13min chapter

Distribution First cover image

How to Build an UNFORGETTABLE Personal Brand (Expert Panel)

Distribution First

CHAPTER

AI in Content Creation: Finding Balance

This chapter explores the integration of AI into content creation, emphasizing its role as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for human creativity. The discussion includes strategies for optimizing content while maintaining originality and authenticity, highlighting the importance of personal voice. Listeners are encouraged to leverage AI's efficiency without sacrificing skill development or the personal touch in their writing.

00:00
Speaker 1
No, I love that. And as with all things, but especially content creation, the more you can integrate it into your day to day, like, hey, this is part of the process as opposed to this being something that's carved out in a isolated thing that you're doing, the better all of this is going to go. The more that you've got things that are one off emotions tied to just one aspect of it, the harder all of this is to be able to manage and stay on top of. So for the second one, we're going to dive into the thing that's probably driven most of the people to be interested in this, the AI side of things. So leveraging AI for creation, which is, of course, most people have experienced at this point, can be a little fraught. How do you go in and how do you leverage AI with it? Justin, you want to take us off on that side? I imagine based off of conversations we've had, it's going to be how do you make the most out of the content you're already creating? Yeah,
Speaker 2
absolutely. I think for me, AI, it's remarkable to think about how AI is shifted content. I know everybody thinks about it differently, especially in the content world of, I think, sometimes traditional content marketers, even folks that world that I'm in, it's we're hesitant to use it for creation. It feels like an unnecessary cheat code or something that's maybe wrong to use. But I would say, I heard somebody recently say this, that AI for writers is what calculators were for mathematicians. So that's how I've been thinking about it, is much more like it's not that I can't get that answer in my head or I can't get there, but I can get there way faster with AI and I can get there way faster. Honestly, it's going to give me things that I love that I never would have thought of, just because it has way more context than I have around things. For me, I think it's just A, getting comfortable with using AI for that, but then B, how I think about using it as part of my content creation strategy is always starting with something that's original for me. So for me, that's the podcast, my recorded weekly show, distribution first. And from that, I know that of the things that I'm going to create, it is my thoughts, it is my guest thoughts, it is my points of view. I know which things are like when the AI gives me something back, I know which things are mine and which things are maybe a little bit more enhanced. And then I can go back and jab back and forth with the AI to try to get to do what I want or get the answer or get the point that I want out of it. But I think for me, once I got comfortable with using AI and being able to my thoughts and extract that. It's made me way faster as a content marketer and be able to do things that, I mean, honestly would have taken hours and hours and hours of time. It's really funny to think about the amount of people and the amount of hours that I used to take to be able to do things that now even me on my own as a solar can get done. It's really remarkable. I mean, multiple emails a week, podcasts, there's a lot that you can do with it. And I would say for me, understanding a couple things off the top can make it go a little bit faster. So what channels are you posting on? So what's the output that you even need? Do you need LinkedIn content? Do you need emails? Do you need podcast description? What do you need? And then from there, understanding even from an output perspective, what's your content floor? So what's the minimum things that you're creating at any given time or any given week, month, etc. But what is your content floor? And then from there, you can constrain it down. And obviously, I know, Blake, with Cast Magic, and there's a lot of things that you can do with that to be able to get the output you want versus simply going back and forth in chat GPT or stuff like that.
Speaker 1
But anyway, hopefully, that's helpful. No, that's great. Chelsea, as Justin alluded to, we should use AI for not necessarily everything. Works well in some situations, in some contexts, in use cases, and can be problematic in others. Where do you draw those lines? Where do you think that AI really fits well versus where we should try and limit what we're doing with it?
Speaker 3
that Justin mentioned of not using it or loving it for direct content creation, that's me. I'm of the personal opinion that it doesn't write, chat GPT AI doesn't write quality content on its own, but of course it's a good partner. It's a good sparring partner. I use it in that way often. I'm in this personal existential moment of balancing, okay, where can AI help me? But then also, what am I benefiting or losing from using AI to help me? Like, am I losing the mental reps? Because I'm asking chat GPT to help me come up with better synonyms or metaphors? Or is that saving me time? So that is like one thing that I think is important for anyone to consider when they're using AI, that's going to look different for everyone, right? If you're getting started, AI is going to be hugely beneficial for helping you get past that blank page syndrome. That's a real thing. Brianna was talking about coming up with ideas. So I think it's really important to implore everyone to evaluate what that looks like for them. For me as a writer, especially in my last role, I was the only marketer. So I needed AI to expedite a lot of my work. So I would say that's really important to consider in terms of what are you losing at the cost of using AI to make you more efficient, especially when it comes to efficiency or doing things for you because writing is thinking, thinking is writing. So when you're not writing verbatim, when you're not the one putting in the reps, just like thinking about like going to the gym, when you're not the one putting in the reps, like you're not gaining that muscle and that experience and that skill. So just thinking about ways that AI does help you. So for me, that looks like I do use it as like a sparring partner sometimes. So that's kind of where my existential crisis has come from. Like, wait, what am I losing here? Because it's fun, right, to kind of like come up with things on your own. But of course, like, it can be beneficial. So I use chat TBT all the time. Like, what's a better way of saying this? I use it a lot to like synthesize and analyze content. So most recently, my ideas are not as organized as Brianna's. So I had actually read about this recently, I just gathered all my ideas. I think it was like, I don't even know, like 15,000, 40,000 words in different places, different tools. And then I use chatgbt to analyze it and categorize my content for me. You can also do that with your LinkedIn content. You can download all of your LinkedIn content. So if you've been writing on LinkedIn for a little bit and you want to see like what's been working, what's not been working. There are tools like Shield and Aware that you can use for that, or you can export the data and then use AI to analyze it for you. I think that's been really helpful, but I use it mostly for synthesizing content. The last thing I want to say is it's kind of ironic to think about using AI for building your personal brand because are you really putting yourself out there if you're not putting yourself into it? So that's where I think it's just important to use AI to help you and not replace anything that you're doing. Use it to make you more efficient and to speed you up in certain ways and to help you throughout your process, not hinder. That's
Speaker 1
great. We've heard multiple times across all of you this focus on efficiency and being able to do things quicker, better, faster. Brianna, what are some of your tricks of the trade on that side of things? Yeah,
Speaker 4
I'm with Chelsea. I think you can use AI for a lot of things. Not all of them are going to help you become a stronger writer or help you build an actual personal brand. You can build an online brand, but it just won't be personal. For me, I use it in very specific use cases for the same reasons because I want to love writing. It's been my focus, my career for a really long time. And I don't want to stop putting in those reps for myself. Where I found it to be the most helpful for me is I can be a bit verbose when I'm writing content. So when I first started creating content on LinkedIn, I am sure people have heard this too. You hear this thing, like, make sure you're writing like a sixth grader or fourth grader or something like that. I had no idea what to do with that in terms of creation. I didn't know where to start. And so I used something called the Hemingway app where you would plug in your content and then it would basically tell you what to cut so you to calm down, like make it less high level, all of that. So I use that at first. And I recently switched over to chat GPT, and I use it very infrequently. What I use it for is, if I have a specific sentence or paragraph that just seems a bit wordy, or like it's not super clear, I'll plug it in and say, without changing my original words or using synonyms, how would you strengthen this to make it more digestible or more concise? And that's what I found to be the most helpful. For one, on one hand, it lets me be the one creating the content, doing the writing, putting in the work, but it takes away that extra piece that I really don't need to focus on, which is just making it more concise. I've put in the wraps there and so it's a great way to subsidize your time without giving up the personal side of it.
Speaker 1
That's great. And then Blaine, what are some of the ways that you automate some of this stuff? Because of course, if you can get it automated and pull yourselves out of the mix, then that of course carries huge efficiency gains. So what are some of your tricks on that side of things? Yeah,
Speaker 5
so I think automation is a big part, but just going back to a point that all of you guys have sort of made is just the importance of at the end of the day, this is your content that you're putting out. And when it comes to personal brand, you don't want to over automate. And then, you know, everyone's like, Oh, like, who's this robot talking to me. So at the end of the day, I think part of your job is a creator is actually being a curator. So it's being able to say, like, does this pass the check of me wanting to like publish this and this being something that like, can put my stamp behind that is a piece of content I came up with. Whether it was 50%, 80%, 90% generated with AI, that doesn't really matter. It's more about, is this truly authentic to me and how is it going to resonate with my audience and is it providing value? So once that check has been made, I think you can get into automation. The way I approach automation is actually through finding specific content formats that either I've written in the past or other creators that I found like I really like the structure of their piece of content. And then what I'll do in Cast Magic is I'll actually drop those in as content samples, where it's going to take like all the information from my podcast or a lecture or a talk, it's going to extract all the like information and put it directly into the format of this content piece that I already like that I know performs well. And then from there, like I'm going to edit it up. And again, I'm not directly going to hit publish, but it might do the job of like doing the information retrieval and like the drafting in putting that post in like a really high performing like wrapper. And then I can be like, oh, wait a minute. This is something that's really good. I can then go in, put my final edits on, and be like, this is something that I would actually feel proud to publish and publish it that way. So when I think about automation and AI, I think what the opportunity is, is identifying in a perfect world, what types of content would I be publishing, whether it's something like as simple as a LinkedIn post or an email format or even if it's like a data task that you need done. Just understanding, like, in a perfect world, if I had an assistant that could go into my information and pull out whatever I need, what would those workflows look like? Set them up, set them up with, like, samples, and then from there, you become the curator and understand what meets your check for publishing content out. That's
Speaker 1
great. I second that as far as what Brianna was saying about keeping it short and making sure that you're getting right to the point. When I was working on my doctorate, I had a professor that would assign us paper assignments, and he would put, hey, you need to cover this, this, this, and this. And I would go through and I would write it and it would be at least 2x my word count, at least. And so then I had to go and trim that down by more than half usually. And it was like, talk about one of the most valuable exercises to dial in my writing, where you've got so much to cover and so little room to do it and really really levels up your writing whenever you can do that so we're gonna transition to the second half of the Content that we're gonna be presenting on and we're gonna we're gonna gonna kind of go around the horn here and let each person talk through A strategy that they've really leveraged in building out their personal brand and so we'll go down that list We'll go kind of in reverse order here, Blaine, if you want to kick us off on that side, out of all of those things, what strategy are really leveraging that's really giving you a leg up?
Speaker 5
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is building out your own personal library of context, right? Like if you're trying to get AI to write stuff for you and you go to chat GPT and you're like, write me a post about X. That's the same post that everyone else is going when they get to chat GPT. It's not personal. It doesn't have any unique information. There's nothing about it that is personal to like you as a creator. So I think the number one thing is leveraging some sort of media library or your own information and having that as a source that you can always pull content from, because that's going to help AI at least start getting it in your own voice tone and style. But if you don't have that context, then even if you try to start with chat GPT, you're going to spend half your day telling chat GPT who you are and feeding it information to create something unique. So as long as you start documenting and building a media library, it's going to give you a huge like up as a content creator. That's awesome.

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