Rep Cap

Rep Cap Office Hours: How We're Using AI in Content Without Compromising Quality or Ethics, with Mary Ellen Slayter of RepCap - Featuring Lately CEO Kate Bradley Chernis

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Transcript

Speaker 1: (00:46)

orated writer as a strategic move inside our agency. So this is a little bit different from our usual webinars. What I'm not doing here is going through a PowerPoint for an hour, um, and sharing examples and all that sort of stuff. I'm literally gonna screen share for you how I do these things. And the first thing I'm gonna do is show you how we use lately to take, so create social copy out of long form existing copy. This is, I think if you are experimenting with AI in your content, um, this is, I think I'm gonna call it a gateway drug, you know, cause I watched too many heads in the eighties, you know, um, dare ads. But it's, this is your, I think this is the safest way for many people who haven't used the sick tech to, to test it out, right?

Speaker 1: (01:26)

This is your content. How can you get more life out of it? We're told over and over again, you know, make it once and redistribute and adapt. This system made the perfect, perfect place to start. The second thing, I'm gonna do a little more complex. I'm gonna use writer to create an SEO blog post. They've got, um, kind of an SEO post builder. We're gonna walk through step by step, but I'm gonna show you like how I would use it to make a post at rep cap. Like, I mean, I'm not gonna, it'll take me a little longer to do a full post, but I'm gonna at least walk you through the process and show you where the human comes in, you know, where the AI is helpful things you gotta watch out for that sort of thing. And then last but not least, we'll just make you some time at the end there for, it's just an open q and a.

Speaker 1: (02:05)

Or if you want me to go back and say, well, how'd you do that thing? I'll go back and do that thing. Um, I've also got some guest, special guest coming in, um, in this conversation. We're gonna be bringing them in as we get closer to the actual presentations. I'm very excited. It's some of the folks actually that whose work I really love at both lately and writer. So gonna pop in and also answer some questions. They're also hanging out in the chat, and so I'm gonna be off the screen for much of this presentation. So if you have questions like ask 'em in the chat, um, especially if they're product specific, um, they will be able to absolutely answer them. Look at elote. So that's our agenda. The first thing I wanna talk about here actually is like, I, I've been working on this a little bit.

Speaker 1: (02:43)

It's like, this is my content marketer's AI manifesto. And one of my rules is, and this, this shapes like how I do this work, is when AI creates only humans publish. I know that in a, there's a dream for some of us that like, oh yeah, you just automate the whole process. Don't you need that human review point? You actually don't want things just to make stuff and just go. You always wanna build in healthy, appropriate checkpoints. The second one is, I know we talk a lot about the bias in ai, which it absolutely is because it's as biased as the humans that it was trained upon. You also have a bias problem. And I find that if we're smart about this, the way that I try to use AI as opposed to amplifying my biases, I use AI to help me counter them, right?

Speaker 1: (03:32)

And open up and spot for me the patterns that I, I wouldn't have noticed on my own, right? So you can either use AI to, to basically make your own, amplify your own bias and make your world even more narrow. Or you can use it to open it up. The third one, protect your data. Okay, chat, G B T is fun. Think of it as like a fun toy. I mean, I also look at it in some ways and I think, man, this is gonna make Cambridge analytical look like a joke. , depending on how people handle this data, be very mindful when you're using AI tools. Like, talk to the people who make the tools that you're using about what happens when you put your data in. Does it get used to train other models? Like does it get co-mingled with other random stuff? Those are all questions that you're gonna have to start asking.

Speaker 1: (04:14)

And I would just say be very careful about what you put into different things. Um, you know, if you're not paying for it, just remember, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product. So if you're putting things in chat g p t right now, you know, you're the product. So, um, all right, guard against what I, it's perfect. And I am using in the classic philosophical sense, in the hairy Frankfurt sense. I keep this book on my desk at all times. Like, um, some of you know, I used to be a journalist and I think that this is part of, like, things can sound great. Um, I think a lot of AI content, what it will generate for you is a lot of very smooth, confident nonsense. Even things if you ask it to do research for you, you know, that that is not a substitute for a good fact checking that is not a good substitute for like, just decent real plagiarism. Like, you know, use your human intuition on top of this. Like, don't if there's no shortcuts here. So, um, anyway, and if you haven't read on, I recommend it.

Speaker 1: (05:14)

Cool. So one of the other overall things, y'all, if you ever come to any of our stuff, I, you'll heard me say this, one of the first rules about great content marketing is it has to be differentiated. And so one of the problems I'm seeing with some of the early uses of this content where people are all excited about how it's cheap and fast is that it doesn't pass this fundamental rule for me, which is that if I took your content and put it on your competitor's site, could anybody tell the difference? And if all you're doing is shoving content into one of these tools and then stuff comes out and you put that and publish it, you will fail this. I do not know, like if there's some version of a Bechtel test or something, but like, people can't tell, and this is going to make this problem worse if you're not thoughtful about this, all right?

Speaker 1: (05:59)

But this also brings me back to another point where the people who say, oh, this stuff isn't differentiated. It doesn't, the AI doesn't have a voice. Well, God, I hope not. Again, do y'all not watch sci-fi? Like when the AI gets a voice, we're, right? , like, that's not what we're looking for. That's not the goal here. And no, some of you, this is when I died, cuz you know, Calvin Block does in fact have a voice and I live in the Bible belt and whatever. I had to this depart where he was like getting my brother in Christ, like, I died. I just died. But it's true. So work on having a voice, AI or not. Cuz some of y'all, y'all, y'all got a lot of ideas, interesting ideas about ai, but you don't, uh, you have no idea what's common, but you also don't seem to have any really good ideas about your content. So, alright, so how do I do this? So that's, I'm gonna now kind of pop off screen, um, and I'm gonna go pop over to lately and show you what I do.

Speaker 1: (07:01)

All right? So I mentioned it lately, for those of you who haven't seen this before, is a content, it's a social tool that will allow you to take your long form content and create short form content. And when I, I actually was watching lately for a while, you know, in terms of when we first started working with it. And like noticed, I noticed that like I would put the content in and uh, 50% of what came out I could use with a little editing. And then like a few months went by and I'm like, Hmm, okay, 70% of this is usable. Oh, okay. Now 80% of this is us usable. I would now say that between 80 and 90% of what lately gives me out of a well-structured blog post is usable with like, with some light editing. That's amazing. Like if my job is to take you write one big, long piece of content, and that is the secret though.

Speaker 1: (07:52)

It, it does its best work. It's garbage in, garbage out. If your original long form piece is awesome, you will get awesome AI like adapted content from it. If your original piece is nonsense, the computer is no better at reading all that than, than we are as humans. Um, so I like to use it this way. So as an example, I'm gonna take, this is a, a blog post, like a rep cap with a pillar post. And I wrote one on how to create a thought leadership program. So what I would do here if I wanted to run a campaign in support of our thought leadership consulting, and I was like, ah, I've got this original piece and I wanna just get some good social posts out of it. So I would come over here. You can either copy and paste it into the blog, into this link. You can also just straight up copy paste stuff in here in long form. Um, I love that y'all, they gave us some ideas and things post from, and then I'm gonna hit generate

Speaker 1: (08:53)

And now it's thinking. And while it's thinking , you're like, wait, how's the machine taking this much time? Um, this also kind of cracks me up. So this is gonna come back, it's going through, um, looking at what I gave it, you know, that whole post and that whole post is like, it's a good 2000 words long. And then I asked it to give me LinkedIn post because the only social channel that rep cap manages, like for our own marketing is LinkedIn lately can absolutely do Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as well. Um, this is just the choice that we made to like focus strictly on this channel. So that's what I'm asking it for and it's still thinking. I think that some of this thinking is actually a function of, uh, my internet right now. But come on now, it's just teasing me. Well that's generating, I'm gonna come show you what the original posts look like. So there's a long form piece, it's got an intro, it's got three clear headers, you know, it's got a thesis. This is what I mean by making sure that what you feed in is well structured. So this is where like SEO posts in particular are really good at this because if they're strong then they already have these kind of, this kind of hierarchy to it.

Speaker 1: (10:30)

This is a post that performs very well just on its own, like it ranks on these, on these terms. So, right, let's go see if it's, ah, it's still thinking on me. Might just refresh this. I think that's a me problem, not a, not a lately problem. Ah, yes. Okay. So lately also allows you to, it's you connect it to the publisher and in this case it's connected to my personal LinkedIn and as well as our pages, you can also connect it to, if you have HubSpot, you can connect it directly to HubSpot. If you use Hootsuite, it also integrates with Hootsuite. So here's where I start looking through now it's given me 10 posts. Um, this first thing, this is where again, what I mean by like, it's not quite perfect, I wouldn't just hit send on this, right? Cuz it's after all that it picked up is not quite right. So I would edit this, right, just to tighten it up a little.

Speaker 1: (11:47)

That's actually pretty good, y'all. Now you could also see that my friends, friends that lately are also nudging me over here to add some emojis and add a hashtags and attachments and, and add mention people. So I'm not gonna do mentions on this just because it's not quite appropriate, but I do appreciate that I'm getting nudged about this, right? So for what are gonna be my hashtags, I'm gonna add, um, content marketing, internal comms, um, communications. I'm just kind of making stuff up right now. Um, and and you can see now it says, ah-ha, thank you. You added a hashtag. I'm not gonna put, um, actually maybe I will. Uh, let's see, who could I tag here? I'm gonna tag cap, just tag myself just so y'all can see how that happens actually that, okay, so anyway, so now I have a post and if I wanted to go schedule this, like, so this one I feel pretty good about. Go ahead lately, schedule it for me, put it on my own post. Put it like, just post this on my own feed.

Speaker 1: (13:01)

And now I walk over. Once you know, you can come see all my LinkedIn like told y'all I was gonna be like watching paint dry. It's probably not actually up there yet. Cause I think there's like some optimizing on the scheduling. So, but, so if I went over there, then it would, it would schedule it. Now I'm gonna look again. What else do they give me? This one isn't quite holding up because it missed the first part, which as the human, I know that as this is talking about the SEO piece. Um, I could, since I know that as the person, I could use that. Or let's move on. Let's just kind of see, maybe there's something else I like better cuz I don't need 'em. All right. Um, this one, it didn't quite it. Look, it looks like it kind of put this in here.

Speaker 1: (14:00)

Hmm. So, but all I really had to do was take a sentence off. This is pretty good, y'all , right? So now I can go ahead and schedule this one too if I wanted. Um, all of 'em. So in the end when this is over, I took that one piece and I would say it gave me 10. Oh, it's still giving me more. See, right? So it's still generating stuff. Like I can just keep looking through this knowing that I want like five or six. Like, what I like about this is that whenever I do it as a human, I actually have a tendency to only grab the top, right? I tend to just grab whatever my lead was, whatever my thesis was. And like, but there's all these other words, like it's sort of down through it. It's like the, the AI helps me find the other good stuff. Here's another one, templates and checklists. Um, that's, that's actually an inherently decent post in and of itself, right?

Speaker 1: (15:09)

And you'll notice like this is part of the a this is part of the nudge. This is part of the nudge. Go look at this. Like, they're gonna flag this for you. So that's, I'm gonna like, that's, that is basically, that is the gist of it. Like, and you could do that over and over and over again. If you go take a look here in the history, I can put that in. I could also generate it again if I didn't like it at all for some reason, I could have it do it all over again. But I have so many, I have 50 posts to review potentially. Um, I did another one last night as I was just kind of practicing to, to do this in public today. I put in one of our posts about email newsletters and it gave me 50 posts. This is a good one.

Speaker 1: (15:56)

So if you are trying to figure out like how to get your, like SMEs to post things, you know, some of you in bigger companies, you're trying to figure out what you're gonna feed into. Um, you know, your social sharing team, like for your sales team, you know, they often, people wanna share stuff. They don't know what to share. This is one way you can kind of generate that volume for them. This is pretty good. I mean, I gotta do a, I've gotta do a little tweaking, but that's better than starting all over from scratch.

Speaker 1: (16:27)

Yeah, here we go. It's like, this is about referral. So I'm gonna come back. I'm probably gonna use this stuff like , you know, I'm gonna go and probably schedule some more of that. Um, the other real quick thing that I'm gonna show you on lately before I, I bring in one of my, my, my guest visitors here is, um, you can also put in, um, videos and audio. So this is a slightly different, um, sort of a different tier on it. Um, and this is something we've been experimenting with more. Um, this is a fairly new feature. Um, you know, I can let like our our guest speaker come and talk about this a little bit. But like you can put in an entire video or an, or a podcast episode. So you can put in audio, you can put in video and it will go through and actually help you find the snippets.

Speaker 1: (17:13)

And again, you still have to edit, but like, it's really nice to have a jumpstart from the AI on like, this is a snippet that goes from 2 0 3 to 2 58. And I could hit play and listen to this. I could see like what, you know, it's gonna tell me where it starts, right? It did the cut for me. And I can still tweak it a little and then I can when it's done. So for those of you who have like, who do a lot of multimedia where you've got, maybe you've got, um, SMEs that you support the do podcast and you wanna figure out how to get more social content. Maybe you have a podcast that you wanna get more content out of. Maybe you're doing a lot of videos. Like, um, one of the things you also said, so you see Ryan Estes is one of the folks that dropped in here. He's a longtime friend, he's a keynote speaker. He generates insane amount of very good content in the form of video and audio that this tool allows us to quickly adapt that into things for his social. So it's pretty cool, right? I'm gonna pop out actually for here just a second, see if I can answer some questions for y'all. And I see that Kate is here with me. So , um, I can, I also can't, I keep forgetting, I can't not call you Kate . Were forever branded, so thank you Kate for joining us. So, so yeah, so tell me, how was that demo? Would you, could I work yourself? It was, wait,

Speaker 2: (18:46)

We literally made a whole bunch of those changes like in the last two weeks and I haven't seen some of them live. So I was sort of shaking a little bit. I was like, oh my God, oh my god, is it gonna work?

Speaker 1: (18:55)

? I was wondering that too. Now , that's why I was happy at practice last night because I'm not, you know, the main people on the team that use this, like Grace McGrath are social person. The writers use it. It's pretty deeply integrated in our process's, like it was from pretty much the get-go.

Speaker 2: (19:09)

Thank you so much Yeah.

Speaker 1: (19:10)

From the time.

Speaker 2: (19:11)

Let me know when you're ready to run sales for me. Okay. Mary Ellen. Yeah.

Speaker 1: (19:14)

Yeah. . No, no, but I mean it's like, no, actually I don't want, I told, I think I told you once before too, it's like, well I feel like it's my secret weapon and I'm always torn. It's like, do I want to tell people about this ?

Speaker 2: (19:26)

Well what I like so much that you, you know, we struggle with it what you had said so well, which is like, how do you get people to understand that the human element is essential, right? Mm-hmm. that light editing, like those little bits because it's funny, people want magic still Mary Ellen, right? Mm-hmm. this part of the problem with

Speaker 1: (19:43)

That's magic. That's still magic's for

Speaker 2: (19:47)

Sure. You know, it's not totally hands free, but, but it makes a difference, right? So, so as you said, it learned over time to get better and better because you helped it do that specifically mm-hmm. . And, and that's the argument we're trying to, it's not just about being ethical. I mean, yes, of course we wanna be ethical, but we want the results mm-hmm. and the results when a humans partner up with the AI beat the pants off, just the AI alone. Mm-hmm. ,

Speaker 1: (20:13)

That's the way I look at it too, because what I liked about it, this comes back to my role about use it to like so overcome your bias, it found things that I wouldn't have found,

Speaker 2: (20:21)

Right?

Speaker 1: (20:22)

That was that. And that's big for me because otherwise I'm just, sometimes people talk about repurposing content and they think that means posting the same thing over and over and over. Yeah. That, that's actually not what that means.

Speaker 2: (20:33)

Yeah. You know, I, I did this by the way. So I, I did this for Walmart by hand like 15 years ago and mm-hmm. , it was the same kinda idea. Somebody had to write social, nobody wanted to, because the approval process with Walmart was like months and months and months. And so I was like, but we're writing all these great blogs. What if we'd lifted out sentences as teaser and just put a short link back to the full and I could get easily 40 posts in an hour and they've already been approved by Walmart cuz we've got the blog approved already. And then what if we trickled them out over time? So like we posted one a week for every, for whatever, 40 weeks. And then you have that like exponential drip feed coming back at you mm-hmm. like a waterfall, you know, over and over. So it's like a crazy mindset that I think marketers, you know, we're so stuck in being in the moment mm-hmm. and that's changed. Mm-hmm. , it's post mo where you get the most, um, kind of bang for your buck nowadays, right?

Speaker 1: (21:33)

Yeah. The other thing I would say, and I didn't pull this up, but I, cuz we use co-schedule. So y'all have an integration with Hootsuite and you have an integration with HubSpot from a product roadmap that makes sense to me. That captures a lot of, a lot of business. We use co-schedule and it's pretty core to how we do this. Awesome. And I don't know if those of you, I can also pull CoSchedule, other people are curious about it, but it, I I still go over and I do the human thing cuz I don't have an integration, you know, feature request really

Speaker 2: (21:58)

Like that. We'll work on that

Speaker 1: (21:59)

And CoSchedule. Um, but, but CoSchedule, the whole concept is that you made it once, right? In fact, actually I am gonna do, have you, have you seen

Speaker 2: (22:07)

CoSchedule? No. Show me. I I love this. Alright.

Speaker 1: (22:10)

Ok, good. I'm gonna, ok. I'm gonna show everybody CoSchedule now too. , this is awesome. Cause it's actually really, this is pretty critical to that model that I was just describing. Should

Speaker 2: (22:18)

I jump off too? Do you wanna just jump in? No,

Speaker 1: (22:20)

No, no. You can stay on. I'll be real quick about this. I'll be very quick about it. Great. Um, I'm gonna not even,

Speaker 2: (22:26)

We just need people to keep asking us for the integration with co-schedule and I'll put it on the list. So we're doing sprinkler right now, right? And, uh, you know, let's wanted do social, but they don't, they're not doing an open API right now, so,

Speaker 1: (22:39)

Okay. So let's see. Let's go look at one of these that we said, well we knew this was really good, um, and we liked it.

Speaker 3: (22:47)

Uh

Speaker 1: (22:53)

Oh, this was a good one. Okay, so what I would do here is I would actually just copy this and then CoSchedule is our scheduling tool and then co-schedule, what you would do is you essentially think of content in that campaign sense. So if you've got a blog post, you don't just make a blog post and it's just hanging out there, right? Like a, you don't just like post on social, like you were just describing. This idea that I posted once is not what we would do here. So like, I'll give you an example. This is actually a good one. Potentially. Um, I think sometimes, okay, so we actually did post these and these were all written with, with lately, right? So this link to this, that email newsletter post mm-hmm. , then we schedule all the social posts that go with it, they all get scheduled at one time.

Speaker 2: (23:43)

Cool.

Speaker 1: (23:44)

So, and I can say run this a week from now, run this a month from now, run this three months from now, and they all get put in here

Speaker 2: (23:50)

By drip feed.

Speaker 1: (23:52)

And so they're generated with lately copied over here. And then I can look at the whole campaign, right? I can see how all the content did. Exactly. Um, and you can just have things in the ideas. This is drag and drop.

Speaker 2: (24:08)

Awesome.

Speaker 1: (24:10)

So if you like something or if you wanna, let's say you're not bound, just cuz we said, oh, I'm gonna run it on this day, but what if I change my mind and I don't want to run it here. I wanna run this this day.

Speaker 2: (24:19)

Mm-hmm. , I love it.

Speaker 1: (24:21)

So that's what we do with co-schedule. Um, and so it's like sort of like a social platform, like a, like a hoot tweet or a Sprout social. But it's also a little bit like, you know, most of us as content marketers make this in a spreadsheet. This replaces a lot of spreadsheets for me.

Speaker 2: (24:37)

We, um, not to be a commercial, but, so in our, our enterprise product has all of that exact features. So there's a full calendar that you can drag and drop and, um, you can upload and download and all that kind of stuff. So, um, but it's a different, it's a bit of a different beast. Like there's, you know,

Speaker 1: (24:53)

It's, yeah, no, I, I figured that probably, I mean, yeah. So there are different sort of levels. I know somebody asked in here about the pricing or whatever, and it's like, if it's pre low cost, I consider the sort of entry level version. It's not free, but it, I consider it inexpensive. Like I consider it. I will tell you that lately was probably the most high, the highest ROI software purchase that I made. ,

Speaker 2: (25:14)

Oh God. I just, I

Speaker 1: (25:16)

Literally, the history of this business, and I know you're gonna raise the prices at some point, but for now, ,

Speaker 2: (25:23)

I just told my customer service team to send you some brownies on us before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just like, you're so great. Thank you so much for,

Speaker 1: (25:30)

For, yeah. So I wanna talk, I know I wanna show everybody edited this stuff with Ryder too, but like, tell me, you were talking about working at Walmart, this solved a real problem for you. This came out of like your problem.

Speaker 2: (25:40)

It did. Like, it was a combination of Walmart and then, I don't know if you know this about me, Mary Ellen, but I used to be a rock and roll dj. So my last gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM Satellite Radio. Hmm. And my Uber power was turning listeners into fans or customers into evangelists. And so what we did with lately was we took the Walmart problem, but we wanted to amp it up because it's not, as, you know, it's not enough just to put great content out there. You want content mm-hmm. that converts number one and content that creates use, right? You are what I want. I want many, many more of use. So how do I do that? What I was thinking about with music is there's, this is complicated, so forgive me, but there's, um, with writing and MU and, and radio, there's a parallel, there's a thr theater of the Mind is required, right?

Speaker 2: (26:29)

Mm-hmm. . So when you do something, and then when you're listening, you have to fill in the blanks with your own imagination. That's the human element. That's the, the un unknown element, right? As an author, it's your job to guide people along and fill in the story as you're going, but give them the room to do that. And it's the same if you're a good dj, you're making this two-way street. Feels like you have a role in my conversation. Mm-hmm. . So here's how this ties in. When you listen to a new song, your brain must instantly access every other song you've ever heard in that instant. And it's looking for familiar touchpoints so it knows where to index the new song in the library of the memory of your brain. Similarly, your voice, Mary Ellen, has a frequency, like a song, there's a note mm-hmm. the sound of your voice.

Speaker 2: (27:11)

So when I read what you write, I hear it in my head. Now, in both of those cases, that idea of listening to music and, and categorizing it pulls forth nostalgia and memory and emotion by accident just happens as part of the default. Mm-hmm. , when you write, if you are writing to trigger those same cues, all of which let, let trust happen, they have to be there for trust to happen. This is how you reach people in a way that starts to get them to evangelize for you. Mm-hmm. . So when lately it's clipping out that content for you, it's looking for these kinds of ideas in what you write to make it so compelling that people can't help themselves, but click, comment, and share.

Speaker 1: (27:56)

Mm-hmm. it does, it finds the, it definitely finds the better stuff and it finds stuff that I wouldn't have found. Like I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have necessarily picked those things. Um, but I also wanna say, I also really appreciate something else you, you were talking about earlier, about getting it through, um, you know, when you were in corporate, like how, like getting it through compliance. Okay. Because like these readers, so I mean, it is, it's like how do you maintain that voice and make it interesting? So you're plucking out the parts that are genuinely interesting. You're, but you're also staying because again, it's grounded in your content that you made. This isn't just, this just comes back to the, like you, my brother in Christ did not have an original. It's like, this actually starts with your voice. If you, if you do have your voice nailed, this is what I mean by like, if you've gotten good content, like if you're a good content person, like you're just trying to figure out like, well, how, and you're being asked to do more with less. I'm seeing that a lot right now. It's like teams where there's only a lot of squeeze, especially on the tech side. Um, that's market. It's crazy, but it's like, if you're being asked to do that and you've gotta figure out how to do it, you don't get to hire another person, you know, but you also want to increase share of voice. You want to be posting more often, you know, with you're, this is a way to do it with intention and it will also make it through compliance

Speaker 2: (29:09)

With intention. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1: (29:11)

Speaker 2: (29:11)

Touched on this, and I dunno if it was here or online, but it's lazy isn't gonna cut it, right? Mm-hmm. . So that intention has to be part of the work that you're doing, right? So AI isn't meant to just, I, I think of CliffNotes, there's such a parallel here. Remember, remember Cliff notes, right? Mm-hmm. and Teachers Cotton onto that real quick. You couldn't just copy the CliffNotes, but you could use it as like a way to better understand the book if you also read the book mm-hmm. . And it's, it's really similar. So it's, it's curious to me how how much people are trying to cheat right now with ai, um, and why they would want to, right? Like what's, well,

Speaker 1: (29:47)

Those people were bad writers anyway. I mean, I wanna say just that Ro Ross Simmons said something also though that really stuck with me. Or he was like, you give a great content marketer AI and you're gonna get really great content and a lot more of it. You give like a bad one guess AI and you're gonna get a lot of bad content and a lot more of it a lot more. It's already

Speaker 2: (30:06)

Happening, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1: (30:07)

It's, oh, it's so painful. I mean, it's also, you can tell the ones that are like 10 prompts to ask Chad g p t to write your next blog post. And I'm like, did you use chat GT to write this? You

Speaker 2: (30:17)

Can tell. Yeah.

Speaker 1: (30:18)

Yeah. Whereas I, my my like, fun stuff in like those tools is I like to ask it. The other day we were talking about the, I was talking about the friend about the new, um, avatar movie, and he said something about Lava Navi, but I read it as lava Nazis and I was like, lava Nazis the new James Cameron film. And so I was like, write a script overview outline for a movie about lava Nazis produced by James Cameron and Jack g p t did write me that beautiful perfect . Like, and that's all it to me. That's all it's good for. Now the other thing then I said rewrite it in this, it was hilarious. And I said, rewrite it in the style of Christopher Nolan. Oh my God. Got a warning, I got a warning that said Christopher Nolan does not approve of the use of his. I'm like,

Speaker 2: (30:58)

Oh really?

Speaker 1: (30:59)

Chris Nolan went . You couldn't

Speaker 2: (31:03)

Who name. Wow. Yeah,

Speaker 1: (31:05)

It did not like it. Did not. So I do think artists will, I guess I'm not really that surprised that Christopher Nolan was to like, get my out of this model. Like, you know, , you'll not make inception like with this. Like, he, he's probably thought about AI enough that like , you

Speaker 2: (31:21)

Know, that's funny about that. So I actually use voice activated software to do all my computing. Mary Ellen. So I, I have a, i i I don't type at all. I'm hands free. And, and so this is dragon naturally speaking, which actually powers Siri. So there's some AI involved mm-hmm. and I don't make typos ever. I make sound alike typos. So for example, it, it will often hear the word VCs, venture capitalists as

Speaker 1: (31:42)

As feces , right?

Speaker 2: (31:47)

And I'm like, no, don't send that email. Don't send, don't send

Speaker 1: (31:50)

That. Actually what it was, it was something that Anne Hanley posted the other day where it was like, it replaced something with the word urine . Yes. That was like, it was

Speaker 2: (31:59)

So hilarious. I read that post. It was so, and it was so, you know, totally true. Um, but yeah, that's exactly what you said. You have to catch the guardrails and, and you know, we'd, we'd seen a lot of people on LinkedIn getting really upset about this, this type of idea, right? Mm-hmm. the fear of ai. And I just wanted to, before we, you know, move into the next thing is talk about where ai, at least in our world, which is content generation, is on the, on the lifespan. So first of all, everybody think of AI as a human and think of it as three months old. So humans are the only mammals. When we, when we come outta the womb, we're totally helpless. We can't feed ourselves, we can't walk, we can't defend ourselves. And so if AI is only three months, it also requires, you know, loving care to do things, right? So I wanna kind of abate the, the freak out about around that. It's, it's, there's no car driving, there's no, you know, I, you keep

Speaker 1: (32:54)

Saying that, you're not you to reassure me, but I just picture you there with the little baby dragon, you know, from Dana Thrones going just

Speaker 2: (33:00)

A baby. I took the compliment to that

Speaker 1: (33:01)

Baby .

Speaker 2: (33:06)

It's just, it's just a baby, you know? So here's another great example that I like so much. So remember, okay, Betty Crocker cake in a box, right? Mm-hmm. , when we first invented that, it was all, all you had to do was add water, was all powder like, and the housewives at the time didn't feel like they made a cake. There was no ownership in this, so it didn't sell. So they took the powdered eggs out and they made it. So you had to have eggs and then it sold like hot cakes cuz the humans had a roll in the process. Mm-hmm. got it.

Speaker 1: (33:33)

Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Nobody wants that. So, all right, so I'm gonna pop over. Um, I want you to stick around for a little bit. I'm gonna go do the writer piece. Um, I'm gonna show everybody, this one's really gonna feel like magic , like they're really gonna, and then we can all come back, come back together. And I wanna let y'all know, I do have some folks from writer on here too, like Rachel and Ryan have also joined us as similarly, kinda answer some questions. So I'm gonna pop off screen and now y'all are gonna get to see me, um, walk through at a high level, um, how we would, how we use this to make a blog post because it's not, um, this is a more complex process, right? So writer is a more complex tool, um, in fact that does a lot more things. So writer, not only, and I wanna say the writer is a strategic investment for us as an agency.

Speaker 1: (34:16)

Um, it is a soc two compliant platform that allows me to, to confidently, comfortably use AI for content generation. Um, and content support for, you know, I work in financial services and insurance and HR tech. Like I'm not, I I need like a, I need a walled garden. And so writer gave me my walled garden. It also replaces Grammarly. So, and I think some, there's some of the functionality that you saw in lately is in writer. Um, I, I don't imagine I have a hard time imagining us not ever having, but just cuz lately is that specialty tool. It's so fast for that exact thing. You want it done. Writer is my Grammarly. Like, it's so many other things. So it's snippets and like, it's, it's beautiful, beautiful thing. Brand guides that we train for the client. Um, all right, what I'm gonna show you is there's a pla tool in here called co-write.

Speaker 1: (35:04)

And co-write comes with templates. This is AI generated. And you're gonna see up here at the top this ask writers AI, anything. This is your chat G p T type equivalent. You know, you can put stuff in here and ask it to do things. You can also ask it to give you blog headlines. You can have it give you outlines, you can ask it to write a case study for you. I mean, you still have to describe it. Put some things in here. Um, you can dump a bunch of stuff in and have it summarize it. You can use it to generate ideas for if you have ideas for email, but you're not loving it like it can tell you some different ideas. Um, one of my favorite things that I've been using writer for is actually we're growing as an agency. You know, we had eight people a year ago, now we have 20, you know, it's like if we essentially on track to double again in size this year if we want to , like, which is, that's a deeper question.

Speaker 1: (35:52)

But, um, what I'm finding is like we had to write a bunch of SOPs and SOPs went from some being something that took me three hours, four hours to get all this tat knowledge outta my head to, I wrote one using, um, writer as support and under an hour because it just gave me, helped me gimme the structure. It helped me think of things I didn't think of to include, which is the most important. Like, again, that's part of the use it not just to do stuff and send it along, use it to like prompt you. So this is probably one of the things that will most freak people out, but also I think can really, really help you turn out a certain type of content at a higher volume. But we don't just put stuff in. So like, here's what, and this is where this is also a bit different from some of the other tools.

Speaker 1: (36:41)

I think there was a question in there where people ask me if I had tested other tools. I have tested all the other tools and I'm not gonna talk about 'em in here because, cause I didn't use them and I'm just not bringing that kind of energy through my Friday. But I have a lot of questions there. There's a reason we chose these two and it mostly comes down to ethics, ethical leadership and transparent leadership around how they're developing the tech. Um, I think in addition to Kate, you know, Habib is the CEO of writer and she has also put herself in the forefront of having serious conversations about using this tech the right way. Um, and that's a really important to me. Um, I like their roadmaps. I like everything's, it's, it's more about the, honestly, frankly, it's about the philosophy and also the approach to customer service. But yeah, I've tested all of them. So all, so what are we gonna write about? I'm gonna write a blog post about how to write an email newsletter.

Speaker 1: (37:38)

And this is where, I mean, I really would, you're watching me do this very rough and I'm gonna change it to how to write an awesome email. Um, if I didn't like this title, I could actually use it to generate some alternatives for me. Cuz again, maybe I'm just feeling kind of stuck. Oh, I kind of like, kind of liking this. Like, let's go with that experts guide. That sounds good. Um, let's, so, uh, what do I want to optimize it for? Email newsletter. Uh, we'll call it like guide, like tips and tricks or something, or like best practices. That's what I'll say. And again, I'm, you know, I'm probably a little more thoughtful in my prompts if I weren't doing this like on the clock here with you. Um, what's the cta? What I want them to do, like sign up for our newsletter. Yeah.

Speaker 1: (38:38)

All right. So now after putting this in, I'm gonna hit outline and it's gonna think for a minute. Oh yeah, it thought for a minute. So what should go in here? So now what I just, if I wanted, I could just hit key points and go on. But again, I'm a human who knows this topic really well and I do have some sense of the points that I want to make when I'm writing. So a section on why they're still relevant. That sounds good. I think I would like that. Um, what makes a great newsletter? I, that's not quite what I wanted. You know, I think I might, uh, gimme something different. Reword this. What makes an email newsletter great. Um, that's all right. I think I'll take that. Um, I think what I'm missing, I'm like, ah, you know, what's missing here is like how to write a great email copy and it doesn't matter, the lowercase uppercase, it's like, none of that stuff matters to me right now. So, and then I, I know I want this to go. Um, and I wanna add one more section. I wanna see some examples, narrow it down a little bit. Even could I say b2b?

Speaker 1: (40:11)

So, I mean, you can see I, I used it. There were some things I probably wouldn't on my own have written the template. I wouldn't have said, oh, how to design the template. I wouldn't have put that in there. I'm a copy first person, right? So I probably would've like done that like first. Um, so it caught something that I didn't necessarily think of. It kind of got me through all the basic obvious stuff. Um, and now this is, this is, it's kind of interesting, right? Like this isn't a bad outline. Now I'm gonna go to key points.

Speaker 1: (40:44)

So when I go to key points, this is now going to this one. I feel like this one usually takes like a hot minute, but again, sometimes I feel so ridiculous being impatient about this because this, let's be real, y'all, this would've taken me 30 minutes to get to this point, maybe an hour. Um, and I'm a fast writer. I'm a newspaper writer. So why are they still a newspaper? So relevant? This is actually, see to me, this doesn't match. This is not the argument for why they are still relevant. That's off. I'm gonna regenerate it. I'm gonna give it another chance. Try again. Ai. Now that is akin to what I was looking for, but I would consider these two things kind of the same thing and I'd probably just merge them. So I've got same top of mind. I'm building relationships, I'm driving traffic back to my site and I'm generating leads. Um,

Speaker 1: (41:59)

Now that's not bad. Maybe I might think of some other things I might wanna add. What makes an anyon newsletter great? Okay. It's well written, well designed, relevant to the audience, timely and interesting. I, you know, I have a model that I often use where I, I say, you know, is it accurate? Is it relevant? Is it interesting? And I, I might say, this is why what the AI told me. Let's see. I actually don't think timely is actually that important. Like, I mean, I think a lot of newsletters, we think we hear newsletter and we think it's like literally news, but it's not. So let's say it must be, um,

Speaker 1: (42:38)

This is me, right? This is where I'm getting into, like my framework. Let's see how well it handles it. So it must be accurate, must be relevant, must be interesting. Let's see what it does with that. Um, how to write great email copy. Clear, concise to the point. Oh, you see the point? See that to me is that these, now we're not getting into like, I don't think these are as good. So like, try again, because what I'm looking for here are steps right now. It just repeated what was up there. That's not good either. And again, I wanna be clear. This is like, remember thinking about the time here. It's like it's easy to be like, oh, that was so bad. But it was like, how long would it have taken you to say that? Um, so why are they still relevant? Did I just hit the wrong button? I hit the wrong button. So I kind of screwed that up. I'll keep that there. What makes an email newsletter great? Um, how to write Great email. Okay, here we go. I need a good subject line. Short paragraphs image spare. Yep. Okay, now we're good. Actually, I'll take that. How to design an email newsletter template.

Speaker 1: (43:51)

Yeah, that's pretty good. Press something about being on brand, right? All right, so I had to promote it. That kind of showed up in a weird way. Okay. Email newsletter tool. So those aren't really tools and resources. I would call those like ways to publish your newsletter, whatever. I'll leave it, but let's see. Now we've got three. Great. No inspiration. This isn't what I wanted at all. This is where I'm probably gonna have to be human. Okay. I'm gonna say [inaudible] recruiting brain food. I'm gonna say Anne Hanley. And who else's newsletter do I love? Um, let's see, what's another good one? I mean, sorry, I read a lot of newsletters. I feel like I need to pick somebody whose newsletter that cracks me up. Um, people Geekly. I'm gonna pick Culture Amp. All right, this is an outline and I'm hitting generate draft. I might get up and go get my coffee. Mike, refill my coffee in while I was thinking, I think while this is, um, and while this is loaded, I think Ryan and Rachel, why don't one of y'all, y'all can pop back on. We can kind of chat about this a little bit. This does take a minute. And again, I feel ridiculous when I say that it's taking a minute because this would take me an hour to write and I'm like sitting here getting annoyed that like it needs 30 seconds. Like what has happened? Like what has happened to me? ,

Speaker 4: (46:22)

It's your new one, right? You're not used to happen right around for things anymore.

Speaker 1: (46:26)

Yeah. You want things right away. , right? It's like, because I feel ridiculous every time I say it. I mean it does just, it does take a minute, like this part. Um, but I think when I think about what we've asked it to do, it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 3: (46:38)

Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. .

Speaker 1: (46:40)

So while it's loading, um, why don't y'all, y'all can just take a second, um, and kind of talk a little bit about, about how you built this. Like, cuz I know that this wasn't something that y'all just rolled out outta the gate, like whore's fairly new. Yeah. And you are pretty, the team was pretty intentional in the product and like, and how this got built. So like let's, um, talk, talk us through that a little bit.

Speaker 4: (46:58)

Yeah, I mean, I'll back up. You mentioned the Grammarly competitor piece. So for most people to know, we really launched focused on helping you write on brand content initially. So we are very focus mm-hmm. focus on getting your style guide into writer. Having you be able to apply that style guide to all of your content. So this isn't just spell checking and those normal grammar use cases. This is also writing on brand terms. This is speaking in the way that your brand wants to speak. Mm-hmm. , that was the initial iteration of the product. And in about August of last year, we launched co-write. And co-write really was our attempt to continue the writing process, give you everything from ideation to writing to editing, and then get you all the way to publication and be publication ready. Um, what you just saw with the blog post builder, what I really want to note there is it's about intentionality.

Speaker 4: (47:41)

And I think we talked about that earlier as well too. Mm-hmm. , this is not asking you to have a very unstructured prompt and then come up with copy that you probably really have to massage and spend a lot of time on. This is you thinking about every step of the way in your writing process. What would I be doing right now? I'd be creating an outline. I'd be confirming what my topics and key points are, and then producing content from that. So with a human in the driver's seat, as we like to say, your content is going to be a lot better. And so we've structured this process in such a way that there's guardrails to help you produce your best content. Therefore you've got a great first draft to work with at this point. Every step of the way you're getting good content and you can edit it. Like we just saw it ,

Speaker 1: (48:18)

I popped it, I popped it back up, it's done. So they gave me this and now I'm gonna hit use this draft. Now what I go over and just publish this as is absolutely not , right? However, this isn't bad content. I mean, you can see y'all see on the right hand side we talked about being the sort of the Grammarly piece. So the other things I really like about writer is it is like spelling and grammar terms are a thing that we flag. I mean similar, Grammarly will do that for you. Clarity delivery, the inclusivity piece is another one that we really appreciate for the type of content that we do. Um, I really love that it actually, that it flags like, hey, why does this say he, are you sure it's a he ? Like, you know, it flags like certain terms as like being not, yeah. This isn't like a term that you probably want to use so people could find an offensive. I find that really helpful. Um, snippets is where we get into things like something you might write all the time, like your boiler plate around your company, you know. But look, this wrote me the first draft of 13, almost 1300 words.

Speaker 1: (49:23)

And I mean, that was work that would've taken me 45 an hour to get here. And now I'm gonna go through, this is definitely not my voice. Exactly. Right? I mean, this is, there's so many here. I was like, we were talking cursing or earlier, I was like, this has no curse words in it. obviously I didn't write it.

Speaker 4: (49:42)

You definitely need to fix that. Yeah,

Speaker 1: (49:43)

Obviously I didn't write it, but it's not a bad start. You know, I would do some things where I'd tighten up some language, I would fit it, align it with our messaging. I have certain ways that I would wanna talk about it. You know, um, this piece is the weakest, like this one, it did not really pick up what, I mean, this is just sort of being like very rel like being very real about this. Like, I told it what newsletters I liked, it did not write up the newsletters that I gave us. Like, so that was too far. Like that was a step too far. So like, for me, I'm now gonna need to come in here and like, it gave me three great examples, but these were not the examples I wanted to highlight. You know, it gave me very obvious like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo. So what I would say is if, you know, as you're wielding this, like know that, like you got your structure started and then you're like, ew, no, those aren't the three examples I wanna highlight. And you'd rewrite that part, but that's a hell of a lot better than starting completely from scratch.

Speaker 4: (50:50)

I, I think that's, that's kind of the point. I mean, we talked earlier about mm-hmm. , you know, bad writers, if they're able to use this, it's just gonna continue to be bad content that's coming up. Mm-hmm. great writers. This is gonna augment your team. This is gonna help you do things faster and at scale, but you're still gonna have that human element. You're still gonna apply your touch to it. You're gonna look at what makes sense and what doesn't make sense to you. Like we like to think about this is just helping great writers continue to be great writers and they can potentially be a learning tool for less quality writers to improve their writing ability as they go. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: (51:19)

another function in here, like, let's say I had something like this and I wanted to summarize it. You know, sometimes we have to, um, when we're doing, we're building like, um, site maps, right? Do you have, like, you have an SEO strategy, you wanna make sure you're writing a post and it's a long post, but you have another post where you touch on the topic and you wanna link out to it, but you don't want to like co you can't be literally the same copy. So sometimes what I'll do for those is I might just say, I might say something like, say summarize this post in a few paragraphs

Speaker 1: (51:51)

And it's a blog post, right? So I'm just gonna say like, give me, actually, I'm gonna tell it. I'll be a little more precise. The better your prompts are, the better things are. That's, I'm gonna tell it in 250 words. This is where I'm not even using it to write my whole post, but I know I need this little bit of content to drop into something. I, I might also use it to say, research a certain thing for me. You know, look, so now it's summarize it for me and now I can grab this, pull it over into my new blog post and edit that shaves like 15 minutes off of my work.

Speaker 4: (52:31)

It's incredible. It's incredible. And this is the last credit piece that you were talking about earlier. This is kind of the free form, unstructured prompts that you can put in here. Mm-hmm. url and generate anything that you want coming out of it. So, um, what do you find your use yourself using the most? Is it the blog post builder?

Speaker 1: (52:44)

Um, no, it's actually interesting. Like, I use that ask anything a lot to do, um, to ask free. I will be working on a blog post and I'll use, ask anything to write pieces of content for me. Mm-hmm. Like just chunks where I already know what I wanna say. And it will solve, like I know that James and I were chatting about this the other day, our head of editorial, it was like he had something and we needed to build out a section. And it's like, sometimes you just need to build out a section and you can go ask it for things. Like, I think I asked it to find me research on the problems with brainstorming as a work, you know, system. And it gave me, like harbor stuff it gave me, gave me decent, I mean, there were like, oh, the five things he gave me, three of 'em were good and I used them. Yeah. I would've been Googling for that and like, and then having to summarize it. So I definitely use it to pull into little pieces. The other thing is the blog builder. Mm-hmm. . Um, we definitely use that. Um, sometimes if I'm stuck on things. So, um, if I, we did something, we were working on a webinar title and I had something and it wasn't feeling right, and I put it in there and I asked it to give me like three, like, or five alternatives.

Speaker 4: (53:50)

And I, I did that. We're sending an email out and I did not like our email subject line and came up with 10 new alternatives just mm-hmm. . Cause my brain was not firing properly this morning. So, no.

Speaker 1: (54:00)

And it helped me. And then this is what I mean by like, instead of amplifying your bias, right? So some of you train the models and we just train it to do to be more of like how we are. You can use it if you're not feeling like you wanna generate new your, if your new idea part of your brain isn't there, ask the AI to get help. You get new ideas. Mm-hmm. , if the structural part of your brain, like the, we use, use the whole brain thinking H B D D I model, basically. Like, but if you can't, if you're having trouble getting started with an outline, use it to generate the outline. Right? , like, um, this will even write emails for you. Like you can start and say like, if you need to write sales emails or you're like, if you're just stuck on what to talk about, like let's say you're working on a drip campaign and you've got the white paper, you've got the guide and you've got the long form piece, and now you've gotta go write three emails that help kind of push people toward that guy. You can ask this to write your email. And again, you're not gonna run it as is.

Speaker 1: (54:58)

You're, you're gonna, but it's, it'll get you started. Mm-hmm. , those of you whose content jobs are also, you're responsible for help centers and FAQs. Like, you know, and you're behind this could get you not behind.

Speaker 4: (55:15)

Oh, for sure. Marilyn, do you use the, uh, have you used the rewrite feature much as well too? I was thinking about that when you were working on your blog book.

Speaker 1: (55:21)

Oh yeah. Let's go look at rewrite. The rewrite thing is interesting. I I used it. What did I use it for? I used it for something last night where the way I most likely use rewrite is frankly in the more, um, it's almost in more of the grammarly ish kind of sense. Mm-hmm. . So let's see. I don't wanna, I don't wanna go back to my, I can actually show you that. Let's look at it in here. This is a good place to check this, by the way. This is also a, a Chrome extension. So you would use this and then there's a, you would be doing it in your Google Docs. I'm doing it inside this platform for now, just to make it easy. But let's see, where's something where it's a clarity. Here's how I mostly use it here, so that's easy. I can switch that one.

Speaker 1: (56:02)

I want something where it tells me that a sentence is like, here we go. Reduce wordiness. No, that's not, that's not wordy enough. Um, like, I wanted like, um, uh, here's a good one. That's a good one. Where it wants me to simplify a sentence. So, you know, sometimes we, we get in here, we've got two complicated sentences and then this pops up rewrite. I can ask it now to either simplify that sentence for me or polish it or shorten it or enrich it. Telling me you don't, you can't do anything for me. You told me it was a bad sentence though. .

Speaker 4: (56:36)

Maybe we could, uh, maybe we could shorten or, uh, polish that one up a little bit then.

Speaker 1: (56:40)

Yeah. No, but I mean, that always comes up. Yeah. So like, what you can do is then swipe on it, pick the thing. It also, sometimes it might've just been like loading. I think my internet's being a little goofy today. So let's go to Polish. Oh, I think, um, there we go. Here we go. There we go. So I can shorten it, I can polish it, I can enrich it and like, it'll give me suggestions on how to rewrite this. And I think this, I like, because I like the way that you've positioned this in here. You're saying rewrite. So Sim Rush also put this rewrite tool inside their writing assistant. Except the vibe I got was like, you know, bad SEO writing where it's like people are just chasing, you know, Hey, we'll just do whatever the first 10 people are, make sure we use all their words and then, but we have to rewrite it so we're not plagiarizing. Yeah. This is not a rewrite this sentence. So you're not plagiarizing it all. Like, you know, the barely rewrite. I, I like the way that y'all positioned this here. Like, cuz that's the sim rush thing had a vibe like that.

Speaker 4: (57:40)

Yeah. I mean there, there's options in there for a reason. It's what's gonna sound the most, like what you wanted to sound like to fit the content that you're trying to write at the end of the day. So it's not about trying to achieve some SEO goal, it's really about what sounds like our voice and what fits what I'm writing.

Speaker 1: (57:54)

Oh, and here's the other thing that y'all, I'll show, I'm gonna show y'all the keep writing beta and then we'll gonna switch over. I wanna bring Kate back. I know we're at time, but I do wanna bring Kate back and just kind of do a free for all quick answer some questions. So keep writing is also in beta. So you know how, again, you get stuck on something and you might have that outline and you're starting to like, get the ideas going, but you're like, oh, what else could I, what else could I possibly say about this ?

Speaker 1: (58:20)

Like, it'll, it'll help you get there. Now I write in some pretty esoteric topics and I've definitely found the end of this sometimes like, I'm like, yep, we have told us something. The other day we were writing a bunch of e-commerce related stuff and it was specifically about like eBay and drop shipping. And I was already at like 4,000 words and I was like, it just kept giving me back the same stuff. And I'm like, you know what? My bot has also reached the end of the internet when it comes to like, what else we could possibly say about this Stop.

Speaker 4: (58:48)

There's nothing else to say at this point. Yeah,

Speaker 1: (58:50)

Yeah. So, but yeah, this one, this is pretty fun. And I know that this is, I, I treat it in the spirit of a beta cuz it's like, sometimes it gives me like, it's like, oh, I didn't think about that. Other times it gives me my lead back again. And I'm like, yeah, no, that wasn't helpful . So do I just sit down and, and like content just like spits out? Like no, I always, I'm editing it. It's a way for me to do things faster. Snippets helps a lot too. Like where it's like, you know, you're gonna use the boiler plate, don't type stuff over and over again. That you always do the same. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn this off here for a second and if folks have like, I have a few minutes if y'all wanna come on. I think we got K act, y'all have questions about this for us.

Speaker 2: (59:36)

Someone asked a question about, um, writer with more technical material and cybersecurity. That's what they wanted to know it looks like.

Speaker 1: (59:44)

Ooh. All right. I'll take that .

Speaker 4: (59:49)

Yeah. Well first off, put it to the test. You can go use ask writer.com right now if you want and go check it out. Um, I will say, you know, obviously technical content's always one of those more difficult things for AI and generative AI to get right. Right now, one of the solutions we see to this problem is we've got the ability to train our, uh, AI on your content as well too mm-hmm. . So we can continue to feed in your best blog posts, your longer form content, and we'll continue to learn, learn more about how you want to write what you're saying and what's relevant for you as well. So, um, that is one way we're overcoming that challenge where if there's not a ton of great cybersecurity content out there for it to be pulling in, we can also feed it in there to fit your needs at the end of the day. So, um, that would be probably the best way to be solving that right now. But I definitely say go put it to the test and see what you get.

Speaker 1: (01:00:33)

Mm-hmm. Cool. I would say that's also an area where this is partly why we chose writer, you know, because we do work in these kind of technical areas and I also work in a space where I need to keep voices straight. You know, I, I mean I work with Aon and a's voice needs to stay Aons voice, you know, and um, yeah, Rachel saw that do guide , right? She was like, do all these things have to go in? Yes. She was like, we underpriced, . Um, but you know, it is part of like, I mean, and I know y'all and it's not all that, it's always boring stuff. I mean, I know y'all also did some stuff with like ado me. That's like really fun. That's a fun voice. Like, so you can use the same AI tool, like the foundation, the platform to create super technical material about reinsurance.

Speaker 1: (01:01:24)

You know, if it's trained for that, that you can, to do things for a Walmart or to do things for an ADO Me or to do things for like, you can, the AI is only as good as like the human running it. Mm-hmm. . Exactly. And in some ways to me right now, I think this is the age of the editor more so than the writer. I hate to kind of writing, I mean, I also say I use the AI to do my typing, not my thinking. You know, I still have to think about what I'm doing. Yeah. And I still am responsible for the content that I publish . Like

Speaker 2: (01:01:58)

I like that a lot Mary, because that's what I do with my human. So like I'll have an intern write an email for me, like a newsletter or something, and then I totally take it all apart. I really do. But just the fact that she wrote it for me gets me that jumping off point and takes major stress and like that fear of the blank page, I'm sure Ryan mm-hmm. know, it's like, it's real, you know, so real for even for great writers like yourself.

Speaker 1: (01:02:24)

Yeah. It's really, yeah. Go ahead.

Speaker 5: (01:02:25)

Oh, I was just gonna say, I think also Mary Ellen, you pointed this out, but like the prompt that you're giving the ai, like whether it be the aspirate or anything or something else, like, you'll get better with it. And I think that also helps, like, you know, you, you produce, you know, writing that, that is actually great versus like, hey, this problem was like not super specific or too specific and mm-hmm. you wanted. So I think that's important too. And it's, you know, it takes a little bit of time to learn, but you'll get there too.

Speaker 2: (01:02:51)

So I have, if

Speaker 1: (01:02:52)

You, if you didn't write good briefs, you're gonna struggle with good problems, . Yeah. So

Speaker 2: (01:02:59)

That's that garbage and garbage out like, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a question for Ryan and Rachel, which is, does, wouldn't it make sense to take your copy and then push a button and lately I it, and then publish it as social posts?

Speaker 4: (01:03:14)

It makes a heck of a lot of sense. Watching these two demos together right now doesn't,

Speaker 2: (01:03:17)

I know we need to get our products teams on the phone and figure that out. .

Speaker 1: (01:03:21)

See, look what I did here. I should have invited co-schedule .

Speaker 2: (01:03:26)

Yeah.

Speaker 1: (01:03:27)

Cause they, so here's the thing too is I would say, I know writer has some functionality that does some of this, certainly that blog post, you could ask it to write meta and you can ask it Give 10 in LinkedIn post. It'll kind of spit that out. But I will say the fit for purpose, like the built for purpose aspect of lately is so complimentary. Like they are really, like, I actually couldn't really live like without both of them. Mm-hmm. , you know, it's like they really do go together in that way. It's like, I looked, I actually ask a lot more of writer, like writers really ask to do something that's pretty like comprehensive for us as a content agency. But like, it's like when you think about tools, right? It's like lately is like this razor that I use to like cut through. Like, I mean, it's so specific.

Speaker 1: (01:04:09)

It's like this, it is not, it's like, it just solves. Like, I, I'm trying to think of what is something that I have that I only use. It's like just the way you use it, it just solves one problem, but it solves it so perfectly. It's solves that problem perfectly. Writer, writer got me through. I think some, somebody mentioned Grammarly earlier, and I know y'all integrate with Grammarly. I we did. Grammarly is a security problem. Grammarly has a lot of issues. Um, and I don't know that people are asking enough questions about how Grammarly protects their data. I mean, I know Dan's hanging out. He's a, a cyber guy, but it's like lys, like I, I think they're, there's, it's just not, it's not. I have clients that don't allow Grammarly. I have lots of clients that actually don't allow Grammarly and writer actually is allowed.

Speaker 4: (01:04:50)

Yeah. I mean we were purpose built from day one to not have the security issues and the data mm-hmm. , which is that Grammarly has. And also say, you know, our foundational model is not storing our customers' data either. We're not training our model on your content. Which I know, you know, that manifesto earlier, like that's clearly a concern with some of these other new tools that have popped up, which is essentially you're feeding the beast and you're a part of the product since you're getting that product for free right now. And that's not something that we're doing with the data that comes in. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: (01:05:15)

. Yeah. We had a, a similar, um, manifesto from the beginning because I mean, honestly, it's your content from it's yours, right? I'm not actually redoing anything with it. I'm actually literally just lifting out the best parts of it. So it's pretty easy to um, navigate that and, and especially with, you know, with all the thought thought leadership. This is the year of thought leadership too. I think Marilyn mm-hmm. mm-hmm. way to get on the bandwagon people. Hello. Um, but it's, people are just cottoning on to really how everybody in the entire company has to be on LinkedIn at least right? In publishing mm-hmm. . And so those guidelines that controls are coming up more and more as imperative with companies. And so we've, we've actually added in, in our enterprise product, like lots more ways to put the, um, bumpers up on the, on the bowling lane for the AI so that it, it literally can't go off the rails.

Speaker 1: (01:06:06)

Oh, y'all should definitely talk then, because I think that is also one of the things that writer does like super well. Um, there's the whole compliance section. It's like things that we don't say Rachel and I were talking the other day about, it's like forward looking statements and why we don't make them, you know? Yeah. . Yeah. So it's like what? It's like, no, we don't talk about the future Rachel . You know, you think about the, the thing like past performance is not indicative of future returns. It's like you remember seeing that. It's like that's the thing you have to flag. So mean compliance teams, your compliance team will love you for this. Like, this will allow you to put out more content if you've, if you're working in one of those organizations where it takes you a while to get through this. Like if you set this upright compliance will let me, so I know Mindy's in here, she works in insurance too.

Speaker 1: (01:06:51)

It's like, I mean it's like this is the stuff you can teach people how to use this. Um, I, the other one, oh, Ashley said, I think what we're getting at right now is the idea that many of us use the writing process to discover what we think. I think asking AI to create an outline or content gives us something to assess and decide do I agree or I think differently. Absolutely. That is, that is one of those you saw how like I generated that and I was like, no, that's not how I think about that. Right.

Speaker 2: (01:07:13)

Delete your mind.

Speaker 1: (01:07:15)

Um, it, it kind of gives you the sort of average of what everything that's already out there that's been said. And so your job is to make sure that you say something different.

Speaker 2: (01:07:24)

Yeah. I think like the problem is of course is that unfortunately the laziness as we talked to you before, and so many people are not willing to put a hu put the effort into it, you know? Mm. Mm-hmm. , they don't wanna make the decisions or they don't have the knowledge and wisdom that you have to make those good decisions. As we're we're seeing, I mean this is the large, a large conversation about like our democracy basically . But that's the, that's the really interesting thing is like there's no desire to do the work. Um, and so, I mean we can't combat that. It's, that's a bigger problem. But in the meantime, when we can show people how little effort it takes to put into it when the results you get and how happy you are, like it's really incredibly validating to me, Mary Ellen, because this is a huge challenge for us as a company and to see someone like you actually embrace what we're doing without anyone telling you to do it. Um, and

Speaker 1: (01:08:18)

By the way, they didn't pay me to do this just for the record. Like, I stalk Kate not, she didn't stalk me. Like ,

Speaker 2: (01:08:26)

I'm gonna take this video though. Like I'm gonna play it for every investor I can. I mean obviously I'm gonna ask you for content and run it through my own ai, but Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: (01:08:33)

And, and I think there's also the fear about it taking your job. I'm gonna openly address this cause this is come out, this is gonna take our jobs. It's like y'all, if it's gonna take my job, could it hurry up? Because I am really slammed like . So we are, we have, are having our biggest month ever as an agency. We can grow as fast as we can onboard people. Like my, I am not, I do not feel, I do think it is changing our jobs. The message I gave even to our content team, you know, cuz we are a content agency and my writers and my editor, I told my writers like, you will soon be all be content marketing managers. I don't know that there will be a job for just a writer here very long. Like, I feel like by the end of the year you're gonna be more about the decisions around the content planning.

Speaker 1: (01:09:19)

You're gonna be doing research, you're gonna be thinking about voice and you're gonna be figuring out that balance between what did the machine do, what did I do, how do I get the right, it is the age of the editor. Mm-hmm. . Yep. You know, a capital E editor who knows the brand. Like you can't just sit down and type and think you're gonna hand it to somebody else to fix, like that's over. Right? I mean there is no, those roles are collapsing. And I'm old enough that, you know, as a newspaper journalist, and I remember when they started squeezing kind of the copy desks, you know, in this way too. And I was a copy editor and I mean, it was like, ugh, okay, we're gonna get rid of these layers of editing. But in the end we, we do still proof. We still proof. But proofing is so much faster with ai it's not perfect. It's not perfect. It won't catch urine, you know, or whatever that was, it won't catch your, like what was your example? You know, won't catch feces instead of VCs like , it can't do all of that. I think it's gonna get better, right? Because contextually it's like, well why? First of all, she would never say ce, she would say, Kate, did you mean to say?

Speaker 2: (01:10:20)

. .

Speaker 1: (01:10:21)

That's how it's gonna catch that. It's not gonna catch it. Cause now knows what BC means. It's gonna catch it. Cause they're like, Kate, did you mean to say

Speaker 4: (01:10:33)

One comment have hop unfortunately after this. I do wanna just say, yeah, I mean we view this as a tool. This is not here to replace anybody. It is here to augment and support and be a part of your writing process. Google Docs didn't replace anybody and we stopped using typewriters and we're on computers now. Like that's all this process. It's just an evolving process, but it's just one more tool to add to your arsenal to help you do your job better now. Mm-hmm. how our viewpoint is hopefully coming across as we do all this.

Speaker 2: (01:10:57)

Yeah. By the way, now we are, we are using typewriters again, but we're spending $800 on old ones. And

Speaker 4: (01:11:02)

Yes,

Speaker 1: (01:11:04)

I dated at Airbnb last week that had, I, I went over there to do some writing and like do something and there was a, that was a typewriter at the desk and I was like, this is adorable. It's awesome. . That's a good point though. All Yeah, it's cyclical, right? Yeah, right. Well just like you probably used, used in torn tables and you don't have the electronic mixing, you're just like, um, I thank y'all all three of you for joining. Um, also I think some of you were asking about trials and stuff like that. I'm gonna send the on-demand version of this later and so you will have access to that. And I've also got links like these guys, guys were both all super generous. They actually gave us like some kind of nicely enhanced trial. Check it out, poke around, you know, as people who came to this webinar.

Speaker 1: (01:11:41)

Um, bless 55 of you for staying 13 minutes late, um, . So, um, send us, you know, if you have questions. I know Kate, I saw you drop your LinkedIn, you know Rachel Ryan dropped your stuff in. But I will send that email. Give me gimme till Monday. Probably. I don't know, even with the ai I don't know if I could get to the, get the email out the door today, but I'll get you an email. It'll have a trial on it. It'll have this on demand version and have some other resources that y'all can all check out. But this is fun. This is like a fun time. Don't be scared of this tech. Make, make friends with it and use it in a wise way and know you're not gonna lose your job. So ,

Speaker 4: (01:12:20)

Thank you for having us. This was amazing. This yeah. Thank you so much part.

Speaker 1: (01:12:24)

Awesome. Thank y'all. Bye. Bye.

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