SPECIAL GUEST!! Michael Stelzner from AI Explored 🔥 Claude > Custom GPT 😮 | Ep. 476

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, and we have one of the smartest dudes on the planet here today. I'm not just saying that he is. Who do we got? We got Michael Stelzner. Now, you probably listened to one of his two incredible podcasts that he already has. He has his, all right, wait a minute. I want to forget even about his podcast. Let me tell you this dude is.

0:38He's the CEO of Social Media Examiner. This is the world's largest marketing media company that literally helps millions of marketers navigate everything in the digital landscape. And of course he has these events, Social Media Marketing World. I've actually spoken at this event. It's probably the single best digital marketing event on the planet. It's not even just about social media, but the dude was like, I could do more. So he went out and he's like, AI, this is a big thing. Let me launch a podcast about AI. And he launched AI Explored. If you haven't listened to this podcast, stop listening to this garbage, go listen to that.

1:15And then he doubled down even more. He has a new event coming out this year in person, AI Business World this April. And we actually have a discount code, which we're going to put in the show notes, all the things. It's going to be the singular event for the world of AI. I cannot wait. So I'm so excited to have me here. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate your energy and excitement. I am excited. I am genuinely excited because you actually know stuff. So many times I'll listen to a podcast. I'm like, this is going to be terrible or I'll read something. It's going to be boring.

1:45You always actually share stuff and you're so crazy prepared. And so I'm excited. I get excited when I talk to you. So let me jump right into it. This is the topic of the day we've never talked about on this show and we're going to be talking about Claude and Claude projects and copywriting. So before we get into all the detail, why are you, Mr. AI, why are you a Claude fan? Well, for lots of reasons. Number one, the founder of Claude used to work for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Number two, they try really hard to have a very strong ethical foundation. Major investors include Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Google, widely known for their coding, but also widely in the writing world, in the copywriting world, to be the best writer on the planet.

2:32Extremely fun to use user interface, very prompt compliant. It doesn't make stuff up. And it's just one of those kind of things where most people don't even use Claude, but once you go to Claude, there's kind of no turning back. If you're in the business of creating a persuasive message of any kind, whether it be a script for a YouTube interview or podcast or whether it be emails or sales pages. It's just ridiculous. It's so good. Okay. So let, let me understand something though. Does that mean, and I w we're going to make this stupid proof cause I'm stupid. So anybody could use Claude the right way, but does that mean you use Claude for everything?

3:08Like you don't use chat to be too much. You don't use Gemini. You don't use Grok. You don't use other ones. Like you are laser focused on Claude or is Claude there for you as it relates to kind of content and copy and all that okay so i use gemini and i use chat gpt and i use claude they're all they all have their strengths chat gpt is really good for very simple little things like coming up with ideas gemini is very very good at analysis and images with nano banana nano banana pro is ridiculous it's so good but none of them are as good with writing and i am a writer i wrote a book on writing and i understand the craft of persuasive writing and nothing comes close to Claude.

3:47So I use this tool predominantly to help with any marketing or copy related task. Okay. Now I'm sold. All right. Now where I'm staring at Claude, I need stuff. I don't know what your Claude projects are. I don't know where do I begin? What do I got to do? What are the rules of the road? Okay. With ChatGPT, there's things called custom GPTs, which people are probably familiar with. In Gemini, they call them gems, but in Claude, they call them projects. And what a project is, is it allows you to basically fill it with information and it allows you to create, for example, a specialist, if you will, like a copywriter who specializes in social media marketing world, which is what I have.

4:29And then you can query it as many times as you want. It has memory. So unlike custom GPTs, where it kind of has amnesia every time you use it, doesn't know who you are, doesn't know of any of the other chats you've had with it. Cloud projects are really, really good. they're smart and they learn as you go now here's the thing with cloud projects you need to have a paid account claude is free it's 20 bucks a month to get access to the projects and the projects are just really really good even better than chat gpt projects and much better than google gems and some of the some of the applications that i've been able to do with this are kind of crazy i have um for each of my products i have trained up a copywriter so i have one for ai business world one for AI business society, and one for social media marketing world.

5:17And they're extremely powerful. But another cool thing that Claw does is it has this thing called artifacts. And I want you to think of a Microsoft Word or a Google document. So you know how sometimes when you're in chat GPT and it gives you a lot of text, it's just this ugly list and it's impossible to consume. Well, when you have it create an artifact, it creates this beautiful thing that's got headlines and subheads and bullets, and it's called an artifact. but an artifact can also be an interactive graphic. It can do all sorts of cool stuff. And that's really the key. Now I'm going to unravel if you want how to do this right, because honestly the key to whether you do this with chat GPT or with Gemini or with Claude is there's, there's things you've got to know.

6:01And if you want, I can dig into that. I want to dig. I want to know what I got to know because I don't know much. Okay. First of all, you have to give it a role. Okay. And this is true with all AI. For example, you are a world-class writer specializing in crafting and improving persuasive marketing emails for your product. That's an example, right? And then the next thing you want to do is you want to give it context. So this is really important. You can upload, for example, a Word doc or a PDF or text of who your target audience is, what your product is all about, what's its value proposition, what are its benefits.

6:38And this is the secret sauce. As an event guy, you're going to love this. If you have a lot of testimonials from people, I've done this where I've uploaded a CSV file of over a thousand testimonials, Jay. Okay, over a thousand testimonials. And then what I did was I included a couple of examples of really well-crafted emails. Because you know this, you're an email guy. A good email is going to have a testimonial. So I've got a thousand testimonials. Now, this is where it gets interesting. Claude is smart. it knows when it reads a testimonial, it doesn't have to use the whole testimonial. It's smart enough to know to grab a section of the testimonial and to find a testimonial that thematically wraps around a theme.

7:19So let's say one of the themes you want is not being obsolete in 2026 because AI is a threat. Well, it's going to go through all of the testimonials from the people that were there at Social Media Marketing World that were in the AI track, talking about how they would have been obsolete if they did not come to that. It will just pull the relevant testimonials and craft it into a message that's completely custom. But it gets even better, Jay. It'll suggest images. So it'll tell me, find an image of a person standing in the hallway networking with someone else. Or find a person taking notes. Now, this is right now where I have to manually go through thousands of pictures and find the right picture.

7:58But this is powerful stuff, Jay. I'll pause for a second and let you ask him. So let me ask you a question about all of this, because what, what, one of the things that sounds like you need to do and whether it's for testimonials and this, that or whatever, um, is give it a lot of baseline information or things and this baseline of who you are, what you're about, what you're marketing about, whatever. Is that some sort of a process that you go through and say, okay, let me let this thing interview me and give it all this stuff. Like how do you get to the point where you could do all this magic stuff?

8:31Okay. Well, you're a marketer and I'm a marketer. Some of this stuff we have, like you must have who your target audience is for your product, right? Like you've got this, you know, these different online events that you do. You've written up a pretty detailed description of who that target audience is, right? You probably have figured out what the value proposition is of people coming to the event. What are the benefits? What will they gain from it? Insights from the world's leading experts, dot, dot, dot. And what are the benefits of that. So most people that are entrepreneurs or marketers have got this information somewhere.

9:05And literally all you need to do is you need to upload it to the cloud project. It becomes part of its knowledge base. And just to help you understand how this works, AI is going to use the entire internet until you give it a narrow focus. So the more context you give it, the more it's going to narrow down its intelligence and the more it's going to work within the constraints of which you give it. And that's why giving it testimonials about your products, that's why giving it actually a description of your target audience is going to make it smarter. And then, of course, you give it a role. Like I mentioned earlier, like you are a world-class marketer specializing in creating persuasive emails for product X.

9:44And you don't want to just say specialize in persuasive messages. You want to get narrow because when you tell it it specializes in email marketing, it's going to take all of what it knows about your product and service combined with the wisdom that it has inside its LLM and it's gonna create really good emails. And eventually you're gonna give it your best emails. You're gonna give it like two or three examples of your best emails. And then what we'll do is it will reverse engineer like what is it about these emails? What is it about the style of these messages? And it will effectively do really, really great output, Jay.

10:16So you don't have to. So one of the things you said at the beginning, which makes me now wanna move over to Claude, is that it doesn't hallucinate as much. It really does have the memory because I have a custom GPT in chat GPT and I'll ask it something and then it will forget that it knows all this stuff. I'm like, hey, doofus, you have access to all this information. Can you please use it? Can you remember what I said the last time? And they'll be like, oh yeah, you're right, my bad. Is that not what happens in Claude? It is not what happens in Claude for this reason. A Claude project, the best way to describe it is you've got your product knowledge off to the right, and then there's a bunch of threads.

10:58And you go into the project and you start a new thread when you're going to create a new interaction. All those threads are in there, the hundreds of threads, and it has memory for the project. So what it's going to do is it's going to learn from all the previous interactions you've had with it. And it has your project instructions, then it has the project memory and the project memory layers on top of your instructions. So over time it begins to learn your preferences. So we don't tend to update our original custom GPTs. We just get frustrated with them and we try to create new ones. Well, with Cloud projects, they get automatically updated because they learn what your preferences are as you interact with them.

11:36I'm going to give you a quick ninja tip. Oh, this is something nobody does. When you're interacting with these projects, what you want to do is say, give it a little bit of a theme. Like let's say it's New Year's, right? And I want to come up with a New Year's theme, but tell it you want multiple variations. This is really important. Then what it will do is it will come up with as many as eight different variations of these and you let it do its thing because otherwise it's going to come up with what it thinks is its one best variation. Then you ask it, which is best. And in order for it to discern which is best, it's going to go back into the project instructions, look at who the target audience is and see which of these is most likely to achieve the objective.

12:17And then what you can do as a human is you can go through all the variations and say, do I agree or disagree? You might say back to it, well, I agree number seven is good, but I like number two. Let's come up with a merge of the two and we'll take a new version of it and it'll go back at it. And then you can tell it, hey, I really like this new version, but I don't like the subject lines. It'll come up with a ton of subject lines. and eventually it will learn that you're wanting to be consultant. So it'll tell you, hey, by the way, this is the best one without you even asking. And you can begin to see how all of a sudden it's creating and it's advocating on your behalf, which I think is absolutely spectacular.

12:54That is awesome. I love the idea of saying, you know, which one is best after it's created the thing because it's forcing it to kind of think twice, which is gold. Absolute gold. All right, let me ask you this, though. Now, people are out there and they're like, I'm not ponying up 20 bucks a month for Claude. Is there any use of Claude for persuasive copywriting, whatever, if everyone wants to be cheap out there and just use the free version, or should they just not even go to Claude? Well, I mean, 20 bucks. I mean, come on, guys. Look, here's the deal. There's a lot of people right now that are, Gemini is so good, they're thinking of canceling chat GPT because they're already paying for Gemini because they already have a workspace account.

13:38So honestly, if I was you, I would cancel my chat GPT account and I would literally go over to cloud projects. Okay. It's that good. Um, but what have you got to lose by trying it? If here's how I position this, if you spend$20 and you end up making a ton of money because you end up with better persuasive messaging that moves people to the action you want them to move, Would that be a no-brainer? Of course it would be a no-brainer. I agree with you. And by the way, I want to put it out there. Michael does not work for Claude. He is not an affiliate for Claude. No, I don't. I don't get anything from this other than just an, I'm just telling you, like, I use it every day.

14:19And it's really, really good for writing, okay? And Gemini is really, really good for visual stuff and analytical stuff. But if you want to create persuasive stuff, it's worth it. buy it for a month and then if you don't like it cancel it i totally agree i think gemini is the best for uh images and i think chat gpt is the best for glazing when you feel bad about yourself it'll tell you your wonderful questions of chat gpt when i'm watching a movie like hey what other movies was this person in you know like i'm not really using chat gpt for work anymore to be very honest with you i'm using it for research sometimes but i find gemini's deep research is by far superior.

14:57But most people don't realize Claude does almost everything that ChatGPT does. It has its own version of deep research. It can do a lot of stuff. And it's going to be the first public company. It's going to have an IPO later next year. So here's how you have to look at this. You've got Gemini, which is the 800-pound gorilla, which is Google, right? They've got all the money world all the developers in the world they invented the t in jack gpt okay they're going to probably win the race then you've got open ai which is out there going nuts doing billion dollar deals with walt disney trying to get money and then you've got claude out here which is the small player in the race and they're going to have a public ipo but amazon is behind and jeff bezos is behind them jeff bezos owns the washington post okay they've been trained on on the washington Post, which is really good writing.

15:53They've got strategic relationships with media companies, which is what makes them better writers. They've even unfortunately bought almost every book on the planet, including my book and trained it on it. Now that's questionable ethics. I filed for the class action suit on that one to see if I can get my$3 ,000, but they know a lot because they're really, really designed for coding and for writing. But if you find yourself in a position where you just are banging your head against the wall because chat gpt is just a nightmare i kind of feel like the future is going to be using the tools that are the easiest to use or the best and i think gemini is one of the best for integration um and i think claude is absolutely unquestionably the best for writing all right it's obviously clear that michael knows what he's talking about with all this ai stuff all right and beyond just listening to the podcast best AI Explorer that he has.

16:49I am telling you, if you go to one event, in-person event next year, you want to go to AI Business World. I am not just saying that. It's going to be incredible. And for the listeners of this ridiculous show, you all out there, he hooked it up. If you go to socialmediaexaminer.com, socialmediaexaminer.com slash do this, slash do this, you're going to get a hundred bucks off. It's already discounted price. Yes. Oh, it's already discounted. You have to do anything okay a hundred dollars i'm telling you if you want to be one of those people actually know what's going on that you don't want to lose your job to ai you go to this thing it's going to be in april it is awesome michael what did i miss about the event why should we be there what's the deal okay well you've been to social media marketing world this is a sub conference of social media marketing world so if someone's already attending they get this included um we care about quality i mean it's simply stated you're not going to find a better lineup anywhere in the world.

17:45We've recruited the best of the best to come to this event. And these are all people that care deeply about making sure that you learn. These aren't people there to sell you anything. They're there to train you. And we're all about education. And as a result of it, I just think you're going to find something that you're not finding anywhere else when it comes to physical conferences. Yeah. And Milo can't say this, but I can. Listen, I've been the social media market world. I spoke there and I've done a lot of events that are stink. His event is unlike anything. the quality, the level of speakers, the networking.

18:17This is worth it. AI Business World. You got to check it out. Michael Mann, thanks for being here today. Thank you so much, Jay. All right. Wait, the party is not over. Go to jayschwedelson.com because I want to do stuff with you. I want to partner with you. When you click on the button, partner with Jay, you let me know what you got going on. Work with my agency. Work with me directly. get access to all of my free resources at jschwedelson.com. And I got a book coming out this April. It's called Stupider People Have Done It. And all of the net proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research.

18:54Go on Amazon, buy Stupider People Have Done It. That way you can help kick cancer's butt with me. And if this podcast wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, it might have been, leave it a review, follow the show. You are awesome. Go out there and crush it.