16 | Writing Smarter, Not Harder: How AI is Transforming Content Creation with Nicole Leffer

0:00Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I am truly super excited today. In this episode, we are going to talk about one of the maybe biggest issues that people have with AI. And AI is used today for many different things, but one of the main things, at least right now, is for content creation. And so many people are having issues with content creation with AI because they're saying it's too much vanilla flavored, right? It's the same content all the time.

0:37It's not interesting. It's not fun. It's not exciting. It's not thought-provoking. And there's also a huge belief that AI tools cannot create thought leadership because it's just reusing existing content and it cannot lead with new, fresh, thought-provoking content. Both of these are absolutely wrong. There is a trick on how to take your own personal experience, charm and personality, and infuse it into generative AI tools in order to create thought-provoking, interesting, and fun content. And the secret sauce is you. And that phrase did not come from me. It actually came from our guest today.

1:18Her name is Nicole Leffer, and she has a vast marketing experience. She has been the CMO of multiple companies, both B2B and B2C across two decades-ish. And I'm going to say exactly because otherwise she's going to be angry of me dating her. So I'm not going to say how long, but she's been doing marketing for a while. And in addition, she helped multiple businesses launch successful marketing strategies as a consultant. So she's been doing this for a very long time, wearing multiple hats.

1:52and strategies into their marketing strategy. So with that in mind, I'm so excited and humbled to have Nicole as a guest of the show today. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:46Nicole, welcome to Leveraging AI. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. This is going to be a really fun topic. I'm very passionate about this. I know. That's why you're here. So let's really go back to the start of this. So many people have that issue, right? They go back and say, okay, I try to use it. It's creating content, but it's not great content. And I don't want this to be my content because then it's the same thing that everybody else is putting out. And then what's the point? First of all, how did you figure out that there's another option to this thing? So I don't know exactly the moment it happened.

3:28I've been using AI tools for approaching two years now within marketing. So I'm not just coming to the scene when ChatGPT came out. And at some point along the way, I realized like you can start prompting and giving a very specific information and it will start giving you a much higher quality content. And then with ChatGPT, it became very obvious very quickly when I got in there and started playing with it that wait a second, this can generate, this can think like this can really pull things together and give you really amazing content. But like you said, the number one complaint I hear from people is everything sounds the same.

4:05It's vanilla. It's generic. How do I get it? Everybody's going to be putting the same things in and getting the same things out. And that is just really patently false. Okay. So the problem is obvious. Let's start talking about the solution. And the first thing is the why, because it requires more investment, right? The biggest difference between getting okay vanilla results and getting great results is investing a bigger effort. Why should people invest the effort? At the end of the day, marketing that personally connects, that is thought leadership, that is fresh ideas, especially if you're in like a B2B space, but really anything, it is all about connection.

4:44And if you are putting out generic, boring content, you're never going to stand out. You're going to hit a ceiling very quickly as far as how many people are going to trust you and come to you. So it really is worth taking just a little bit of extra time. You're already you're going to no matter what be saving a ton of time by using these AI tools. So instead of going, I'm going to save so much time that I get garbage out of it, you can go, I'm going to save a ton of time and get something extraordinary out of it. And it is just so worth it to have that content that really is going to help you to stand out in the market without having to do anywhere near the scale work you used to have to do.

5:21I agree 100%. I think in my previous company, we literally had a slogan and one of our core values that was relationships of our transactions. At the end of the day, especially in the B2B world, relationships are everything. Relationships are going to get you more referrals, are going to stay with you longer, are going to cost you less to maintain, are going to have less customer service problems. If you can build an actual relationship with people, either prospects that you're trying to bring in or existing clients in order to maintain them and have them share you with the world, building an authentic relationship with somebody is the key to do that.

5:57And you don't do that through generic content that is the same as everything else. Exactly. You want to stand out on search. You want to stand out anywhere. You're just not going to do it with generic. Awesome. Let's start diving into the how. now so we all know i can go to chat gpt and say please create a blog post on x or please write a social media post for linkedin on this and that topic and it will do that yeah and that's exactly what most people do and how they end up with that generic content you just gave the perfect how-to for generic yes uh how do i go from that to this is my content it's fun it's exciting and it's thought provoking?

6:41Yeah. So there's a few important things that you need to consider. One is exactly what you put in is exactly what you're going to get out of it. And so you need to be giving chat GPT, use chat GPT as the example here in your prompts, you need to be giving chat GPT, these unique and creative ideas. You need to think it is not a thinker replacer. And I think that's where a lot of people are getting mixed up, but like, you've got to come up with some creative inputs that are unique thought leadership. You can put this in a lot of different forms, but the first step is putting your ideas in there.

7:17Ways that this can manifest are if you've recorded a podcast or you've recorded a virtual event or a webinar, you can take that transcript, take that audio, put it into a transcription tool, get out the transcript almost instantly with AI, and then you can feed that into chat GPT. And so your prompt becomes something more like you are a top LinkedIn influencer that specializes in creating books that really convert and really get people to read your entire content and engage. And so I want to pause you. I want to pause you for one second, because I want to make this as practical as possible to people.

7:53So I want to go a step back and ask you two questions about a transcription tools. So which ones are you using or which one you recommend? Yeah. So I personally tend to use the Whisper app within the OpenAI API. It is the cheapest I've found. It is almost instantaneous. Now, if you have really long content, that's going to become a challenge. So you might have to find another tool for that. But I recommend Whisper in general. That'll work or just cut your content up if you need to go longer. So 45 minutes, totally fine. So if you put 45 minutes or less into Whisper, you're totally fine. So Whisper is a great option.

8:31If you're creating a lot of long form audio content, I highly recommend Descript. It's an incredible tool that does a lot more than just transcribing, but it's another way to do that. Descript is a favorite. Yeah. Okay. So now we're over the tools. The next question is now that you have 45 minutes of transcription, you can't just paste them into ChatGPT because you won't take it. So do you have any tricks for that? Yes, absolutely. So what I write a prompt that says something along the lines of here is part one of a transcript of a virtual event. please read this content and do not do anything with it just respond with red and i paste in how much it can take and it's going to respond red and then you're going to take you're going to write almost the exact same prompt but here is part two of the transcript of this event do not do anything respond with red paste in the next part until you get through all of it now if you start getting past four or five parts it might try to give you start completing it for you.

9:29Chachi P. G. just goes off the rails every now and then. So if that happens, just remind it again at the end of the transcript, do not do anything. Respond with red at your prompt to tell it that and then regenerate it again. And you should get a red back. Once you have had it read all of the parts, then within your prompt, so when it's that long that you're using that much content within your prompt, make sure that you're referring to utilize part one, part two, part three, part four of the transcript, do not just assume it's going to use the whole transcript unless you explicitly tell it to in your prompt.

10:04Brilliant. Brilliant. Let's continue from here. So now we know how to take the content long form, doesn't matter where it came from, and put it into JetGPT. What else do you put in your prompt? Oh, and you also said act as and then be very specific to the task at hand, whether it's LinkedIn or writing a blog post or whatever it is that you're trying to do. Yeah. I always say, just imagine the best possible person that you could have working on this project with you and tell it to act as that, or just you are that at the beginning of your prompt. Now you can do that after, like if you're doing a long transcript and you're training it, just put the transcript in how I just said.

10:42And then once it's read all of it, then say, you know, you are that LinkedIn influencer act as that LinkedIn influencer or blog writer or whatever it is. And then you're going to use these parts of the transcript, spell out every part that you've already titled it. And then here's where you get really important. You want to also tell it what voice you want it to write in and you want to tell it what persona you're talking to. So you need to be able to tell it who is this for? What does the company do? Who am I writing as? And put that in at that point so that then what it's going to generate for you is output that is using your ideas, that is talking to your customer, that is using your voice.

11:27You do want to break that into steps. So I just condensed it all into one. And if you're doing like a blog post, for example, ask it to write the outline before you ask it to write the blog post. Still tell it the things it's going to be doing that blog post with, but say Your step is the blog post or your step is the ideas for the LinkedIn post or really break it down and don't just say all of this is going in one prompt. Okay. So we said, give it the background information, which is whatever content you're basing this on, or you can write it yourself right there on the spot. Give it who you are and who is your speaking as and for.

12:05So I'm the CEO of company ABC that is doing this and that. I tell it who it's talking to. So who's the target audience, the persona that it needs to be writing for, and what tone of voice to use? Can you be more specific on that? What does that mean? Yeah. So let's rewind of something that you want to do before you're ever creating content, period. And this is teaching ChatGPT how to write like you. Okay. So the way we do that is you put in a prompt that essentially tells ChatGPT, you are a expert AI system and your role is to analyze this text for voice, tone, exactly how it is written and the patterns within that writing.

12:51And I want you to use NLP, which is natural language processing. AI is going to know what that means. You don't have to.

13:01NLP to analyze this text and write a description of how to write like this for a future AI system to you. And then you're going to paste a sample of your text. So you want to do this for your blog posts and you want to do this for your LinkedIn posts. It's different. Each time you want a style of blog posts, do this for that style. You want another style of blog posts, do it for that style too, like separately. You're going to have it do that. It's going to spit out a paragraph that says, the writer of this is confident and witty and they make lighthearted jokes and they write with a structure that does X, Y, Z.

13:41It's going to be very descriptive of that style in a way you would never be able to describe your own style. And copy and paste that into a Google Doc and keep that, or a Microsoft Word Doc, but keep that and keep all of these different voice prompts for the types of content you might want to create. So have it for different styles of blog posts, have it for different styles of LinkedIn posts, have it for anything you're creating, eBooks, whatever styles you write in. And then when you go to create the actual content, you're going to take those voice paragraphs and say, this is the tone and the writing guidance for this.

14:16And it's going to sound a lot more like you. You may still need to edit a little bit, but it is going to be 99 % of the way there versus 0 % of the way there if you don't do that. Love it. Absolutely brilliant. I want to add two small things to what you said, Nicole. One is there's a tool, it's a Chrome extension and I have way too many Chrome extensions, but it's called Magical. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to create these shortcut snippets for anything like custom replies to LinkedIn approaches and stuff you write on the bottom of your emails to some people and stuff like that.

14:51And then you just type whatever two or three letters that you saved as the thing and it spits out the full paragraph, two, three paragraphs. So instead of copying and pasting back into a Word document that then you've got to open the document, all you've got to remember is it's going to be, let's say it's a LinkedIn formal, you call it LIF, and then you type LIF and it will spit out that thing that you saved, the whole paragraph. Yeah. So that's tip number one. So you're shortcutting my shortcut. I'm shortcutting your shortcut. I love it. This is awesome. There's so many tools. I love these conversations because these tools are coming out hundreds a week.

15:29And so it's so hard to keep up with what is actually out there at this point. So that's awesome. So, so this is one tool that I literally use for everything because it's in Chrome and everything is in Chrome. So I literally use it for shortcuts for everything, including these kinds of things of like snippets for prompts that I reuse all the time. So that's number one. Number two is obviously, and don't tell anybody, you don't have to just use your voice. If there's somebody that you're seeing that getting a huge success on LinkedIn or TikTok or wherever, oh my God, I want to be able to write this way.

16:00Feed it that. Just remember that then people will expect you to be able to be like this yourself. So if it's really far off from who you are, it's going to be really awkward when you start meeting people in real life. But the ability to spit out content that is like somebody that is already out there and being very successful follows exactly the same steps, only feed it that content to begin with. And if you do that, it is a great strategy. I just, I do recommend people before you even start doing any of this, just know where your own like boundaries around what you are and aren't comfortable with are, because we're all going to have different like ethical guidance on that.

16:44So like for me, that's great. I wouldn't do it to somebody directly competitive with me, because I think that is not right to necessarily take somebody in my actual industry. But if I took something that is like so out there and not related, maybe I would use a strategy like that. So just be aware because sometimes you get so excited about it that you forget to think about those things. And I have worked with clients who after the fact regretted that they had done certain things or they just sounded too much like somebody else. And they, like you said, then you're going to need to start writing like that.

17:14So just make sure you think those things through before you go all in on those strategies. But I love it. It is true. And it is super cool. I just not thinking about those pieces. There's just certain things. And that goes for any of the AI tools, not just like that strategy. Absolutely. I think in general, there are a lot of ethical questions when it comes to using AI for anything. and I think as a human race, we gotta be more thoughtful of these things before we use any of the tools for anything. And I think it will become more and more obvious in the next few months, but it's a great point.

17:56That does raise one more thing that is related to that. It's actually on the output side. Remember to really proof and fact check what comes out on the other end, even if it is your own stuff, to make sure like from an ethical standpoint that you're not putting bias into it that you didn't mean to because it's not something you would say but that the system was trained on the internet and it brought in bias and especially if you do train on something else's writing you might not realize that there's bias baked into it um check for any kind of biases that you don't want to go out in your writing and also for facts because these tools are not research replacement and they make up facts all the time.

18:35So before you start publishing content that comes out of these tools, that fact checking is so important. If it happened to the CEO of Google, it can happen to you too. It will happen to you. I mean, I just go out and say, it'll happen to you no matter what. Okay. So this was a very long side and important segue and I'll get us back. I'll get us back on track. So we talked about all these things that go into the prompt, then you hit enter, you get ChatGPT wrote something based on the style and the audience and who you are and what you're trying to achieve and the input that you gave it. What do you do then?

19:15Okay. So then you're going to keep refining it. So you're going to see what comes out. And if you hover over your prompt on ChatGPT, you're not going to see it until you hover over it with your mouse, but a little pen and paper icon is going to appear. You're going to click that. That's the edit button. Nobody knows it exists. You do this one thing, you're going to be ahead of 99%. That's not a studied fact, but I would venture to guess 99 % of ChatGPT users. Click that button and start editing your prompt to actually, based on what you're seeing. So if you like that it's including certain things or don't like it's including certain things, make sure to say, do not talk about this or do talk about this based off of what you're saying to refine that output.

20:02Hit save and continue and let it regenerate again with that newly edited prompt. And that's how you're going to refine your output rather than chatting to say, I liked this part, but I didn't like that part. Rewrite it this way. Do it through that edit button. You can always scroll back. there's a little button that will appear to the left and it will let you scroll back and see the old versions. You're not going to lose them. That's going to help you get really to the point of what you want. And it is much more effective than chatting back and forth to change your outputs. So first of all, I think it's a brilliant concept.

20:38The fact you can go and edit your prompt. And like you said, the vast majority of other people don't have a clue that it exists. Why is there a difference? Like, why should I go back and edit my prompt versus saying, hey, write this again, but don't talk about this and instead talk about that? Yeah. So what happens when you use ChatGPT is it actually remembers everything that's happened in the conversation up until that point. And every single thing you've said and everything that it has said is going to get incorporated into how it's understanding everything you're asking at from there forward.

21:13And so sometimes like when you've been talking to chat GPT for a little while, it's sort of, I call it going off the rails, but like, it just starts making stuff like random stuff. And you're like, where did that come from? I was not talking to you about this. Yeah. It's probably from earlier in the conversation, something you said, or it said, and it was probably something you edited out it talking about. And when you edit your prompts to get it to the point you want, instead, it's only going to remember looking up at the things you've actually used. So that final version of the prompt and its final output that you're continuing from.

21:48So really good, just like real world example of this. Just imagine you typed in, what does the sky look like into your prompt? And it comes back and it says, I can tell you what it's going to come back and say, because it's always different, but also the same. In the daytime on a clear day, it looks like this. At night, it looks like this. At sunrise, it looks like this at sunset, it looks like that. Sometimes there are clouds, sometimes it's like very deep. If you go in and you keep asking questions and you say, no, I wanted it to be on a clear sunny day. And then you go, okay, now make that the opening of a blog post.

22:20Now make it a blog outline, like all of these steps. At some point, ChatGPT is inevitably going to start talking about at night again, because at some point I talked about night and sunset and all of that. Versus if you in that initial prompt just hit that edit button and said, tell me what the sky looks like. And now you've seen all that on a clear, sunny day. You're going to get back on a clear, sunny day, what the sky looks like. And now 10 steps later, it's not going to start talking about night because you never talked about night. It never talked about night earlier in the conversation. Basically, you're establishing the correct baseline of everything you want to base everything moving forward on.

23:05And it's not going to have this weird flashback. Oh, but I did talk about this in the beginning. So maybe I should put this back in. Exactly. Awesome. So now I've refined it. I got a good first version that is not really a first version. It's a good first, third version or third version of the first version. What do I do then? So you've got a prompt, you like you've got an output, you like regenerate it two or three times every time, even if you like it, even before you like it, like just regenerate it because Chatty PT comes out with something brand new every single time it runs a prompt. And so regenerating it, especially content creation and creativity, there is zero guarantee that the first time is going to be the best time and it does not take long.

23:52So just regenerate it and then you can choose your favorite or you can puzzle piece them together. So I love puzzle piecing like this paragraph I loved and this paragraph I loved or the sentence in this sentence, put them together and you're going to get way higher final quality output. And I do the same thing. And a lot of time I even just use it for ideation. Like I would look at them and then I won't even copy and paste this stuff. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. Like I got to talk about this thing from that version and that thing from this version, because these two things are really important.

24:22So I agree with you 100%. If you run the generate several times, even with the same exact prompt, you'll get slightly different versions of the outcome and you can pick and choose the stuff that connects going back to you and your style and the things you were trying to put out there versus this is what ChatGPT came up with as variation number one. And also don't get hung up. I don't like that opening sentence. I'm going to throw out the whole thing. Just don't use that opening sentence. And it's amazing to me how often I'll hear people go, oh, I didn't like the beginning of it. That doesn't mean you can't use the rest of it just because you didn't like that opening.

24:58Let's talk a little bit about the formatting of the outcome. Do you do the formatting yourself or is that something you also put into the prompt as far as how you want it? It depends on what the project is and how much I already know. A lot of times I'll put into the prompt, format this in Markdown so it's easier to read. and that helps me get when you tell it to format in markdown it'll put in like the headlines sub headlines bullet points bold italic like just depending on what you're doing that's not necessarily going to be the final format that it is in as the output but it really helps you look at that blog post or that outline and like really understand or the script for your video or whatever you're creating and understand the format sometimes I'll say okay now put this in html for me so I can just drop it on my website.