best possible result.

In the Wine category, my post on the Central California region attracted the most traffic. Central California is an immense territory encompassing over 90,000 acres of vineyards, and the state produces roughly 80 percent of all U.S. wine annually. Italian immigration built the industry and kept it going through a phylloxera epidemic in the 19th century and then Prohibition.

For Wheels content, the most popular post was the story of adding a Vorsteiner rear diffuser on my 2006 BMW M3. This is a common modification for the E46 M3 and there are a lot of low-quality diffusers on the market. I got lucky and was able to purchase my diffuser from a fellow CCA member who had purchased it years ago and then sold his car and no longer needed it. The fitment required a little work and I was expertly assisted by staff at the Craftsman Auto Care Alexandria location.

None of these posts will ever rival my top two for driving visitors. The #1 post is about how to unlock secret menu options in the E39 M5. This post gave me an exciting introduction into a post going viral, at least amongst BMW and car enthusiasts. First the post was promoted by Lifehacker, which at the time was part of the Gawker network of sites. (Remember them?) Then later it was promoted via the Twitter account of a Finnish security expert named Mikko Hipponen who had over 60,000 followers. (Account now deactivated.) On a single day 2,068 visitors hit the Triple W – heady numbers in 2012.

My #2 post is the one that has given the Triple W a very nichey sort of visibility in BMW enthusiast circles. BMW produced a special kind of low emission vehicles known as Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicles, SULEVs. These vehicles came with a special, 15-year warranty on all fuel-related components of the car. For whatever reason, this warranty was not being communicated well to owners (IMO of course). They were going in for relatively simple (a la fuel filter replacement) service and were being hit with estimates of $6,000 – $8,000.

So I reported on the subject to raise awareness. A number of owners posted comments on how they used this information to get dealers to repair their cars under warranty. That gives me a lot of satisfaction and I still get emails on this issue today. These posts generated a lot of comments – 115 to the #2 post!

I’ve maintained this site since 2008, probably the golden age of blogging. So much has changed since then. LinkedIn is a better environment for work-related posts. There are specialty forums and communities for BMW and wine posts. All that granted, the Triple W is my small contribution to the ethos of the Open Internet, and the power of the long tail. Whether you’ve been here for years or just subscribed, thank you for visiting.

And have a very Merry 2025!

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This week started off on the right foot with me being the guest of Mark Amtower’s Federal News Radio podcast Amtower Off Center.

No one has been a leader in the B2G market longer than Mark. He and I are co-hosts of the GovCon Ideation community with Janet Waring of ArtForm, as well as co-authors of Government Marketing Best Practices 2.0. We had a lively conversation on a range of B2G marketing topics, focused on the way to use thought-leadership content to differentiate your product and/or service to prospects.

We were shooting for interesting, informative, and even a bit entertaining. Give a listen and let me know how we did! If you don’t already have Amtower Off Center in your podcast app of choice, you can click here to hear the interview.

Thanks again Mark, and to all a Happy Halloween.

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Ever since the broad availability of artificial intelligence exploded last year, I’ve been wondering about its impact on B2 marketing. There is already a lot of “me-tooism” in much of B2G content marketing. Would AI make that even worse? Or could it, in fact, amplify the value of truly original insights for thought leadership? Or perhaps both?

A recent article by Tom Fishburne, aka The Marketoonist, articulates some thoughts on this question. While focused on SEO it’s wrestling with the same basic question. Titled “Writing and SEO Word Soup,” it talks about how since large language models (LLMs) are built on ingested content, if LLM-powered AI is used to generate “new” content then it quickly becomes just “word soup.” Fishburne quotes Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast:

Fishburne calls the temptation to turn your content development over to AI a “race to the bottom.” Unfortunately, I can see too many companies falling into this trap, humorously represented below:

While Fishburne focuses on the peril of word soup and “infinite words nobody wants,” I think that depressing vision also presents a huge opportunity for true insight and commentary. There’s an old expression, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Similarly, if everyone else is regurgitating existing content, the B2G companies that are saying something new and different have a chance to differentiate themselves.

Of course, not every piece of content has to be a heavy lift. Plenty of content created for customers and prospects is straightforward in nature, like contract vehicles, partner information, and awards. Thought-leadership content requires some time and effort, but the payoff will be magnified in the age of AI if your competitors take the path of least resistance.

There are ways AI can support your content development strategy. My friend Janet Waring and her StoryTech partner agency ArtForm recently did a video on the topic that is time well spent. But you can’t take humans out of the equation. If your SMEs don’t have useful insights, your efforts to differentiate your company will fail.

Thanks to my old friend Mark Amtower for suggesting I subscribe to the Marketoonist newsletter. I signed up for the cartoons and stayed for the commentary. Maybe you will too.

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Recently I attended the GAIN 2023 conference, an event dedicated to business-to-government (B2G) marketing. I’ve attended GAIN since it began in 2016, sponsored by Government Marketing University. In 2021 GovExec purchased GMarkU and produced this year’s event.

Attendance seemed strong and fully recovered from depressed pandemic levels. Many of the speakers and presentations were excellent. I can’t do the whole show justice, but here are some useful GAIN 2023 nuggets that stood out to me. Plus some links if you’d like to explore further.

The opening presentation was on Artificial Intelligence and how to use it to become a next-generation government marketer. Paul Roetzer of the AI Marketing Institute gave a talk that was a mixture of thought-provoking predictions and practical AI tips. Such as:

• ChatGPT is just the tip of iceberg. 80% of KW will be intelligently automated to some degree in 1-2 years.

• How to best start experimenting with AI? Problem-based vs. Use Case model. Problem-based is using AI to solve known pain point, use case is quick-win pilot project, must be data driven, repetitive, predictive and generative.

•There are so many new tools to try! ChatGPT now includes DALLE-3, Imagen, new AI features added to Zoom, Runwayml.com, descript.com, Microsoft CoPilot.

Well-known B2G practitioners Lisa Sherwin Wulf and Monica Mayk shared their perspectives on making the most of your B2G marketing resources and budget.

•Timelines and measures of B2B vs. B2G success are very different – align with Sales and Marketing on KPI from beginning, know corporate rules, operational vs. campaign funds, find money from other departments and projects – OPM stands for other people’s money

•Park money with partners and vendors

•Know your tech stack and KPIs

•Hire internal when you can, keep stable of freelancers and vendors

•Leverage corporate PMMs who want to learn PS

•Remember that industry expertise is costly but critical

Allan Rubin and Guy Timberlake shared a detailed methodology for understanding the federal buying journey. The 7-Step process from the Defense Acquisition University helps marketers know when to engage federal decision-makers with their content and differentiators.

•GET IN FRONT – if you wait until the opportunity is announced (RFP stage), you’re already at step 5

•Understand the DAU 7-Step process

•Become familiar with the Shipley Method

•Share informative, vendor-agnostic info throughout the entire process, builds trust and differentiates

Aaron Heffron then shared some research on the media habits of the public sector buyer. Aaron is, President of Research and Forecasting at GovExec, and formerly President of Market Connections before its purchase by GovExec in 2022. Most of the information was familiar to those who purchased the M4PS research earlier this year, but there were some interesting items.

•Drive time is back, and WTOP is #1

•Customer testimonials way down in credibility – not known was has caused this, perhaps poor quality or overuse?

•Newsletters are big in SLED

•66% feds listen to podcasts,  up from 56% in 2022

•GovExec top digital site for 38% of civilian and 39% of Defense

Juliana Slye of B2G strategy firm GBR and Molly Tomevi of Carahsoft did a presentation on the Government Buyer’s Journey. Spoiler alert – it’s long.

•Something must first happen that knocks government out of status quo before it wants to make a purchase

•Process takes at least 12-18 months

•According to Forrester – 13 pieces of content consumed for a B2B purchase, 27 touchpoints for B2G

•A MQL does not become a SQL until step 16-17

•44% of millennials want a purely digital sales experience, no humans (Gartner)

Finally, it wouldn’t be GAIN without a lot of networking with peers and prospects. Hope these nuggets are helpful and see you there next year!

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