Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And welcome back to another episode of The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today, we're talking about AI, artificial intelligence. Is it the future of marketing? What do you think, Melanie?
Melanie
I think it does have a space in marketing, but I don't think it's going to be as devastating as a lot of people might think it might be. I think there's still a long way to go in it. A lot of us have got science fiction in our minds of what it's going to be like in the future, but I don't think it's going to be quite as impactful as we first thought. Already we've got chatbots, and that's an AI of some description, isn't it? And that's really helpful and really useful. But I think people still actually buy from people. And we're all a bit coped on these days and know that not necessarily everybody that we're communicating with without hearing them is actually a real human. But I think that's also an age thing as well. I think older people want that real human contact, whereas the younger generation are just happy to go through a chatbot. What do you think?
Esther
Did you just call us old?
Melanie
Older people.
Esther
That's all I took out of that one. Thanks, Melanie. It's calling us old. Okay, well, I like AI. AI, like you said, it's not in its final stages just yet. We're not talking Terminator here. We're not talking end of the world, war of the world scenario. But we are talking about making life easier on people, and we all love that. There are AIs out there, like I said, chatbots one, but there are AIs that will write blog posts for you. There are AIs that now design images for you or take an existing picture and transform it into something completely different or add things in that weren't actually there. But part of the thing about AI is that you need to programme it. So you need to go in and you need to be very specific on what you want your blog post to say. You can't just go in and, in this case, talking about writing a blog post maybe with ChatGPT. There are others available, but it's the one that seems to be in the news constantly. You can't just go in and write me a blog post of 500 words. You need to tell it what topic, who your audience is. You need to be very specific, or it'll just spurt out 500 words on a topic that it decides. So unless you're willing to put in the effort to get the end result, then I would stay away from AI for a while until it... There's still kinks to be ironed out in terms of AI as well. It's not perfect. It blurts you out a 500 word blog, but you'll still have to go through it and read it and make sure it makes sense. It's not just done, post it on the website, happy days.
Melanie
I also think that the art of conversation, the art of creative thinking, I don't think it's going to come to an abrupt halt, but I do think sitting down, bouncing off ideas with a peer or a group of people and doing some real brainstorming is still really important and essential. Now I don't personally use ChatGPT to write my blogs for me. I do not ask it to write my blogs for me, but I do get ideas from ChatGPT on kinds of blogs.
Esther
Yeah.
Melanie
And I don't use... I mean, there's all these other websites, Headliner that helps you find the best headline. So there's all these tools that you can use free or paid. But I think it's still important that we interact and partake of conversation. I'm sure you've seen it as well before. I've worked with some clients and I've taken them off social platforms because they're spending so much time in the virtual world. They're losing touch with the real customer. And I'm a little afraid that that's going to happen as well. But in the same breath, if we don't all embrace artificial intelligence properly, I think we'll get left behind as well. So it's trying to find the happy medium.
Esther
Yeah, it is one of those things. Social media came out, was it 15 years ago or more at this point? And not everyone jumped in the bandwagon at the same time. Some people are only joining social media, Facebook, Twitter, whatever it may be, these days. Those of us that jumped on from the very beginning wonder how people don't know how it works. Going back old school, it's like somebody getting a washing machine for the very first time when they've been so used to washing the clothes by hand. But a washing machine is more effective, it's more efficient. It may not get the clothes as clean as you want to do, but it saves you a lot of time, energy, effort, and you can do more with the time that you save. So if you're using AI as part of your marketing, then automations, like we talked about in a previous episode, where you have a sequence set up already, then you're saving yourself time and effort. So you can go back face to face with your clients. You can spend that time doing other things to grow your business. So you're spending more time on your business rather than in your business.
Melanie
Agreed. So it's just like any time we use a freelancer that works with us or if you collaborate or partner up with somebody, it's outsourcing the work. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't oversee it still. Just because you're getting this work written and checked, you still need to double-check it. You still need to make sure it's accurate. You still need to make sure it's going with your brand persona. Some of these AIs, like ChatGPT, for instance, is awfully clever. It's got some amazing language skills and vocabulary in there. And if you're not really that effulgent with your words, then you need to dumb that down a little bit and make sure it's still working towards your brand, because otherwise people are going, Whoa, what's happened here? This person's eating a thesaurus.
Esther
Yeah, it has to sound like you.
Melanie
It has to sound like you.
Esther
But again, you can put that into the initial... When you first put in the information for ChatGPT, you can write it in the style of -.
Melanie
But you see there's a whole skill set to that, isn't there?
Esther
High school graduate or -.
Melanie
There's a whole peculiar skill set to just programming, which is what you're doing, programming ChatGPT.
Esther
Yeah. But like you said, it's not going to take over the copywriting jobs, the SEO jobs. It's going to help a lot. But people that are scared of their jobs disappearing or of people just using these AI tools for everything that they need, people are shouldn't going to realise that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. It's not the full thing that you would get from a human. So once you realise that, if you are thinking of ditching your copywriter or ditching your SEO person in favour of just using a free tool. Just remember, that's the key word. It's a tool. It is not a substitute, it is a tool. And if you don't review it and if you don't… Google is also going to be very on the case to make sure that it's not plagiarism, that make sure that it is written or reviewed, at least by human, because otherwise we could end up the same way that we've ended up with a lot of images, that people are using exactly the same images from the free image banks or using the same templates on places like Canva. And so everything looks and feels the same. And we're going to end up with that same thing if people just keep jumping onto ChatGPT and asking it for the information because it's just going to regard you to it's the same or similar information as your competitors.
Melanie
And that's something else actually a great segue. Some of your competitors are also going to jump on it if it appears that you've just been using the tools and not putting any originality in it. And there's a way of checking. They've had to do this because of academic classes and students getting these AIs to create their papers and that stuff. I do think AI is important. I think all of us, if we've got our business online, and we're not just talking social media here, guys, we're talking press releases, we're talking leaflets, flyers, anything that's promoting your business on any medium, I think it's useful. I think it's a great starting tool, but I think you still need to put your own personal input in it and just make sure that it's still on brand with where you are at the time.
Esther
Yeah, I'm like you, Melanie. I just use it for ideas and generating ideas. Some of the names of the podcasts are generated ideas from ChatGPT because it is difficult to come up with a different name after 180 plus episodes. You're going, What do I call this one now? You get brain block. I mean, we are human at the end of the day, and there's times that we just go, I don't actually know what I want to say, but I know it's something surrounding this. And I know of other people who use it like that as well, and it's just to get those initial ideas and then use it as a jumping off point. But yes, jump in at the ground level now when it's young and new, and it's not even that new. I mean, AI has been around. 50, 60 years at this point.
Melanie
Yeah, but we didn't discuss this when we were doing our first 10 podcasts. It wasn't in the marketing... In this marketing orbit, everyday marketing, three years ago.
Esther
No, we did talk about chatbots. We had Sasha Lidia on talking about chatbots.
Melanie
But that's as far as it went.
Esther
Yeah, but I think with COVID and stuff, things have progressed quicker because a lot of people were locked down for so long and had these projects in the back of their minds. So they got the projects done when they didn't have other things that they needed to do. That's just my thought, but there will be, ChatGPT is one, there will be loads more because once there's one, there's always more.
Melanie
Always.
Esther
But do have a play around with it, guys. Don't be afraid of it. You cannot break it ok. Just have a play around, review it, see if it will work for you. And if it doesn't, that's fine too. You don't have to jump on the bandwagon either.
Melanie
Certainly you don't have to jump on it straight away. There's a lot of tools that nobody's immediately jumped on. I didn't jump straight into signing up for the paid-for Twitter. I have now, but I gave it some time. I'm probably not going to do the Facebook verification either. I'm just going to see how that pans out. And that's already changed a little bit from the people who purchased it back in March. It's already changed a little bit. So why don't you let other people be the beta testers and they can work out all the little problems and the rest of us can just hop on later.
Esther
Absolutely. And on that note, we will leave you for this week and we'll be back next week with more Monday Morning Marketing. Until then, bye-bye.
Melanie
Bye, guys. Have a great week.
