How To Avoid Blah Blah Content And, Instead, Win, Online – Episode 100

And you do have something interesting to say. Everybody does. There is not a single client we have that doesn't have unique expertise or unique experience or unique ideas that other people, even if it's just people in their industry that really care about pressure vessels or whatever, will care about. It's just you'd be much better actually getting somebody from your company who knows loads of stuff about like a really interesting technological development to talk about it. And it resonates with five people than you would getting your social media manager to post something about, you know, how fast your company is growing or how many fantastic new leads you've got that resonates with absolutely nobody. The five people that the really technical but quite interesting content resonates with other people you actually want to reach and the other people nobody cares about. Maybe I'm quite grumpy to.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Episode one hundred. Now we were kind of trying to avoid. Are we going to try and avoid making episode one hundred of Digital Marketing From The Coalface? Um, all about us. Like how clever we are about doing.

Self-congratulatory.

A little bit self-congratulatory. And what we're going to try and do is avoid that. But this is episode one hundred of digital marketing from. Did we mention that?

I don't know, do you wanna do it again?

Yeah. This is.

Episode.

one hundred of Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And I think it's fair to say that there are at least, I don't know, three episodes of the, of the out of the one hundred that were kind of worth listening to one or two. Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. So and there might be a bit of background noise because, uh, we're downstairs in the, uh, in the office, but, uh, it's a beautiful day and we've got the door open and there's a bit of activity outside, but we just thought because it's Digital Marketing From The Coalface episode one hundred, we could allow that bit of sound.

Or.

Background sound.

one more time.

Um, so before we, uh, get cracking with, uh, this episode. What number episode?

I don't know. I think ninety nine. No. One hundred one hundred, one hundred one hundred.

How did we keep doing that? And it's only taken us like twenty five years. You know, we've kind of got there quite quickly.

Two years.

To be fair. Yeah. Um, no.

No less.

Than. Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's September.

It has now started getting very self-congratulatory.

Let's do some actual work.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right. Um, so, you know, I don't know why. I'm just. I feel a bit grumpy. I shouldn't. That's novel. I kind of feel a bit grumpy.

It's not novel at all. You're always grumpy. Oscar the grouch.

Yeah. Yeah, that's probably true. Many a true word is said in jest. Uh, I get you. I hear you. Um, so I was looking on LinkedIn, and, um, I saw a post. Um, I'm not going to name the person who put the post in, but it was like basically, you know, to paraphrase, I'm off to London. I hope it's sunny. That was it. That was the LinkedIn.

A valuable nugget, you know? Yeah.

And I just thought that's what LinkedIn has become. You know, to me, what they were really saying was, look at me. I'm going to that there London. I must be important. Yeah. You know, it's like and I was it kind of made me start thinking about, um, you know, content marketing and content and social media content. And, you know, I think it's fair to say that, you know, we've all kind of experimented and tried different approaches. And, you know, I think social media might seem an odd thing to say. I think it's still in its infancy. I think we're still trying to figure out how to use it effectively. Like, you know, on, on Instagram, it's like, look at my wonderful wife. Look at these completely, um, after effects affected photographs of how fantastic my life is and all the rest of it. And it's not, it's just bullshit.

Here's me hugging a celebrity that I walked past at a conference.

That's right. It's funny, I saw something on on Twitter and this guy had he, I think it was it was it was a fairly well known actor, uh, who he'd met in an airport lounge and he'd taken a photograph with the actor's permission, I think. But he tweeted it as if like, say, for example, it was Kevin Bacon or something like that. He was like, yeah, I'm just hanging out with Kevin Bacon. And then the Kevin Bacon had actually tweeted, like, we weren't hanging out, man, you kind of disturbed me in having my coffee and asked for a photograph, you know what I mean? Like, we weren't hanging out, bro. Um, but it's um. Yeah, I mean, if you think about Instagram, people sending pictures of what their life isn't actually like, but how they, what they wish it was like.

And LinkedIn is just the business.

LinkedIn is the business version of that. Twitter's where people just get, get angry with everybody and, you know, disagree and say things they would never say to somebody, somebody, if they were having a conversation with them face to face, that kind of thing. And, you know, Facebook got taken over by, you know, the, my brigade, the grey haired brigade. Yeah. And the kids went, oh, well, you can have it. We're off. We're going to some use something else instead.

Snapchat or TikTok or whatever.

Yeah, that sort of thing. But, you know, I was just kind of amusing away and thinking about the stuff that we, that we do post, we the collective, we the human, the human race, the stuff that we do post. Um, and then trying to sort of like think, well, how do we provide some thought leadership about this? How do we get people to stop putting up the look at me bullshit and actually use social media, different social media platforms in the way that in a way that will potentially add some value. That's the first person who's ever done a three point turn right outside our office. They usually just go around and through the car park, but we're recording a podcast. So they decided to do a three point turn and point their exhaust right into our office. Yeah. Right.

So yeah, I mean.

So how do we do that? How, how do we kind of have a conversation that doesn't, doesn't just turn into a, a couple of blokes moaning and ranting?

Um, well, I think the first thing to say is as well, I think you can sort of apply this more broadly than just to social media, right? I mean, people are using their company blogs for exactly the same thing. And in fact, their websites for exactly the same thing. Look at me, look at me, look at me. And if everybody's shouting, look at me all the time and sort of releasing what is effectively sort of valueless drivel into the ether. Guess what? The ether or the internet just becomes sort of clogged up with it. Nothing stands out because everybody's having a pop and that's a problem.

Well, do you think it's more fundamental? Do you think it's it's, um, pumping stuff out there that people don't care about is, um, what am I trying to say? It's, it's, it's, it adds nothing to anybody. Yeah. I'm not really, I'm not.

Really.

Like across what I'm trying to say here.

It'll get like this like slightly off topic and might get weirdly philosophical and drag us straight into blokes moaning about shit, which you just said you wanted to avoid. But yeah, I think the same thing is true of Spotify. I have quite a lot of friends in bands. They will all bemoan the fact that now, because everybody can upload without a record label, can upload their music to Spotify. Nobody stands out on Spotify. Spotify as a platform is not somewhere you go for music discovery because it's just full of millions of crap artists, and you can't really spot the good from the bad. Yeah, ruins it for everyone. And I think the same thing is true of the internet at large. Like.

It's quite the philosophical, bald, ranty, moany statement.

Well, there you go. I'll stand by it. If everybody can do stuff, then nothing good will come of it.

Yeah. Cameron and I finally got round to watching, um, the Netflix documentary, I suppose, uh, about the book. Um, how is it? How not to give, how not to give a f*ck. I think it's called something like that. Um, and, you know, I'll use the word damn instead of instead of the F word that's that we've had, we've had, we've had our won, we've want. You know, it is what the book's called anyway. You can't pronounce exclamation mark, asterisk, asterisk, exclamation mark. So I'll just have to. I had to use the word at least once. But you know, you know why you shouldn't give a damn. And the interesting thing was, um, it wasn't about how to live your life and not give a damn. It was how to give a damn about the right things, right?

Yeah.

So if you, for example, and it resonated with me and I was I enjoyed it. And I think if he if it was, if it was a lesson in how to live your life in such a way that you don't care about anything, I think I would still have probably enjoyed it because it would have been interesting to hear that that philosophy, philosophy. But when I look back at at, at, at my sort of if I look back at the last, say, twenty years I spent, you know, I spent ten years trying to get to the top of our game in, um, competitive dancing, ballroom dancing, and, you know, with success. We did very well. Um, though I say so myself, and we only did that because we put body and soul into it and we know we put everything into it. And, and I was hoping I was kind of relieved that that this documentary didn't kind of conclude that like, why, why on earth did you do that? You know, why bother with that? And it really isn't. It's about bothering with the right thing. And I think when it comes to content, it's the same thing. Yeah. You know, it's deciding what to care about. And I think if you're not prepared to decide what to care about, if you're not prepared to spend some time thinking about your business and thinking about what kind of content you can produce, whether it's a social media post, a video, um, for TikTok or Insta or whatever, or a post on LinkedIn, which links back to some content, maybe a blog post or a case study on your website. And instead you opt for the look at me bullshit then. Yeah. You know, so yeah.

So I guess what we're really saying is like, work out what you actually want to say and spend your time talking about, and then invest heavily in doing that. Don't say anything. It's not. Don't post on LinkedIn. It's not don't blog. It's just that you have to be focused on blogging about the stuff that actually matters, both to you and also, I think, to the people that you actually want to pay attention to. Because I think that's the other thing, isn't it? A lot of it is very self-congratulatory. Let's be honest. Nobody actually cares that you're going to London or that you want this new gig, or that your fancy website that you're pasting AI content onto is, you know, tripled its organic traffic in three months or whatever. It's just.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the other favourite, I think on LinkedIn is when people post things like, I am, I am so proud to announce, yeah.

Blah, blah, blah.

You know, it's like, I'm so proud to announce that I've achieved this following qualification. It's like, yeah, it's a Google ad certification. It takes an hour to get it. Yeah. And now you're proud and you're announcing that you're so proud to have achieved it. Yeah, I just it seems like there's an almost like a, a desperation to say something, anything, anything. Um, and especially if it's something that, that draws attention because, you know, as a, as a species, we, we, you know, we like to be the center of attention.

That little dopamine hit, isn't it? Somebody liked your post. Two hundred people liked your post. I'll do it again. Like I'll get another two hundred little tiny dopamine hits, but it's not actually doing anything useful. It's certainly not going to grow your business.

Maybe not.

I saw something really interesting the other day on LinkedIn actually, which was somebody posting about losing, um, a really big gig that was sort of twenty to thirty percent of their agency's income. Um, and they were just really sort of, um, like laying it all out, you know, this is what we did wrong. This is what went wrong. This is where we actually have to pick up as a business and sort of like, you know, sort of baring their heart to the world. And I thought it was really interesting because my first instinct was like, oh.

Stop, stop.

Stop.

Baring their heart to the world.

Soul, soul.

You bare your soul. You don't bare your heart. you, bear your heart. You're kind of.

Dead in your chest.

Yeah you do. It's better though. It's a good job in there. You know?

Sorry. Yeah. It was really interesting because I just thought, like, to start with, I was like, oh, this is really novel. This is like, you know, somebody being honest on LinkedIn. And then I was like trying to decide whether or not I actually sort of agreed with the principle of doing that or not, because I still think ultimately it was just all about attention. It's still all about them. And I think it's, yeah, it's just everything we do on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever just seems to be about, you know, me, me, me, even the stuff that's sort of, on the face of it, at least not me, me, me.

Yeah. So if you're a, if you're trying to get your organisation, your business noticed, are you saying that, um, doing it in a way that comes across as needy is going to leave people less interested in you as a, as an organisation?

I think as a race, what we're really good at picking up is when somebody is sort of showboating or doing something for attention. I think, you know, just like subconsciously we pick up on those things really easily. And I think as soon as you've you've made it clear to somebody that you want the attention, they're sort of like you.

But the whole point of like marketing is to try and get people's attention, isn't it?

Yeah. But you have to be smart about it. You can't just go out and demand people's attention. That's effectively what's happening, I think.

Yeah. Okay. Um, so if are we, are we saying to people, um, when you're, when you're posting content on your website and when you're using social media to try and promote it, or let's just take content out of the equation. Just, yeah, we'll move on to content because I've got a few things to say about content, especially AI generated content. Um, if you're posting things onto social media about the business, like before you hit send, pause for a minute and think, right, Why should somebody care about this? Will this be seen as just being needy, or will it be like most people reading will just go, oh, so what?

Yeah.

You know, are we saying that?

Yeah, I think we are. I think yeah, make sure it's actually interesting.

What a bastard you are.

What's the thing that you always say? Is it like a rule that you have for it? Isn't it. Is it like, why should I care or something? The question you always have to ask yourself.

Simpler than that.

Is it.

So what?

Yeah, yeah. So what? There we go. Yeah.

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

Jazz classic. So what? By not Charlie Parker? Um. Come on. Name some more jazz classics.

Oh, yeah. I'll just whap out my small black book of jazz classics.

I'm gonna look it up because I should, um. This is, like, ridiculous that I don't know this off the top of my head because it's, um, it's an absolute jazz classic and it's, uh, Miles Davis, isn't it? Yes it is. Wait a second. I've got the album. One of the albums. One of the albums? Oh, God.

This is not good podcasting, is it not?

Is watching me scrolling through albums in my.

Spotify.

List? Not good, not good. Um.

So thing about podcasting that you should know is that it is audio only. Is it?

Well it isn't, is it because we've done some videos? This one isn't being videoed because our videographer is on holiday and we couldn't really be bothered setting the video cameras up there. Upstairs, we've got all the equipment, you've got some new equipment, some light boxes and all kinds of things, but it's too hot. It's too hot. That's right, that's right. So AI content, uh, we'll get on to, but just to finish off on this whole idea of, of, um, so what we've covered this before, we've said before and talked before about making sure that if you're producing content, that it's not the sort of content someone could read and then simply go, so what? You know, that didn't help me. It was all about you. I'm not even interested. And that kind of makes us sound like a quite a cold, uncaring organisation if we're telling people that and it makes, I guess it makes like the whole human race sound cold and uncaring. If they're just looking at anything you produce and going, so what?

But I think that's a valid. Especially in a place as crowded and as noisy as LinkedIn. I think that's a very valid way of looking at it. And, you know, one thing I do have to say is that a lot of the people listening to this will have either themselves, or they'll have staff working for them who spend a lot of time and effort crafting social media plans and queuing up content. And to be honest with you, fifty percent of that could probably just go straight in the bin. Um, it's probably just empty noise. And I think if people spent less time on this sort of self-congratulatory, but it's time and energy and effort and money, to be honest, on all of this kind of self-congratulatory content and actually spent time funneling down and working out what they actually want to say and what's actually going to resonate with their audience. There would be a lot better off for it, I think. You can take that sort of eighty over twenty rule and that I love so much, and apply it to your social media plans and just sort of cut eighty percent of what you're going to say, and you'll be much better off for it. Yeah. Yeah. Too bold.

Well, I think, I think for some people, if they stopped the self-congratulatory nonsense, they would have pretty much nothing to say.

Yeah. Because it's hard.

It's let's face it, it's hard trying to find things to talk about that will genuinely be of interest to other people that you could hand on heart say, I'm going to post this. I'm going to get this out there because I know that people will find it either valuable, entertaining, interesting. I mean, something they'll find it something.

Yeah.

It's hard.

Especially for the kind of clients we often work with. B2B, you know, very technical engineering and that sort of thing. It is difficult for sure. But like the the time and effort you spend finding that tiny nugget, that one post that is actually interesting is far better than spending all of that time coming up with stuff that nobody cares about. And you do have something interesting to say. Everybody does. There is not a single client we have that doesn't have unique expertise or unique experience or unique ideas that other people, even if it's just people in their industry that really care about pressure vessels or whatever, will care about. It's just you'd be much better actually getting somebody from your company who knows loads of stuff about like a really interesting technological development to talk about it. And it resonates with five people than you would getting your social media manager to post something about, you know, how fast your company is growing or how many fantastic new leads you've got that resonates with absolutely nobody. The five people that the really technical but quite interesting content resonates with other people you actually want to reach. And the other people are not. Nobody cares about them. Maybe I'm quite grumpy too.

Well, if you are, it's my fault. Okay, so we're talking about posting on social media. We're talking broadly about content, sharing content, etc.. Um, so I think it probably is worth mentioning, um, AI content. There's a lot of chat about artificial intelligence being used to create content because we've known for a long time that people do not like writing. Yeah, I do.

I do, I do.

Yeah, but a lot of people don't. If you, if you put a blank piece of paper in front of them and said, write me a thousand words on something that you really enjoy, something that they really care about, they would still struggle.

It's hard.

It. But it isn't. But anyway.

Well, you are grumpy. Many of the people listening to this will find it hard. Yeah, I mean, it's challenging for sure if you're not used to doing it.

Okay, so there's a couple of ways of using artificial intelligence. So one of the ways you could use it, it's been around for a long time is using a tool like, and there are others Grammarly, for example. Now what Grammarly is doing is it's looking at what you're writing. It's allowing you to set the A tone if you like. It lets you say, this is this is the audience. So it's either a well-informed audience or a general audience. It lets you set the tone as informal, formal, business like it lets you set. What else does it let you do? Lets you set the tone, lets you tell, you know, tell it whether you're trying to tell a story or I don't know, a lot of facts, for example, and that artificial intelligence, um, within Grammarly is a great tool for helping humans write content. People who don't like writing it lets them write with a bit more confidence.

Because essentially you can just like sort of brain dump into Grammarly and then it will go through and reorganise your thoughts. It won't change anything. It just sort of reorganises words and juggle things around until it gets the right sort of tone. And yeah, I mean, I think what Grammarly is doing is, is just using a very complicated algorithm to say, well, you know, if you switch that word and that word, it sounds a bit lighter, it sounds a bit less heavy. And that is.

Good. Well it does, it says it comes up with things like, you know, like for the audience that you've said this is for a general audience. That sentence is quite long and quite hard to understand. It gets it spectacularly wrong. It does. So you have to be careful with it. But AI does get things spectacularly wrong. We all know that. Um, so a great tool, artificial intelligence. Grammarly. If you don't like writing, then you can use something like that. Just I like it, I like it. I mean, I, I write quite a lot, I suppose, and I, and I do like using it and I've found it over the years really, really useful and keeps me on track sometimes. Um, and you know, the feature like rewrite for clarity, you know, you'll write something and you think it's okay, and then it'll then it goes rewrite for clarity. How about this instead? Actually, you know, that's great. Um, it lets you be, I think probably less verbose in the writing, but more concise. Um, and it's great. So that's one side of AI. The other side that's getting a lot of press at the moment is ChatGPT. Yeah, and it's the whole idea of AI simply writing your content.

Mhm.

Go on. What do you.

Think? We've done a very good job of not touching on this subject. Everybody else has raced to on their podcast.

No we have. We have spoken about this. Yeah. Because remember we mentioned this idea that people are confusing capability with competence.

Well, have we talked about that?

We did. I'm sure.

We did. I think that might be just a private conversation, but I might be wrong.

I'm pretty sure we.

Mentioned it shows how much we listen to our own podcast.

It certainly came.

Up.

It might have come up in the mastermind group with the other agency owners that I was in. It might have been in that, but it certainly came up. I thought we'd. Anyway, this idea is a really good article by.

I forget I forgot as well. Yeah, there are a lot of, um, very, very clever, very smart people out there talking about this and what a lot of them have to say about it is exactly that, that a lot of people have been sort of duped into thinking that because something like ChatGPT or, um, what's the other one that we've tried Jarvis or whatever it is, um, capable of producing things that look at first glance like very good writings, um, you know. Good words, good stuffs, good England. Um yeah. Um that, that it is in fact absolutely fine and you should copy and paste it straight onto your blog and it's all hunky dory and fantastic. But what these tools actually do underneath the hood is just find the most common combinations of words. So of course, at first glance it looks realistic. It's combed one hundred thousand articles and it's found that whenever this word is mentioned, it's closely followed by these words. So it's the semblance of something that seems very sensible. But it is literally impossible for these tools to add any actual real value or useful information, because all they can do is regurgitate other sort of things that people have already said in a slightly different format or rearranged.

So if you rely on ChatGPT, they're almost certainly our case studies where people have built websites. Every single piece of content is.

You will see them on LinkedIn.

Is unadulterated. Yeah, it's unadulterated AI content untouched. Yeah. Simply copied and pasted out of ChatGPT and they're getting good rankings.

But again, you see, I think that phrase about competence and, you know, um, you know, producing something and people mistaking it for competence applies really strongly to those people too, because, you know, they're creating these websites and they're ranking really well. Are they selling anything? Is anybody finding these websites full of AI generated content that are ranking for all these bizarre, obscure, slightly arcane keywords and then buying product? No, of course they're not like people are doing this so that they can prove that they can do it, but it's of no real value. It's not it's not really particularly interesting or useful as anybody can buy one of these tools and churn out a load of content and rank a website. Is it going to build your customer base and a brand and pay for your retirement? No.

Maybe not, maybe not. So if we're saying that simply letting AI churn out content and saying, yep, that'll do. I.E. phoning it in, um, isn't the way to use AI.

That is not the way to use AI.

Right. So let's discuss ways you can use it.

Well, I like it. I think because I think you've been using it in quite a similar way. I really like it as a sort of sounding board or prompt. Um, so I'll sit down with a subject that I'm going to write about and I will just ask ChatGPT or a tool like that to, you know, tell me specific things about areas of interest. So the other day I was writing about, um, human resources case management, and I was like, you know, what is like, what, what compliance considerations are there when you're like tracking HR cases and it spat back a load of information and okay, the information was regurgitated and it may have been factually inaccurate, but it gave me a good sort of outline for how that section of the article should read and the things it should cover and the, you know, the sort of order of things that it needed to tick off. Um, and then I used that to go away, do a bit of my own research and then write a section a lot faster than I would have been able to if I'd been sat there trying to sort of think to myself, oh, what do I need to cover here? What should I mention? What topic areas are important? Um, I think it's really useful as that as a sort of adjunct or assistant, I guess.

Yeah. And there's a lot of people out there with their, um, look at me content, look at me.

Yep.

And basically try to teach you how to use ChatGPT. Oh yeah. Look at these prompt. These are one hundred prompts that will allow you to use.

People unironically changing their LinkedIn job title to AI Whisperer. I'm just like, find the nearest AI whisperer.

Tell me about that.

Yeah. So they legitimately, they think it's some sort of special magical skill to be able to prompt the AI in a way that gives you better outputs in inverted commas than anybody else. So it's like if you ask the AI a question that's couched in a specific way or phrased in a certain way, or mentions a certain word, the AI will suddenly transform and give you really good content instead of really crap, banal content. And they genuinely think that that's a skill and a talent that they have and will unironically go about the internet saying, oh, I'm an AI whisperer. You're not. You're literally just typing things into a box. It's. I hate to burst.

I've never come across that. I've never heard that term. I think it is quite amusing, though. It's very good. Um, so would it be fair to say that? Well, I think it is fair to say that AI is a great tool. If you are an expert to help you produce content more efficiently.

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, we talk a lot about science and the sort of the comparisons between the way that Google works and the way that like scientific articles are written and stuff like that. One of the things that I think is really interesting is that scientists at the top of their game will often have, like, assistants to write for them, right? So it's like when you're putting a paper together, the, the lead scientist is not sitting there and like writing out the definition for the particular disease that he's trying to cure or whatever. That's all his assistants. And then he looks over at the end and sort of glues it all back together and puts in the well, or she, sorry. You're absolutely right. Outing me on the podcast as a sexist. All right. He she, whatever, um, goes back at the end and sort of glues it all together. And I think in a way that's sort of if you are a subject matter expert, you can use AI a little bit like the scientists using their sort of, uh, post grad students or whatever, you know, it will do all of the boring stuff so that you can come in at the end and say, okay, and this is why we're interested in talking about that. And this is what I want the audience to take away. Yeah.

So I decided this week to, uh, actually use ChatGPT for, um, to help me write some content. I decided I got my subject and it's a subject that I know a lot about. Um, and, but I wanted to write some content to answer a very specific question. And so I used it and I think I produced it in the end, I produced a piece of content, which was, if we're counting about three thousand four hundred words, I think the end result is quite good.

And that is a lot of content.

I read through it, I went over and over it, and the way I used it was I asked it very specific questions. And, um, I then rewrote a lot of what it had written for me. I used Grammarly to help me rewrite some of what it had written for me. I sense checked everything it was writing for me. I removed stuff that it was writing for me that I knew to be bullshit. And in the end, I produced what I think was a half decent piece of content. Um, a considerably long, half decent piece of content that, um, I'm quite happy with.

So.

But I didn't ask it a question and say produce three thousand four hundred words on the subject of X.

So that's what I was going to ask you. Like what roughly what percentage of that do you reckon you did have to rewrite?

I think pretty much all of it got rewritten by either by me or by Grammarly.

So it's not. Yeah. So you're not like using its output at all.

Some of it got deleted because as soon as I read it, I thought, this is, this is nonsense. Um, but I did as a writing aid. I think I probably produced that piece of content in under two hours.

And it would normally have taken you.

I think, if I just want if I'd written it all myself from the start, from scratch, I think it would have probably taken me considerably longer than that. Yeah, it would be one of those things where I'd have done it. I'd have gone back to it the following day, done a bit more, gone back the following day, done a bit more. But I just found having this assistant, I mean, one of the things I used it for was like there were certain aspects, there were certain aspects of the article where I needed to just explain a concept. I just needed to explain some aspect of it was, broadly speaking, about search engine optimisation, one particular bit of it. Um, and I just wanted that explaining and, and it made that stuff a lot quicker because it could produce it for me. And then I was just basically sense checking it and mending it and kind of, yeah, taking out some of the.

Yeah.

Nonsense that AI is prone to putting in there when it pads things out and uses. Uses the wrong words and things like that.

Because one of the things I think that's really interesting about web content, like blogs especially, is like you're having a conversation or you're adding value to something that lots of other people are talking about, but because you don't know who's going to be reading it, you sort of have to put in a lot of like foundational information, like explaining the basics of lots of concepts that people should really know. And it's not necessarily adding value, it's just that you need to do all that to get to the point where you say your piece. And I think, yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? AI is fantastically good at doing the sort of grunt work so that you can then add value, but that's the key is to be actually adding something of use to the end of it.

Yeah. And I also think that it's great if you're using AI to help you write about something that you know a lot about. Yeah. I think where you could definitely come unstuck is if you say, for example, you're a marketing manager at an organisation, you bring in an intern or someone just out of uni who knows nothing about the subject here. And let's just use ChatGPT and get it to write content about subjects here. That's where you'll get the garbage content. Yeah. Because it's not being reviewed. I mean, it's almost like, you know, if you, if I ever get around to writing a book, which I'd like to do, if I ever get around to writing a book, uh, you know, the editor will make sure the final thing is the editor will make sure that the final thing probably hangs together and works properly. And I suppose if you're using ChatGPT to produce content, um, then you can, you know, get it to do some of the donkey work, right? Fair enough. But it really helps, I think, if you know the subject as well.

I think in a weird way, though, this is a sort of circular discussion, isn't it? At the beginning of this episode, we were like, don't be talking about things online that you don't really know anything about, or that you don't really add any value. And I think in a weird way, we're sort of saying the same thing. I mean, in general, web content cannot be produced by The intern or ChatGPT or anybody who isn't actually a subject matter expert. I mean, it can Anybody can sit down and try and write a blog post about something, but you're not going to actually add any real value. Again, you're just sort of cluttering up the internet. And I think a lot of companies are very guilty of this. They'll be like, oh, well, the marketing intern can write the content. And it's like, no, the only person in the organisation that can write the content is the person who knows all about that subject. They might not want to write it, and you might need to give them the marketing intern to use as a sort of like human notepad. But the marketing intern cannot write that content for you, because the only reason that content is useful or valuable is because it's, it contains your insights earned from however many years of doing something.

Yeah. So it's, it really is kind of this idea of it being a very kind of clever, um, clever assistant.

Yeah. Effectively it's grease for the wheels isn't it. Yeah. Not, not the wheel itself.

That's right. I'm just trying to find, uh something. Let me just see. I'm just trying to look through. I'm trying to find an example. Um. Okay, this isn't this isn't again, this isn't this isn't great podcast listening because I'm looking through, I'm looking through ChatGPT to try and find this example, but I might just have to kind of paraphrase and try and, um, make it up from someone else's point of view. Um, so what happened in the, um, ChatGPT screen is I asked it about a particular subject and in order to, it then provided me with some information, it provided me with some information, but coming back, but it kind of gave me it from a, from the perspective of, um, from sorry, from a us perspective, it was the language it was using. It said it used mailman instead of postman and stuff like that. So I said basically, that's fine, but can you rewrite that from an English perspective, perspective from somebody, somebody in England or something along those lines? And I might have shared it in Slack. Is that what you're looking for just now? Yeah. Okay. See if you can find the actual thing. But what it immediately did is it rewrote it and very literally said, like you say, for example, the original said, um, imagine you sat in a garden and the sun is shining. And I said, rewrite that from a, from a, from a British perspective, that's not a good example because you would probably more or less say more or less the same thing, but it actually came back literally and said, imagine you're sat in a typical British English garden. And it was like, that was its way of making this content more British English than American English. And it was it really was hilarious. I can see you, frankly, frantically typing away, trying to find it.

Yeah, I can't find it. It's very annoying. But yeah, it was literally like, yeah, imagine you're in a British English garden having a tea party. That's right. Come on. It was, it.

Was.

It.

Was truly, truly awful. And that I guess in, in one, uh, session, I, I got great value from ChatGPT and it showed me how utterly stupid it was at the same time.

Yeah, well, this again. I mean, I see so much of, um, people online saying things like, oh, soon AI will do away with human workers and it'll automate everything for us and we won't have to do anything anymore. And it's like, I just don't think people really understand how utterly incompetent and incompetent in the true sense of the word, in the sense that it is absolutely incapable of thinking for itself. It's not actually intelligence. No, it just does very specific things using a prearranged set of rules. And yeah, it is very good at some things and absolutely terrible at doing anything sort of remotely creative. Um.

Yeah. Who was it famously said in the entertainment entertainment, you know, the recipe for success is to be, um, a good entertainer. Say, for example, you know, a singer was to be, to be sincere. And once you've learned how to fake that, there's nothing stopping you.

Interesting. Yeah, I see. Yeah, but I think it's true, isn't it? I mean, I think just going back to the point we were making earlier, this is what humans are particularly good at picking up on is whether something is sincere, real, based in expertise. You can see through the bullshit. Yeah. The mistake I think a lot of marketers make is that thinking that the job is to bullshit. That is not the job at all. The job is to actually, you know, find a way of showcasing something genuine.

That's right. Okay, well, episode one hundred has been, uh, as, as dreadful as the rest, so that's good. Uh.

Don't oversell it. Whatever you.

Do. Um, and as we move forward as, um, um, people who've got a podcast with at least a hundred episodes, I'll stop saying that now. Uh, we'd love to hear from anybody that wants to come on and tell us stories about growing businesses, tell us stories about marketing, tell us stories about anything you like related to, um, digital marketing. And and we use that term loosely.

We've not had a guest on for a while.

We haven't. No.

We should find someone to talk about AI.

We've had some of these professional podcast booking companies getting in touch and they want dreadful, you know. Um, yeah. Arthur two sheds Jackson to come on and talk about some two sheds.

Jackson. What does he sell?

We never heard that Monty Python sketch. It's very good. The Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson. He's actually a composer I think. Is he? Yeah, but all the interviewer keeps saying, asking him about his the sheds and then he and he. And he's trying to get them to stop talking about the sheds. It's really it is very just Google it. Just YouTube. Arthur two sheds. Jackson it's a very, very good Monty Python sketch. Um, okay, so literally enough of this drivel. Thanks for listening. And I think the next one hundred episodes will just be automatically produced by AI. It will beep beep boop boop.