Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.
Intro:Never fear, hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we We
Liz Moorhead:don't need to disclose anything.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. And by the way, Chad, I love, in the chat pane, it's funnier if you watch Linus tech tips, which I have watched Linus tech tips. So I I will say that, yes, lack is whack.
Liz Moorhead:I was here with Nick Fravargo. Yeah. Nick Fravargo, lack is whack. I'm I'm here for that. I love that.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Lord Lord lack, you whack, homie.
Liz Moorhead:I am going to admit that while I'm excited for the conversation you and I are about to have today, George Yeah. I'm a little nervous. So, typically, for those long time listeners, first time callers, I typically am in the role of the question asking. I get to be a fussy little bee interrogating everybody about their thoughts and feelings. Periodically, George will catch on to my scam and be like, no.
Liz Moorhead:No, Liz. You tell us your feelings too. And then I have to say something smart, and I hate it. But today, I am so thrilled to be having this conversation with you, George, because let me let me pull the curtain back for our listeners right now. Yep.
Liz Moorhead:Today, this is another conversation about AI because George and I, in parallel, on our own and then also collaboratively, have spent, what, the past nine, twelve months deeply experimenting with AI in terms of how we integrate into our systems, our processes, content. Yeah. You have a talk coming up at inbound. You wanna plug that real quick? What day is it?
Liz Moorhead:What's that topic?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's September 19 at 09:45AM to 11:15AM. It's one of them ninety minute, their talks at inbound, and it's future of content AI harmony and human touch. And so, hopefully, you can get, scheduled for that, save the seat, be there because it's gonna be it's gonna be real interesting, down and dirty, a lot of, information that you'll expect and maybe a good amount that you won't expect to be in that room, to be honest with you.
Liz Moorhead:Oh my gosh. I will be front row. So if anybody was in the second row, I apologize. I'm a six foot tall monstrosity, and I will be there with my little party hat and my little confetti poppers. It's gonna be a good time.
Liz Moorhead:And then on my side of the fence, and this is where I get a little bit anxious. This isn't just me grilling George about AI. No. I get to go in the hot seat this week because I recently published an article at sidekickstrategies.com, which talks through my human powered AI content framework, which are the processes and tactics and tips that I use to actually use AI. And, George, other let's start here.
Liz Moorhead:Other than you sending me a quick Slack going, so you made a reference to Victorian children having consumption, and I don't get it. But this article is fire. I I'm so curious what your thoughts were because you give me a lot of latitude and leeway to just write whatever in my dumb my dumb brain. And given that AI is something you are so passionate about, I I am curious. Well
George B. Thomas:so let's back up a little bit because she started to throw out, like, a time frame there. And I was like, well, I've been messing with AI for twelve plus, you know, maybe almost the last two years since it came out a little bit. You may be nine months. I feel like, dragging you, kicking and screaming, to be honest with you, into this AI conversation. I I'm just being honest.
George B. Thomas:But true. I'm being honest. But true. And so what's funny is when this article, first of all, when you came up with the idea of the article, I was like, oh, I I like this idea of this article. I think there's gonna be some key things because I was super curious of how does a human who comes kicking and screaming from a content strategist standpoint, how does their brain evolve?
George B. Thomas:What changes? What do they start to look at? What do they think about? Because if you take historical SEO and content creation and you think about this just, like, plethora deep layer of AI powered blah blah blah conversation that was happening on the Internet, like, how do you disseminate to, like and here's some valuable pieces on this. That is the other side of what everybody's talking about is AI generation from the beginning.
George B. Thomas:You can create to, like, AI generation. Here's how you can finesse. And so I kinda giggled when the article came out and when I was reading it. But but the first question that I wanna ask you is and and, again, this is a safe space. It's all about being honest.
George B. Thomas:When you were in the mode of kicking and screaming, and I sent over the first, what I'll call, two to three massive pillar posts that were, like, kind of AI generated, human powered, my brain research, but AI generated. Like, what was your initial thought of, like, oh god. This is where we're headed? Like, unpack that for me a little bit.
Liz Moorhead:It was a two things are true kinda situation, George. On the one hand, I knew this was something that we needed to do, and this was a process we need to to go through together. You know? I I knew even though my initial reaction was, am I being punished? You weren't actually trying to punish me.
Liz Moorhead:But I think what happened is that I faced a situation, and you and I have spoken candidly about this. So most of this won't be a surprise. We had to just start from ground zero and throw AI spaghetti at the wall. Because the one thing I will say about it is that I think I was in a different position than maybe some other content strategist who are working with big visionary leaders on their content were in. In a lot of cases, I could imagine scenarios where a boss is showing up saying, this is what I want you to work on and publish.
Liz Moorhead:I would just I I think I would have had a, like, a meltdown because they wouldn't have seen quality deficits, and they weren't coming to the table in the way that you were, which is, okay. This is something we need to do. This is something we need to work on. And by brute force, why am I am I am dragging us both over the cliff, and we are gonna work on this together. Now beyond that, though, when I first looked at these pieces of content, I think I looked at it in a way that a lot of people who are a little bit purest about content creation are, which is there is a big difference and a much different locus of control when you are a content strategist who I have the vision.
Liz Moorhead:I am setting the strategy, not just at the high level of what we're talking about over the next ninety days, but at the topic level. And then who am I talking to to get that information? And what are the precise questions I'm asking so I know I'm plucking the exact expertise out of their brains that I need in addition to their voice and tone. So we go from that method. Right?
Liz Moorhead:We go from that to suddenly being on a I have been given the biggest lump of clay from which I am unclear on which the strategy came from, not what the topics were. I understood what we were talking about. I understood why we were writing about it. But when I was initially looking at things, it was just this, like, I have to do reverse engineering to understand what this is. I have to this is less of a strategic job and more of a cleanup job.
Liz Moorhead:And so there was this weird kind of topsy-turvy thing where it was like it felt really painful because even though it might on the surface look like, well, I'm giving this a piece of content, fix it. It is an entirely different set of skills that are kind of painful because you always feel like this is not the way I would have done it. This is not the way I would have done it. And I'm not saying that from the perspective of I would have written it from scratch with quill pen in the dark on a Tuesday night in the rain. Like, no.
George B. Thomas:Well, maybe.
Liz Moorhead:I mean No. I put this in the article. I am an inherently lazy person. I just my my assumption for a while, and I don't think I'm wrong. I think in some cases, this is true.
Liz Moorhead:AI can be used to solve the right kinds of lazy in the content process. But it goes back to a conversation that you and I had, and this is and I put this in the article. I said, what actually flipped the switch in my brain was when you said, Liz, I'm well, one, I'm not trying to hurt you. I I want your brain to help us solve this problem because you and I both saw the same problem. People were picking up AI and churning out garbage, and they still are.
Liz Moorhead:Like, you and I hear this probably multiple times a week. We hear our peers going, well, that's clearly generated by AI, or we think it to ourselves. How many more ever evolving landscapes can we deal with in copy? Really? Like, just stop it.
Liz Moorhead:So I felt good in that you were forcing me to solve a very big problem, right, which is similar to what happened to me six or seven years ago. How did I come up how did I become a pillar page and topic club cluster expert? Because Kathleen Booth made me, and I didn't want to. How did I become a prolific newsletter writer, at Impact? I grew our newsletter from, like, 1,200 to, like, 40,000 people, and I'm doing it now with Beyond Your Default because I was forced to by Bob Ruffalo and Kathleen Booth, and I did not want to.
Liz Moorhead:So we are back again doing the same thing. But the thing that switched the the the switch that flipped to my brain was when you said to me, George, do not look at AI as a replacement. Look at it as an assistant, and we were off to the races.
George B. Thomas:So that's where I wanna go next is because, again, I think this episode is gonna be for those folks, whether it's small business owners, whether it's content creators, whether it's content strategist inside of organizations. I think there's gonna have to be this unlock from what is maybe the old purest form, into this new AI model and understanding, or there's gonna be the people who just jumped in, started creating crap, and now they're trying to backtrack into something that will actually work in a year of 2024 and beyond where SEO and content is becoming even more extremely difficult with changes that Google's making and the way that users are actually finding information in these large language models versus Google being a little less of the all source knowledge light and truth. So I wanna go back to that. Like, when I said, think of it as an assistant instead of a replacement, Talk to me about the dominoes that had to drop in your brain and kind of the inner journey, if you will, of, like, oh, that mean because there has to be dominoes that dropped in a level of curiosity that went in multiple directions.
George B. Thomas:Unpack that a little bit for me.
Liz Moorhead:Well, the first part is going to be the probably a brutally honest answer that doesn't sound as sexy or strategic as, one might think. But, George, I think this is what you will deeply relate to as well as any solopreneur or entrepreneur or business owner who spends most of their time working in the business and on the business. I spends most of their time working in the business and on the business. I desperately need an assistant. I cannot hire one right now.
Liz Moorhead:I can't. And so the moment you said it to me, I'm like, I can have one. I can have one. And so here's where the dominoes started falling. Right?
Liz Moorhead:One of the things that I work with you know? So we work together. We do content, for our clients. We do strategies, things like that. But one of the things that we also offer, is I do content manager training.
Liz Moorhead:So I work with new content managers, whether you're a content strategist, content marketing manager, whomever it is that owns the content strategy and is responsible for the production. Right? And one of the things that I always teach new content managers is this idea that I will teach you frameworks. I will teach you best practices. I will teach you rhythms.
Liz Moorhead:Right? Be building that strategy every 90. Every two months, you should be doing this. Every week, you should be doing this. Right?
Liz Moorhead:Teaching you the foundational elements. But one of the most important things you will need to master in your first ninety days as a content manager is what your unique processes are. And so this is where I think it gets a little bit tricky, but this is where it got really exciting for me. Because I'm sitting here going, no wonder I don't relate to most of these articles trying to tell me how to use AI. These are not process these are not my processes.
Liz Moorhead:This is not how I operate. This is not where I work. So one of the first things I did is I started sitting down and I said to myself, okay. When I look at the content work that I need to do, I created I've created two buckets. Painful, heavy lifting that I have to do category one in order to get to category two.
Liz Moorhead:The high impact value stuff where my brain actually needs to be fully present. And so that's where I started filtering in little things. Right? Like, George, you know how many hours I spend. Like, I I think people will be baffled to learn how much I actually spend talking for my job.
Liz Moorhead:I spend Yeah. Probably 50% of my time when we're, like, at full capacity interviewing hours and pillar pages, messaging strategies, website pages, brand voice and tone workshops. I will have transcripts that are literally a hundred pages long. And what I but that was my only way. I couldn't take notes during the workshops because I had to be fully present as an investigator tapping into my superpowers of asking great questions and building rapport and building trust with the people who were working with me.
Liz Moorhead:Right? I can't be there in but then I also asked the
George B. Thomas:work assistant could be.
Liz Moorhead:But here's the thing. So then that transcript pops out. Right? It's a hundred pages worth of stuff I need to go through. Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:So that's where I started. I'm like, well, what if just I tried for funsies one day. Take this 50 page transcript. Can you just tell me what the list is of things I'm supposed to be running through? And it spit out a list.
Liz Moorhead:And what was great is that it didn't do the work for me, but it saved me probably about two to three hours of highlighting, combing through, making sure I didn't miss something. Like, it gave me immediate direction and immediate actionable stuff. So that's where it's, like, little stuff like that where it's like, well, what are the parts of the process that hurt the most, and how can I reduce that pain?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's it's interesting because I think you stumbled into a thing I when I pull out here is that, a lot of the time for the past two years that I've been doing AI or working with AI, it it it hasn't been for worksies. It's been for funsies. Meaning, I've been curious and just, like, will it do this? Will it do this?
George B. Thomas:Can it do that? And, like, trying to push it and myself to, like, new levels of understanding what it could help as far as pain relief with the busy day that we have. The other thing that I love that you said in that is it allows you to get past phase one to get to phase two. And when I heard you talking about phase two, it's actually where you can start to insert the humanness.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah, buddy.
George B. Thomas:That right? That that Liz adds into this. And so what's fun is if I think about you kicking and screaming, me creating the original kind of docs that came over is there was a human level at the beginning. Meaning, I was doing research. I was telling AI what I wanted to pay attention to.
George B. Thomas:There was an output of some information. I was putting my little thoughts and brain children around it, then it was coming to you, and you're able to get through some pain points and start to humanize it on this other level. So that's what I wanna kinda get to too because you started to write in this article, like, things that you are asking ChatGP to do and this, that, and the other thing. But for sure, I want you to start to dig into these, and I loved when we got this section, the my AI content tips, tricks, and hacks. And so when you look at a piece like I, sent over, this list that you have, like, who's the audience?
George B. Thomas:Be specific. How do you how do they feel about this topic? Like, unpack some of this list. And the fact that it's drawing from your historical content strategist brain set and knowing how to interact with your AI assistant and what you've seen as far as, like, good, bad, and ugly that kind of got you to this list.
Liz Moorhead:Absolutely. One of the things I will tell you right off the bat, it's something I wish I had written in there, but we're gonna say it for our live audience here in in the studio and also maybe on LinkedIn. I have no idea. But you have to ask yourself to start. Are you an artist or are you a masochist?
Liz Moorhead:Because you have to make that decision. Because if you're sitting there clinging to parts of your process because of the purity and the you will die. I will tell you one thing that has made me feel really good about what I'm about to dig into with some of these tips and tricks is the fact that I know because of my level of expertise, I know what to ask. I have never once since the AI machine has come along ever felt like my job was in jeopardy even when I was kicking and screaming. Because you're right.
Liz Moorhead:I was, like, I was a whole ass here behind you, George. I am stubborn. My first word was no. So, like, we know what we're dealing with here. Right?
Liz Moorhead:But you have to ask yourself that question because it you have to ask, am I clinging to the parts of my craft that matter, the artist, or am I clinging to the parts of the process out of fear that's just itself inflicted wounds? Masochist. So when I started digging into this, I started thinking about, well, what are the ways in which because it started small. Right? Can you just read this and tell me the thing I forgot?
Liz Moorhead:And I'm also like you. I use chat GBT. I'm like, so these are the four weird things I have in my pantry and my freezer. What am I gonna make for dinner? And then it'll spit something out, and I'll still eat a burrito instead.
Liz Moorhead:It's just you know, it happens. But when I
George B. Thomas:I like burritos.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. Exactly. So when I think about my content tips, tricks, and hacks, I started to think, okay. So if I excel in a particular area, I also have to do the same to my assistant. Right?
Liz Moorhead:So I treated my assistant like a human. It is a robot. I named him Greg. That is my chat GBT. His name is Greg.
George B. Thomas:Nice.
Liz Moorhead:Okay. I like him. He's fun. I started thinking, well, if I know what my strengths and weaknesses are, strength, interviewing, storytelling, personality, jazz hands. When I think about Greg, strengths, he can move through things quickly.
Liz Moorhead:He can organize things for me quickly. He can find things for me quickly. He could do lots of things really efficiently. Weaknesses doesn't know how to tell a human story. Will only ever be as smart as my inputs.
Liz Moorhead:And it is a Yeah. And Greg is very literal. Greg is Fabio. Greg is a beautiful golden retriever who is just there to make me happy and give me the shit I need. Leap quickly.
Liz Moorhead:Sorry. Hi. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean?
Liz Moorhead:So that is the first thing I would say. You have to recognize that your outputs will only be as clear as your inputs because let's go back to what are the first things you and I ever did together. In all fairness to you, you and I you did the same thing I've done, but I just didn't like, it didn't get past whatever because I didn't have anybody to share it with, which is like, we're just gonna see what happens. I'm a little unclear on the direction of a particular piece, so I'm gonna feed it some inputs and just see what comes out. Basic one zero one experimentation.
Liz Moorhead:And then I was like, George, do you have fifth do you have fifteen minutes? Do do you have fifteen minutes? Can we talk? And we hopped on, and we started reading through it together, and we were both like, oh. Oh, no.
Liz Moorhead:And that's when we learned a really valuable lesson that if you are confused, your outputs will be confused. And when I say confused, I don't mean like you're having some sort of existential crisis about a topic. I mean, if you're looking to AI to tell you what your story should be, you are already lost. You need to be showing up with those things. See, now the other piece of that is, like so don't expect clarity if you are unclear.
Liz Moorhead:On the flip side of that, this is where I think people struggle with how you and I use AI, and I'm very excited to start tapping into what your processes are because this are because this is hot. So it's getting very steamy.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. I like this way, though. This is good. I know.
Liz Moorhead:I'll get you back on Monday when we record Beyond Your Disposal. Don't you worry. When I think about how people get antsy with AI is they want it to reduce workload. Right? So I think people get a little squeamish when it's like, well, I'm now asking you to do different more front loaded work.
Liz Moorhead:Right? So let's go back to a different time. Once we had that weird experience where we're like, well, this is a big pile of word salad, and we don't know what this means. Yeah. Try again.
Liz Moorhead:You and I sat down and said, okay. So let's mash our heads together and understand what are the things that we need to tell it to do. And so we came up with a big strategy process. We basically decided what are all the questions we need to answer and feed to our Gregs and our chat g b t's. And Yep.
Liz Moorhead:Who is your audience? Be very specific. Don't just give me a persona. I want to know how they feel about this topic. Excited, proactive, reactive, stressed?
Liz Moorhead:How do they talk about their problems? What do they want in their words? Like, we really start digging into a lot of the stuff that I teach with the content compass, which is who, what, why, how. Those are your four pillars of any great piece of content. Who are you talking to?
Liz Moorhead:What do they want? Why are you the one to answer it, and how are you gonna help them? That is the blueprint for any great piece of content that you do. So that is the part I think that kind of turns people off a little bit. You mean it can't just do it for me with a one word prompt?
Liz Moorhead:No, genius. I'll tell you what I told a friend of mine over the weekend. I can't be. I can't meet your needs if I don't know what they are. And your robots feel the same way.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's it's so cool because there's a couple things that I wanna unpack here that by the way, some of these are just, like, life sayings that you may have heard or philosophies that you may believe in. But one of the things that when I was going into playing with AI that I was keeping in mind is something that my grandpa was used to saying, that's garbage in, garbage out.
Liz Moorhead:Oh, yeah.
George B. Thomas:And so I immediately was like, well, I don't trust the garbage pile that is just the overarching large language model. So let me make sure I'm putting air quotes here, good garbage or good data or good information in to the conversation that I'm trying to have. So you gotta pay attention to, like, what you're putting in first to then tell it what you want to get it out. And here's what's funny too is it's like some people when they start using AI feel like they just kind of, like, lose their brain or lose their way. Because if you asked any creative, what's one of the most important things that you have in your process, they would use these words.
George B. Thomas:Oh, we have to have a creative brief.
Liz Moorhead:Oh, god.
George B. Thomas:What we were creating, Liz, was basically like an AI version of a creative brief of what we wanted that assistant to do and the things that they needed to know about the project that we were building. And so did an did the, brief take time in the past? Yes. Is an AI version of the brief gonna take time? Yes.
George B. Thomas:But is the output in both situations gonna be much better than if we try to run through the scenario without it? The answer is yes. And so here's the other piece that I'm gonna throw in here is, like, we gotta remember that there's fundamentals in life for a reason. Like, somebody did just wake up one day and say, you know what? For business, we should have personas because it'll be something cool to talk about.
George B. Thomas:Yep. No. It's because you literally know the humans that you're actually trying to serve. And that's what I wanna go into for a second here too is, like, I was not coming at AI to how can I get the work done quicker? Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:I was coming at AI from a standpoint of how can I create something much richer? So talk to me about this mindset of, yes, it will speed up your process in certain areas, but at the end of the day, you're gonna be able to build something more rich and robust that actually serves the humans
Liz Moorhead:Oh, yeah.
George B. Thomas:Better than what you may have done before. Like, unpack your brain around that.
Liz Moorhead:Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that AI Greg, my my pal, Greg, or any AI AI tools. We're talking that HubSpot's AI content assistant that pops up in all of your rich text fields on website pages and and blog articles. It challenges me to be more broad. And and and what I mean by that is is that it I can sometimes get very tunnel visioned in my ideas, and I'll get really stuck on a particular topic.
Liz Moorhead:And I won't see the forest for the trees, and I'll forget things. Right? Whether we're talking about, hey. Can you just look at this transcript? Or one of the things I love to do when I am challenging myself, not even in writing.
Liz Moorhead:Right? I will feed it a bunch of research. So we we have a podcast that we do called beyond your default, and it requires a lot of research that I need to conduct very efficiently. Once I pull all that research together, I will sometimes throw it all in there, and I will give it a huge brief. I will say, this is my vision for this episode.
Liz Moorhead:This is some this is an example of stuff that George has talked about with this topic. These are the basic bullet points of where I think I wanna go, and here are a bunch of raw materials. Like, for example, just pulling back the curtain, like, super radically. We're doing a an, we're doing an episode next week about spirituality and feeding your soul, but I'm also bringing in secular perspectives. And Carl Sagan, who is a famous astronomer and writer and philosopher and famous atheist, has some incredible work that talks about soul and the human experience in a in a large vast infinite universe.
Liz Moorhead:I've read cosmos a thousand times, but I have not read everything that Carl Sagan has written, so I had him pull stuff out. But then I also said, now I have the all these things. Can you just spit out? I'd like I usually say 30 questions. What would you ask in this conversation?
Liz Moorhead:I usually only pick maybe two or three of the 30, but all of the stuff that's there tells me, oh, god. I would have never thought of that. I'm still the originator of the original questions that end up going into our conversation, whether that's cherry picking the ones I want or being inspired by something else. What's up, Nick from Fargo? That's right.
Liz Moorhead:Beyondyourdefault.com forward slash newsletter twice a week. I will rain hellfire in your inbox and tell you to do things you should be doing. But that is where I start thinking about. The other way I like to use it too is that sometimes there's just meat and potatoes. There's meat and potatoes stuff in your content.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. Like, here's another thing. Know your AI gaps. There is no aspirational rhetoric that AI robot will not try to pull into your piece of content. I don't care.
Liz Moorhead:It doesn't matter how many times I'm like, can you please just describe the problem? Can you please start by describing the it will start with the solution every time. So I always know I have to be much heavier there, but it allows me to expand things out. Like, can you just give me 400 words on something about, like, I'm just making cellular, like Salesforce versus HubSpot or something like that. I know I'm not gonna use most
George B. Thomas:of it. A great video Yeah. By the way. That sounds like a great video in the future.
Liz Moorhead:Just, like, I just pick it up, and it gives me some messy stuff to play with. It inspires me. I usually will still write from scratch. Maybe I'll pull a couple of things in, but it'll still do two things. Shorten my time to phase two where I'm actually creating.
Liz Moorhead:My brain is actually moving. I'm not just staring at a blank screen. But it also will usually say, well, shit. I would have never I would have never thought to bring in that parallel. I would have never thought to compare those factors because we always go for things like pricing, cost, da da da.
Liz Moorhead:Like, it just it makes me clear as an investigator that I'm I'm tackling all of my arguments.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:George, are you ready? Because I have a few questions for you.
George B. Thomas:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I might not be done with you yet, but go ahead and let's let's go after this.
Liz Moorhead:We'll get one final question with each other. How about that?
George B. Thomas:Okay.
Liz Moorhead:Here's my here's what I wanna know from you because you are in a very interesting position right now.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:One of the reasons why I'm gonna be in the front row of your talk is not only because I'm your number one fan and you're my friend, and we work together, but also because I'm very interested to learn from you on this topic. But this is a bit of
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Building the boat while you're sailing it. Like, you are actively learning every single day and iterating the processes that you are gonna be teaching live on stage at inbound. Yeah. And so I'm curious for you. What are some of the most recent light bulb moments you've had?
Liz Moorhead:Because I've looked at this deck over the past few months, and boy, is it changing.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:What are some of the most recent light bulb moments you've had where you're like, oh, crap. Now I gotta throw that out.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. That's it's it's rough because by the way, my rough draft is due, and I'm like, guys, you don't understand the world that I'm living in right now. Like, can I just show up and give the talk? Because this could change, like, a thousand times, which I know I'll have the ability to change it because I'll be doing it from my computer and different stuff like that, but you still have to follow the rules. But, Liz, here's the thing is, like, so many things have changed.
George B. Thomas:Like, first of all, let me tell you a little story. One of the things that I think makes me interesting or maybe unique is I have this mindset or this ability or power to say, how can I optimize the crap out of something? So so let's for example, let's remove AI for a second, and let's talk about video production. Right? When I worked back at the SalesLion, Marcus and I were talking all about, like, it's the year of video.
George B. Thomas:By the way, this is 2014. People finally caught up. But we're like, okay. So how can we optimize this? We used to live in a day where you'd set up the gear, you'd film the stuff, you'd have to pull the cards out.
George B. Thomas:And early on, I was working on systems where the camera was plugged right to the computer and the file could just go into the editor, And then it was like, well, this switcher and this board and this mic, and if you set it up this way, then you could just show up. And I got to the point where, you know, it's it's nothing for me to probably create three, if not five, videos a day a day and publish them onto the Internet. But that's because we removed any insufficient, like, pieces of the process where it was just like step up, hit record. Thirty minutes later, forty five minutes later, there's an edited version, and it's published on YouTube. So I have this mindset with AI, and so I've been working on, like, sure.
George B. Thomas:You can generate content with it, but what's the most optimized way to do research? Sure. When I type, I peck, like, you know, one finger at a time. How can I use AI to be the most optimized typist? Not a writer.
George B. Thomas:There's a difference. A writer has to be creative. A writer pays attention to a creative brief. A writer does all of these, but a typist types. You give them ish, and they type it.
George B. Thomas:They produce. So how do I turn AI yeah. They produce. Right? So how do I turn the AI into the typist, not necessarily the writer or the human or creative side of what they're actually outputting or producing?
George B. Thomas:So the reason I'm bringing all this up is because everything is about how is it human powered and AI assisted to remove any efficiencies. And I'll give you a great example of one thing that I'm gonna add to a PowerPoint presentation that I kind of giggled, but I was like, it sounds simple, but I know that nobody's doing it. And the fact that nobody's probably doing this and the amount of time it will save people, I have to talk about this as dumb as it sounds. So here's probably how most people use AI. They input some information because they know they gotta do some research before they actually create the thing.
George B. Thomas:But every time they put in, let's say, a URL, it will tell you about the URL that you put in, And you literally have to sit there and wait for it to give you the information on the research that you gave it in realizing that you don't need to know about the information that you gave it. It's literally giving you a summary.
Liz Moorhead:I told I told Greg to stop doing that. I I told Greg, read this and just tell me you read it. Stop summarizing. And that's what we hear now.
George B. Thomas:Literally, the prompt that I put in there is I when I go to start research, I give this prompt of do not give me any output on what you learn. Just add it to this conversation.
Liz Moorhead:Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:Some reads go away. At least five, ten, maybe twenty minutes depending on how much research I'm doing is saved. And now I can just get all the research in and turn to the, like, okay. Now let's get the creative brief portion of this going so that we can get real creative and start the typing portion of this. But, again, that's using your brain, the human power to get the AI to assist.
George B. Thomas:So that's just a small example of something that if you asked me thirty days ago, are you gonna put that in the presentation deck? I would have been like, no. A week ago, four days ago, I was like, this has to be in the presentation deck.
Liz Moorhead:Okay. So the next question I'm gonna ask you, I don't know if it's something you've already tackled in your presentation. And if not, I hope you do because this is coming from a content nerd who is working with, you know, we're both business owners, but when we work together, like, I'm working for you. You know? Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Like Yeah. We partner on things, but when we're doing this, I'm working for you, and I'm working for Sidekick. And one of the things I will tell you is that the only reason I'm probably ever got over the kicking and screaming hump is because how you approached it with me. And because you could George, you know, but you could drag me anywhere, and I will still say no. I would just I would just say no.
Liz Moorhead:I'm a toddler in a crate and barrel with a mom who does not wanna be there looking at spoons. Like, I wanna be watching Teletubbies or whatever. So what
George B. Thomas:Wow. That's a flashback.
Liz Moorhead:I know. So my question to you is this. What advice would you have for business leaders, marketing leaders, people who are probably going through the same process where they have put upon people or maybe people who are excited but resistant or confused and they can't wrap what are the tips that you have for them in terms of how they approach this relationship with their wary would be content nerds?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Well and so there's a couple things that jump into my brain there. One, you can't just sit on your mountaintop and say, hey. I want you all to start doing this. You'll find that most leaders go through the trenches with their, soldiers and you know?
George B. Thomas:And so if you're gonna ask people in your organization to do this, you should probably also be leading the way and figuring things out in yourself. So, like, for instance, with with us, Liz, you know that one of the things I immediately did was create a Slack channel that is the AI conversations. And any prompts that I would create that, had positive effect, I would share in the Slack channel so the rest of the team would get these, at that point, annoying pieces of information of prompts that they go, another one. Until they realized it was a library of prompts that they could go to and actually copy and paste and tweak to do the work that they were trying to do. So I was leading the way.
George B. Thomas:So if you're listening to this and you're a leader and you want to create these efficiencies in the places where it matters with AI, then you need to kinda lead the way, be testing, be be going with that. The other thing that I will say is you have to also give them time. Liz, I talked about and showed you AI stuff long before you were like, okay. Let me go ahead and dig this a lot. And so but it was that space to, like, let them brew through it in their own brain.
George B. Thomas:Let them have, as we've talked about on this podcast episode, their own moment. Because that's the thing. What what I feel like us as leaders were meant to do is we're to help people, understand, gain insight, and because of that insight, have an moment and then therefore take action. Because the actions that you've taken after that insightful moment are dramatically more impressive, and expansive than if I would have been trying to be like, I'm gonna beat you with this ruler till you use ALI. Like, that would have never never worked.
George B. Thomas:No. It would have never worked.
Liz Moorhead:Completely agree. And one of the things I will also throw out there too just on the other side of it that I thought you did really well was that I, I never felt at any time like I was at like, I was joking about it, but I wasn't dragged along. You you looked at me and said, I want you here working with this on me because I value your content brain, and we are going to solve this together. We are building this together. And I think that's another point that I really wanna just double click on for any listeners out there who are marketing leaders or anybody who is in some sort of top down or management situation with someone where you're leading the charge and somebody may be a little bit dicey about it.
Liz Moorhead:You have to genuinely believe this. Right? You can't just, like, ask him a couple questions and say, I checked the feedback box. But it was literally like, we're gonna mash our brains together. We're gonna work on this together, and the reason why you were the person working on this with me is because you are the content expert.
Liz Moorhead:And that just, like, was radically different for me. One question I do have for you, though, is, like, what are some of your most I don't know what you call funny, hilarious, but moments where you're like, well, I'm not gonna do that again with AI. That was a fun life experiment, and we're just we're because you talk a lot in this deck and this presentation about, like, the things we should be doing. But what are those behind the scenes like, no. No.
Liz Moorhead:No. No. No. So let's not.
George B. Thomas:Let's take a step back. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because one thing I've learned is that the more complex you try to make it, the more AI will start to hallucinate, and you'll just get some real radical information. And so one of the things again, I'm always trying to kinda simplify the complex and keep the conversations and the prompts very specific, very actionable.
George B. Thomas:Because as soon as you start to and and we're good at this as humans. As soon as you start to come into the conversation a little bit sideways, or you start to use a lot of jargon or things like that, where it'll just it'll start to just deteriorate and fall apart, and it's hard to see that it's deteriorating and falling apart until you try to get that actual output. And then you're like, oh, crap. Here's a real small thing for you, by the way. And I was like, this is interesting.
George B. Thomas:I'm gonna change this moving forward. As a creative, Liz, when you talk about what's on the page, have you ever used the word copy? I'm gonna go ahead and create the copy for the page. Like, that's what we always called it at different agencies that I would work at is, yeah, create that copy. For AI, it's text.
George B. Thomas:AI really doesn't know what copy is. Mhmm. Or to copy something is to duplicate something. And so as soon as I switch from saying create copy for this landing page and I switched it to create the text that I need for this landing page, the output was dramatically different. So, again, not a, like, massively brain exploding thing, but the difference in a word to the output of what we got was substantial.
George B. Thomas:The other thing is that I I wish that I would have learned something and implemented something earlier, and it took us a while to, like, research it and get it in place, the certain prompt. But the amount of articles or content that I created that I handed over to you for us to go through this process that said Delve Delve. Oh, jeez. Or or other AI, like, loved words. God, I wish I wouldn't have done that, or I wish more people would learn to do we literally have a prompt, which now, by the way, it's not even a prompt because I have it in my chat GPT memory.
George B. Thomas:So it knows with every conversation I have to ignore these words, but it's literally, a prompt that's oh my god. It's it's if you're listening to this, you can't see my hand gesture, but it's like the size of my headlong of words not to use when creating content. And so just, like, that element in the difference in what is output, it's it's funny. I've had I did a session for one of our clients, for one of their communities on AI and how to use it, and and it was kinda like the precursor to what's gonna happen at inbound. It's definitely not the same same thing at all.
George B. Thomas:But what's funny is this this human, this Human.
Liz Moorhead:Oh, yeah.
George B. Thomas:Said that George's chat GPT is the most tuned in GPT that I think I've ever seen anybody use. And I want everybody to understand that because here's the fatal flaw. For probably the first six to nine months, Liz, I used it without thinking about what car I wanted to turn it into or how I wanted to tune the engine. And the magical piece for me when we're thinking about what what don't ever try that again, is I would never use a vanilla type style chat system again. Like, the fact that HubSpot now has where you can put voice and brand into the blog tool, beautiful.
George B. Thomas:I'll use it. I'll have fun with it. I'll attempt it. I'll test it. If there is a tool where I can't give it instructions or I can't program a memory or I can't give it the, you know, what, my friend, Remington, would say is guardrails and goalposts of what we're actually trying to do on a day by day.
George B. Thomas:I would never do that again because, again, when you take time to tune it into what you want it to be, to eradicate the efficiencies that you know you have in your process and to build something that's deeper and richer that you wanna provide for your community, I don't run into a lot of those like, oh, what's this pile of heaping crap? I used to have those. I don't necessarily have those that much anymore.
Liz Moorhead:Amazing. Alright. George, you get one more bite at the Liz Apple. Make it good.
George B. Thomas:So I'm super curious. What is the thing that you've asked AI to do that you never thought you would ask AI to do in your life, but now you have done it?
Liz Moorhead:I would say poetry, but if anybody's been listening to this poet podcast for, like, the time, we know that's not true. Yeah. We've done it. What is the one thing I ask it to do that I never thought I would this isn't gonna sound very sexy. This isn't something mind blowing or groundbreaking, and it just comes back to something very simple.
Liz Moorhead:And this is where I think people will you know, I think we're looking for big, audacious, crazy ideas of how we should be using these tools when in actuality, the most impactful things, it's that eighty twenty rule. Right? Like, 80% of your efforts from come from or any 80% of your results come from 20% of what you do. Right? It's the same thing.
Liz Moorhead:Like, a small incremental ask will suddenly have an outsized ROI. A couple of things. One on the keyword research side. So this is something hypertechnical for my big content strategy nerds out there. So we've all been there.
Liz Moorhead:We've been in SEMrush. We get one of my favorite things about SEMrush is that's where I get to actually be an investigator because I have to use my little my little human hat. I have to say, well, what are people actually searching for? What are people actually looking for? It's very interesting.
Liz Moorhead:I love data because data it it data is the most human part of content strategy development for me because data is just the quantification of human behavior. It tells me where the people are. It tells me what the people want. Right? So I love those little ones and zeros, and I'm like this in my personal life too.
Liz Moorhead:I it's one time somebody told me it's like you're, like, arguing with a calculator. I'm like, thank you. But, you know, I I love that. But here's the thing that's tricky is that when you finally find that right broad match keyword that you really wanna dig into, you will get hundreds, if not thousands of results. So one day, I just got curious and said, I'm gonna give you a big prompt.
Liz Moorhead:I'm actually gonna give you a transcript of a conversation. I'm gonna give you the and the conversation had to do with, a a pivot and content strategy. It was between us and the client. Then I fed it a bunch of different prompts and said, this is my overall vision of what I'm looking for as this company's content director. These are the things that I'm moving away from.
Liz Moorhead:These are the things that I look at when I'm evaluating SEMrush results. I'm looking for a particular competitive density. I don't want commercial or transactional intents. I want informational. I don't want anything that's geo specific.
Liz Moorhead:I don't want this. I do want that. Like, it's a big laundry list. And, again, that's something that took me five to ten minutes to write up. But, again, this is usually a two to four hour activity.
Liz Moorhead:And I fed it all that stuff, and I said, could you give me I think it was 50 or 60 opportunities. List out the volume, sort it by keyword density, which is usually how I like to sort it, and maybe give me a few topic ideas of where you would take some of these keywords. Did I still have to do some refinement on the back end? Absolutely. Again, I'm a strategist.
Liz Moorhead:This is just about this is too much data for me to go through. And then also, I still manually went through some of it, but I was able to skim much faster. I was able to move much more quickly. But what was really cool is that there were a couple up opportunities where I'm like, I would have never Yeah. I would never thought of that.
Liz Moorhead:The other piece of it is on the back end. Hey. I just wrote this totally dope, totally human piece of content. Can you just give it a quick check over to see how you might have optimized it differently based on this keyword based on this attempt intent? And by the way, here are the top link to our 10 URLs to the top 10 websites that are currently ranking for this term, and I wanna beat them.
Liz Moorhead:I still do the human work on the back end of it. I make the changes. I decide what goes in, what goes out. It's still all my work. It's still human powered.
Liz Moorhead:So that that would I would say like, again, these are not sexy things. But if we think about the things I never thought I would ask, you usually think about AI for inputs and outputs in terms of create this piece of copy, text, whatever for me. But it it is an incredible optimization tool because it is it is a machine, and it knows what to look for. Now, again, you have to have the expertise. Right?
Liz Moorhead:Like, if you have a more green content manager who hasn't been doing strategies like I have for ten years, they're probably not gonna be as detailed in the prompts that they're doing. Again, but I've never worried about being replaced. So, George, here's my final question to you. You've been listening to a lot of this conversation. Obviously, you're here.
Liz Moorhead:You've been asking me questions. I've been asking you questions. What is one light bulb moment you are walking away with from today that's either gonna influence how you use AI going forward or the talk you're about to give in a couple of months?
George B. Thomas:Light bulb moment. I think for me, it's it's interesting because sometimes when I have this conversation, I'm so bought in, and I'm I'm so, like, down with it. And I I have to realize that there's probably gonna be a large part of the audience that is there because they're down with it, but there's also gonna probably be a large portion of the audience that is there because they're just curious of what's possible. And so one of the things that you're you're asking me questions, and, I thought you were gonna ask me a question that was like, how would you, tell leaders, or what steps would you tell people, to get started? Right?
George B. Thomas:You didn't ask me that question, but my brain went there. And I'm like, I don't have anything in my presentation deck right now that covers the, like, getting started portion of this. Like, I really do jump in to the deep end of the pool of, like, check out all these cool prompts. And by the way, you should talk to it like it's a human. And did you know that it can actually be your assistant for the things that are in a, like, I mean, I just dive in, like, immediately.
George B. Thomas:Like, here's what you're trying to do. You're trying to hit the easy button and creating a piece of crap, but you don't wanna create crap anymore. Let's create good things. And so I'm I'm sitting here understanding that my draft due date is passed, and I probably need to be like, alright. Here's the five things you need to do and think about to even get started.
George B. Thomas:And and I wanna ask the question now when I first start, like, by a show of hands, how many of you are right now using AI to generate any type of content in your organization? Because it could be, like, years before where all of a sudden I think it's gonna be a room full of people that raise their hand, but only 10% pea of the people raise their hand. And I've gotta be ready to pivot and have that piece of conversation. Now what's nice about that is if, like, a % of the audience raised their hand, I could skip through those, like, five or six slides real quick and be like, okay. We don't need that and actually dive into the deep end.
George B. Thomas:But I don't I don't have that safety net right now. And so for me, that was an moment of, like, oh god. She's about to ask me a question that I don't necessarily have an answer for. Well, I And I was immediately like, I should probably have an answer for that.
Liz Moorhead:I would make the argument though that the conversation we did end up having though about how you bring your people along with it is a is a critical part of that getting started process. Because Yeah. I I'm coming at it from the selfish perspective. Right? Let's talk about me and how you managed me, George, because I'm a pain in the ass, and that's what we had to do.
Liz Moorhead:Right? But when we think about it, you know, the thing I wanna point out here is that this is the part where it's like, it's so easy for you that you don't realize it's magic to others. Like, you natively default to thinking about processes because the human part becomes so easily to you. And so I think one of the things that people need to remember, and hopefully this makes it into your talk, is that part of the getting started process is taking a look at the humans who need to come on this journey with you of AI and catch the vision. And I think that's really critically important.
Liz Moorhead:And then one last question for you, George, because you you always put a bow on these conversations so well. Yeah. What do you want our listeners to take away from this conversation today? What what are the big things that you want to stick in their brain?
George B. Thomas:I mean, the the big things for me is you can't ignore it. You really can't run from it. And so the quicker you embrace it and the quicker that you put the right mindset to it like, for you, Liz, the unlock was think of it as an assistant, not a replacement. There's gonna be different unlocks for different humans, and that's gonna be an interesting part for me over time. The more people I talk to about AI and what we're doing and how we're using it is like, okay.
George B. Thomas:What do I need to search out their unlock. But here's the thing that I wanna leave you with is that the rest of the world is probably preaching and teaching this to you in a way that you don't even understand but is fundamentally wrong. Take a look at the Internet, and what you're gonna see is that AI powered this, AI powered that, AI, AI, AI. Ladies and gentlemen, this all changes when you flip it to the way that it should be. When you're using AI, your mindset has to be, should be, it's human powered, AI assisted.
George B. Thomas:Mhmm. That's the big takeaway that I want you to have. Human powered, AI assisted. In each step that you use it, where's the human power? Okay.
George B. Thomas:Now let's assist that. Here's the human power. Now let's assist.
Liz Moorhead:Nick Nick from Fargo has a has a question for you, and that's it it's what powered, George?
George B. Thomas:Oh, it's
Liz Moorhead:That's right. Power. And by the way, if you think we're ending a a whole podcast episode of about AI without an AI poem, sir.
George B. Thomas:Oh, boy. Here we go.
Liz Moorhead:Ready for me to take us out with a little haiku?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Let's let's hear a haiku.
Liz Moorhead:AI types away. I pretend to work hard, but I'm napping all day. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we'll talk to you next week.
George B. Thomas:We're out of here.
Liz Moorhead:Bye.
George B. Thomas:Okay, Hub Heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes.
George B. Thomas:FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub heroes podcast on any of the socials, and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.