1594 – A.I. Tools with Epic Presence’s Casey Meehan

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0:58with us right now Casey Meehan Casey you are the CEO and founder of Epic Presence you're found on the web at epicpresence.com Casey thank you so much for joining us Josh it's great to be here thanks for having me well who doesn't want an epic presence I like the kind of the the imagery there, but tell us more about, and by the way, congrats on 10 years at the helm here, but explain what Epic Presence is. So we're a content marketing agency, and we do serve, you know, SMBs, a lot of folks in the software space over the years, some of our most notable clients, Salesforce.com is probably the one that most people would know.

1:45there's another big one um eightfold ai they're an ai company that's in the uh staffing and workforce management world we started with them when they were just a 30 person operation and worked with them for many years helped them to scale up to about a six or almost 700 person uh you know they're like a double triple unicorn something like that um these days uh and with Salesforce, we've had some great success in 2021. We had one of, if not their most highly trafficked blog post was a whole study that we did around entrepreneurs and COVID. We went out and fielded a study and created some research around that.

2:27So those are the types of things that we've been up to, but now there's been a big transition into AI and that's shaking this world up a little bit. So, yeah. So I'll say so in the content world, how have you adapted or how have you what have you been focused on over the past six months? Yeah, so I've really been focused on how can we get as much out of these new AI tools as possible. And I think right now, folks are still in this phase of like, oh, let me make it create like 30 quick tweets or 30 Instagram updates or some fairly thin blog posts that then need heavy editing. And so what I've been working a lot on is building these knowledge bases.

3:16So taking a similar process, when we get started with a client, we always start with an interview, deep dive, who they are, how do they get to be where they are. But instead of just taking that and putting that into our writers' minds, before that, we're now working on creating these big databases, these knowledge bases. They're called many things now. It's still a new field. But turning that interview information into data that we can then use the AI to, you know, as source material for the AI. So when we ask it to create a blog post, we're referencing, you know, maybe two to three, four hours of interviews that we've done with a subject matter expert.

3:58And this is pretty useful stuff. It has a lot of use cases outside of marketing as well. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, I want to talk more about that. But I'm also really curious about other trends that you're observing in content, particularly if we think about B2B companies, folks that are going to have decent sales cycles. I mean, there's definitely that's very relationship oriented. They're going to have conversations, you know, generally before. Well, in some case, not all of mine, I recognize with your clients, but, you know, thinking about someone who might be running an agency, they might look at content and say, well, Casey, that sounds great.

4:42Obviously, that feels like a long-term strategy. What can we do or is there anything that we should be doing to kind of fuel the fire, say, over the next six months or so? I would say just kind of being a little bit cautious with this thin content and thinking that, oh, great, I can just tell this bot, this chat GPT to create, spin up all of these articles, and that's going to be great. I see my background is in SEO. I see a lot of SEO folks just thinking, well, this is wonderful. Can we create all of this? But they're not necessarily seeing that second level of the fact that everybody's creating all of this content.

5:23So it was a competitive space. Content marketing was very competitive before this. And now it's 100x what it was, if not more. And at the same time, people are going to chat GPT for their searches more. So the search volume may be diminishing while the content is increasing. So quality matters more than ever. And so just thinking you can just spin up some thin content that doesn't quite have, that doesn't cite or source, you know, relevant folks, that is, you know, there's a danger there to just creating thin content. And I know a lot of agencies are using it for that, which I would warn against.

6:11But with a little bit of just cajoling, you can get it to create some pretty interesting stuff. And especially if you're using, you know, if you have a talented writer and are working to get them onboarded with how to use this and specifically asking it to cite resources, site specific folks and things like that. So you can actually try to turn it into real quality thought leadership marketing materials. That's, I guess, my quick and dirty takeaway. And I'm on LinkedIn. If anybody wants to chat with me, I love talking about this stuff. So I'd be happy to chat with them if they just want to hit me up on LinkedIn.

6:50Yeah. What are the risks? I mean, you mentioned you kind of put out, this is a cautionary tale, put out a warning, but what are the real risks? Uh, the real risk is just, you know, uh, kind of similar risks that folks have faced when SEO seemed too easy in the past where, you know, um, they've spun up, you know, there used to be article spinners or just ways where you could create just these articles with tons of keywords in it that meant nothing. I think we're seeing kind of the second phase of that. Yeah. Um, Google's gotta be concerned about that. Yeah, you can tell Google's, I just have a conversation about this, because the number of ads that they're showing now compared to their organic results has really increased in the last few days.

7:34So that's sort of an indicator that they are concerned and, you know, putting more emphasis on their paid results there. So yeah, Casey, where do you fit in? Like, is there a particular size company that you typically work with or like how does, you know, just, you know, how does Epic Presence actually work? So, yeah, we're, you know, we work well with SMBs. We like to have, you know, a direct line to, you know, the C-suite if we can. And that allows us to really speak on behalf of the, you know, of the organization, but also, you know, that it's, the company is big enough to have some sort of a marketing department, you know, because we're just kind of bringing the one piece of the content and it needs other things.

8:30there. And roles are really switching up where we're sort of transitioning into being more of an AI consultant to some degree. So training up your teams on how to do some of this stuff. I've been spending five hours plus every day learning and experimenting with it. And I have a background in it before even JetGBT came out. We had a really talented data scientist on staff, and I'd been doing a lot of stuff with Python and machine learning since 2018. So I'm really now moving in a direction of helping teams of all sizes, but especially in that B2B SMB zone of maybe five to 50 employees, helping them make this transition and getting the most that they can out of AI, specifically when it comes to marketing, but also process enhancements and things like that.

9:21Yeah. And then for industries, are there particular industries that you're stronger than others or maybe kind of function of what they might do? We've dabbled a lot, you know, very B2B. So everything we've done pretty much has been in the B2B space. We've had some significant traction with pharmaceutical. We've had a lot of work in education, work tech, HR tech. Those are some of the big ones that come to mind. Yeah. What do you see happening right now in HR tech? Like if you were to just kind of give us a lay of the land for those who aren't necessarily in that world, what's been happening in HR tech?

10:03I think there's, you know, it's just the pendulum has been swinging so dramatically where it was, you know, nobody could find folks. So it was really just talent acquisition, talent acquisition, and we can't, you know, staff up enough. And now that is swinging, you know, in a little bit of a different direction. And how do we reskill and upskill our current workforce is a big trending topic there. A lot of the cool tools that are coming out are helping folks to find really talented people that they might have on staff that aren't being utilized in the best way possible. So those are some of the big picture things I'm seeing there.

10:46Yeah, getting back to AI and AI tools, particularly if you're using ChatGPT, are there any prompts or kind of ChatGPT hacks that you're like, oh, if you haven't tried this, try this. anything like that that you found that you maybe or something even just like a recent discovery you're like oh that's pretty cool I'll share one with you after you share yeah so well I'll start with just a really fun one that I was having uh that I uh was this weekend my wife was away visiting uh her relatives so I was just kind of hanging out and I typed in let's imagine something that's never been imagined before and had this whole conversation and the AI returned, well, would you want to imagine a product or a society or a creature?

11:37So that was just like hours of entertainment and just kind of blowing my mind. Another one that comes to mind is one that I use a lot that's called the God prompt. And I didn't come up with this, but it's a prompt that basically allows you to improve your prompts. So you basically tell it, I can pull it up here and I can read it for you word for word. So that you have it, but this one has been very powerful because you kind of like, you kind of know what you want to, you know, the question you want to ask, but actually getting the AI to fine tune it. So this is the prompt. It's a little bit long.

12:16I'll read it out. It's, I want you to become my prompt creator. Your goal is to help me craft the best possible prompt for my needs. The prompt will be used by you, ChatGPT. You will follow the process. One, your first response will be to ask me what the prompt should be about. I will provide my answer, but it will need to improve it through continual iterations by going through these next steps. And the steps are based on my input. You will generate three sections, a revised prompt that will be rewritten. It should be clear, concise, and understood. And then suggestions to improve that prompt and any questions related to the prompt that might also improve it.

13:01So that is beautiful. That's one prompt that'll make all of your other prompts better. and your whole one prompt to rule them all exactly exactly there's another tool i've just been messing around with i just found yesterday perplexity i would say if you haven't messed with perplexity ai it is in many ways more powerful than chat gpt which i can't believe that i'm saying that because it's so powerful but it had perplexity right now has a much better access to the internet. So, you know, they just rolled out the browsing feature in, in chat GPT, which I have struggled with a little bit. But this perplexity is another tool that I highly recommend folks check out because it's very, very powerful.

13:46You know, we were trying to come up with a couple things last night we were talking. And so one thing that, that we'll often do is kind of advise on our client's authority, perceived authority. And part of that is like, look, if you're running the podcast media circuit and so forth, you really need to have a press kit, including some bios. And for someone that doesn't have a bio to begin with, I mean, usually they do, but even if they don't, it was recommended we just ask ChatGPT, hey, I need you to write a bio, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. what information do you need to write a good bio on me?

14:29So you ask chat GPT what it wants, and then you can kind of come up with that and then feed it. And then it'll take that and rewrite that into, you know, some bios you have variations on. Exactly. Ask me five questions that you need me to answer in order to create a great bio. Oh, I like that. So you're just prompting it to ask you the questions. I've been playing with that all morning. And yeah, that's really cool. Everyone who's listening to us, go do that right now. Everybody needs a good bio and, you know, revisit that. And, you know, just launched a YouTube channel called Blazing Zebra, where there's many, many different videos there, which are all sorts of prompt sequences.

15:17One is for copywriting excellence. One is for modern market research. One is for keyword research, a really cool one for SEO keyword research, all related to AI. So that's a Blazing Zebra YouTube channel with just thousands of prompts are up there already. So check that out. No, I think it's really fun to just kind of see prompt ideas. It's really cool. You know, another thing that we were kind of goofing around with is I just needed like some sort of an outreach communication. And everything that was coming back is like, I would never talk like that. No, it was like, we tried so many, you know, to kind of tweak it to get the right tone.

15:58Right. So finally, I mean, it's, you know, again, it's my personality too. So I'm not, you know, completely, I, you know, I'm, I'm unique in that I would say I'm fairly personable in my communication style. So we had to come finally, it's like the right terminology. I said, write a ridiculously friendly and informal or something like that. It's like, I had to use the word ridiculously, you know, informal and friendly and approachable, you know, community, you know, message, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that was so funny that we had to throw in that amplifier that that and the results were like, there we go.

16:36We finally got it. So I guess I, I guess I now know myself. Exactly. There you go. It tells you a lot about yourself and it does help to repeat, you know, in three different places in the prompt, repeat like what you're having a problem with, like be not sensational, very factual. Those things can help. And I almost feel, I don't know if you feel this way, but it's almost like a pinata where you're kind of hitting at this pinata and it's like, it's not giving you anything. And then all of a sudden you do the right thing and it just explodes and just starts sending you all this stuff. You're like, yes, this is what I'm getting at.

17:13That's the experience that I have with, with working with it, where it takes multiple prompts and you're almost ready to give up and you try one more variation of a prompt. And all of a sudden, then the lights turn on there. Yeah. Yeah. Casey, again, your website, thank you so much. Fun conversation. Your website, epicpresence.com. When somebody goes there, what would you recommend their next steps after they've been listening to our conversation? Well, there is a video there that just says start here that just does a little bit about what we do there, but it is changing pretty dramatically. So if folks are interested in talking about anything with me, I would say just come to my LinkedIn and shoot me a quick message there if there's anything I can help with, marketing or AI related, that would be a good next step too.

18:05Yeah. All right. Again, Casey Meehan, founder, CEO of Epic Presence. Your website is epicpresence.com. Anything else that you'd recommend for people to do? Or you mentioned your LinkedIn. Yeah, you are very engaged on LinkedIn for sure. Anything else in the world of Epic Presence or Casey that folks ought to connect with? Check out the new YouTube channel, Blazing Zebra. Yeah, that's where I'm focusing a lot of stuff. I got a lot of helpful tutorials up there. It's all about AI and marketing. So check that stuff out and let me know what you think. One more time on the channel name on YouTube. Blazing Zebra.

18:46So it's a zebra, Blazing Zebra. I like it. There we go. All right. Just hit subscribe. Awesome. Thanks, Josh. Very cool. All right, Casey Meehan. Again, founder, CEO of Epic Presence and the YouTube channel. It's all the rave right now. If you love chat GPT and want to see the kind of stuff you could do, go search for Blazing Zebra and go follow you there. Awesome conversation, Casey. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Great to be on.

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