How to use AI without ruining your content (and your connection)

Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm Ellie Scarfe. I'm a senior executive coach of just about 20 years, but now I spend most of my time working with other coaches who are looking to grow their businesses with more corporate clients. Today I want to talk about how to use AI without ruining your content and without ruining your connection to the people who read your content. And I would say that this is becoming a bit of not just a trend, but a movement in social media. So if you are on LinkedIn as often as I am and be embarrassing to admit that, but I'm on LinkedIn every day, multiple times a day, and there is definitely a trend that people are moving away from the purely AI written content. There's a real recoil from, from that, you know, from wanting to engage with purely AI written content. And I get it right, you can spot it. I think people are getting really savvy what is purely AI written content and what is not. Now, I am not a purist in the sense that I don't think you shouldn't use AI content just for the sake of it. My take is that if content is helpful, content is helpful. The issue is that a lot of AI content is not helpful, is overly genericized, and is using really predictable phrasing and certain tropes and even exact words that starts to feel so predictable that we kind of recoil from it. And that's where how I'm engaging, how I'm feeling about the AI content that I'm seeing at the moment, you'll all see like the EM Dash. If people see the EM Dash now, they're running for the hills. So make sure you are deleting them from anything that you get AI to write for you. And also our LinkedIn coach, Kate Merriweather, she has, she gives us lots of advice on different, different things that AI is doing a lot of the time. So there are these real predictable pattern, and whether you know what those patterns are or whether you just intuitively feel it, I think we are pushing away from the purely AI written content. Even if you have the world's best custom GPT. And don't get me wrong, I've used all these tools, but I'm moving away from it. And I want to show you some ways that we can still use AI to help us write our content and to come up with our ideas and to plan. And there's loads of different ways we can do that, but in a way that keeps our connection and our unique insight and our unique voice based on our Experience in a way that keeps that front and center. So that's what I want to talk about today. Now I'm going to be really practical. I'm talking about real things you can do if you do not want AI writing your content as a whole. Right? If you want to use AI as a tool and not be outsourcing your content to AI. So the first tip I have is that AI is really great at extracting relevant themes and questions to answer and suggested topics from the conversations you are having. So that might be, for example, if you are having sales conversations or and assuming you're recording them. And of course that needs to be very ethically and transparently done, but assuming you're recording those for from potentially from any other conversations you're having. Tools like Fathom AI, I'm sure a lot of the other note takers, when they put together your summaries of those calls, they also have the capacity to you can often edit how those summaries are presented. And so I've been experimenting with having Fathom give me a section that is what are some potential podcast questions or podcast topics that emerge from this conversation? Obviously with all identifying features removed. Now we have to be a little bit careful, I think from an ethical perspective here because firstly we can't record people without them being aware of it and we just need to be conscious of confidentiality. But then again, those conversations we are having are the most, the best insights we have into ideal clients, what's going on for them. And so even if we put AI completely to the side, what I would say is take a moment after your meetings to write down two or three topics that came up that could be LinkedIn topics, could be stories you'd want to share on LinkedIn, could be ideas that you had for future content. So you can do it that way, but you can use AI to help you. And it could be that you simply have a transcript, you feed it into your preferred large language model, whether that's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever, and you get it to give you some suggestions based on your conversations. It could be that rather than taking a transcript from a conversation, you could feed it what you are engaging with, right? So it might be posts that you've read, or it could be reading you are doing anything like that. It could be articles, snippets of articles that have sat with you, things you want to capture, and it can make suggestions from that. Now an interesting, interestingly, there are some tools now, so like the note takers, the digital note takers, like the fathoms, the otters, there's thousands of them. The ones, the ones that show up in Zoom as if they're a person, they're quite intrusive. And so there are now tools that are less intrusive where it is not immediately evident that there is recording going on. Now, I want to be really conscious that I'm not suggesting, suggesting you secretly record your conversations, even in your in person meetings. You can use these tools on your phone, in an app. Of course, we must use them ethically and let people know about them. It just means that they're not sitting there like a person in your Zoom meetings. And they're sort of a bit more, a bit less, I guess less intrusive is the best way I can describe it. Now, one of those tools I heard about from Samantha Imber in her podcast How I Work, she's recording a series called How I AI with with her colleague Neo Alpin. And so if you look up the How I Work podcast, there was a great episode recently called 13 AI Tools We Use Every Day. So I recommend you listen to that. And Samantha says she uses a tool called granola. And granola is something that captures conversations, but without showing up as a person in the meetings. You can simply click record when you have on your phone, in a meeting, on a desk. So there is a lot of tools out there that can help you do that, can help you with this note taking. But beyond note taking, I guess what I'm saying is they can take the notes and the AI tools can add a layer of intelligence to help you extract themes for content questions. You could answer pain points that have emerged and suggest topics. So that is one, one thing you could do. If you don't want your AI writing your content, it can tell you what you could write about based on those conversations that you're having. Of course, with all of those ethical points kept in mind, another great use of AI, I think, in our content is that it can be your copy editor, it can do it in a few ways. So it can simply be like a grammar checker, right? A grammar checker, a spell checker, a sense checker. But it can also, you can also ask it to give you very specific feedback. And the feedback will depend on what you want and the success of using it in this really well depend on how specific you're able to brief it, how specifically you are able to brief it. So, for example, do you want this piece to come across with a certain tone? Do you want to be particularly clear on one particular point? Do you want it to encourage a certain type of engagement? Do you want it to speak to a certain type of person? What it can do, you could ask it in fact to edit it to do those things. Or what I like is for it to give me a few points of feedback and you can say give me three points of feedback or give me three suggestions of how I could improve it in this way. Or you could be a bit less, less determinative in that way. But it is really great as a feedback giver, sometimes better than it is as a writer, to be honest. And the tool you would use for this is just whatever your preferred, preferred general, general tool is. So the ChatGPT, Claude's Geminis of the world. Another way we can use AI is with converting your content in one of a number of ways. And so this occurs when you have got some writing that you have created. So it's your intellectual property, it's your voice, it's your words, and you have it in some way. Now this could be, for example, you have a, a huge back catalog of LinkedIn posts. You may have a bunch of blogs that you wrote for your website. You may have programs that you've written or speeches that you've written, or keynote addresses or any of this pool of ip. And I always suggest that you do a bit of an audit on all of the IP that you have because it is likely a huge, a huge repertoire of content that you can use. What AI can help us do is a few things. It can refresh an old piece, right? So you could get an old piece, you could get it to refresh into your new business voice. It can refresh it in light of new happenings in the world, new challenges emerging in your ideal client industry. Really just to take it from being an old piece and then just refreshing it, that is something you can totally do. It can change the length of a piece. So you may have written a blog, that blog may be quite lengthy, but you would like to repurpose it using your words. And you have to be clear about that. You may want to repurpose it for LinkedIn, which is going to require shorter pieces of text and a slightly different way that we write in more bullet point style. So it can do that. It will also help you shift the audience that you are writing to. So you may have written a lot of your content to an individual buyer or an individual coachee, but as many people that I work with are doing, we're shifting more to targeting corporate buyers. And so that is quite a different audience. And it's a different way that we would write. So we could ask the AI tool to do that shift for us. We might be shifting our ideal client, shifting sector, shifting industry. And so we may want to say, okay, whereas in the past I'd written this piece targeting an education market, now I want to target professional services. Could you please rewrite it with that in mind? So all of those are ways we can use your IP in lots of different ways for lots of different audiences. And really not reinventing the wheel every single time we write something and using AI as a tool now, editing is key. So when we get the AI to do this, think of it as getting you 75% of the way there. But you still have to apply a strong edit, which is bringing your voice back into it, because it's very easy for the AI to take your voice and sort of for it to be lost a little. And I would always brief it, say, I want this to be in my voice, using my words as much as possible, but it will lose some of that and it may sort of not make sense in the same way. So make sure you're infusing that voice back into it. Another way you can use AI is for your planning and content. Planning is one of the best ways you can spend your time and is one of the things we are least likely to do. And the problem is, and look, honestly, I find myself in this bucket often as well. I'm not perfect at this. I don't know many people who are. But I do know that everyone who plans out their content in 90 day bursts finds it extremely valuable. So how can AI help it? Well, it can help us in probably infinite ways. But here are just two that can, I think is a good way to use it. One is that you can do a brain dump, right? So if you are like me, you have captured ideas everywhere. You have lots of ideas. The problem is that they're whirling around your head and your inbox and your notes app and all of that. And so what you can do with AI is you can do a bit of a combination of a brain dump, a copy and paste. I really do think using the voice feature is really great for this, the voice recording feature. And you just, you might go for a walk and just talk at it. Say, you might have to say, don't interrupt me until I tell you to, otherwise it'll stop and think you're finished repeatedly. But then once you've done that, ask it to create themes, suggest posts and get it into your schedule. Now you have to give it some detail about how you want your plan to be structured. So you might say, please create a draft content plan based on the following parameters. I want to post on LinkedIn four times a week. In those four times a week, I want two of those to be value based or sort of thought leadership posts. I want one of them to be more personality or content driven and I one of them to be sales or promotions focused. Everything should be oriented towards speaking to my ideal client and answering the questions that they have. It should use language that they would be likely to use and a lot of it as far as possible should refer back to their challenges and pain points and goals. So you would give it that information and it can then create a bit of a draft for you. Of course, again you edit it, you overlay your thoughts on that and you can go back and forth with it, or you can just take it and then work from there. Another way you can get it to help you with this planning process, if you don't want to just go freestyle, Brain dump stream of consciousness style is you can ask it to interview you and to ask you questions about your ideal clients, about their challenges, about your offers, and to help you identify these topics and these pillars that can go into a content plan. So whereas the brain dump style is more about you leading it by saying this is what I've got, this is what I want want back. Getting it to interview you is saying I want to create a content plan. Can you ask me what I need? What you need to know to help you come up with some post ideas based on these following categories. So that is a really great way that you can use AI and it's not writing it for you, it's giving you prompts and it's taking it from your brain. And then the final way that you can use AI to help you write your content without it writing your content for you is to help it help you produce easily, right? Help you to produce content easily. And part of that is getting, helping you to get things out of your head. And I'm really thinking about advanced level dictation. So this is sort of a slightly different thing to the brain dump, but it's when you're actually writing the post, if you're a person who doesn't think in writing and you think more in speaking, this is particularly for you. So what you can do is you can dictate and this will work with any of your large language models. So your chatgpts, your clauds, if you give it enough pre warning of what you're going to do. You can ask it to capture what you're saying and then produce a sort of a clean edited version of what you've said and then you can see what it comes out with. However, again, I learned of a new tool that I'm considering testing out from Amantha Imber and How I Work podcast or how AI podcast on the 13 AI tools they use every day. And this tool was called Whisper Flow. So W I, S, P R F L O W. You can check out the links in that How I work show notes of that episode and it lets you dictate, but it also has the smarts to if you sort of say I'm going to share, I mean five ways of doing something, it doesn't capture the four oh no, I mean section, it just says I'm going to capture five. And it says it lets you say, oh, hang on, cancel that, go back and restate it without you having to sort of edit it or go backwards or anything like that. So that seems like a really great tool if you are someone who prefers to talk your content out. And there is something I think that is quite magical about content that starts as speaking, because of course you will want to remove all the ums in the end. I believe that tool would do that and any of the tools could do that, that. But spoken content is very much more likely to be your voice. And it's literally your voice, right? So it's what comes out when we're not. Now you might want prompts, you might want bullet points. And of course, if you're going to script it, you might as well just use your script because we're not actually recording video recording content. But capturing you talking something through is much more likely to capture that true voice and be therefore so much different to that generic sterile AI content that we're trying to get away from. So there's a few ideas. I really hope that this has been helpful for you today. Honestly, just thinking this through has made me realize that I could be doing even more in this area. So I will get back to you. As I experiment with more and more ways of using AI without writing my content for me, and I have really moved away from using too much AI in my content. Certainly on LinkedIn it's not writing any of my posts at the moment. I use it to help me go from the episode to create show notes and to create a newsletter. But truthfully, I do so much editing, I'm not sure that is the best way so anyway, just know that this is live for all of us. If anyone is saying that they're an expert on this, they really aren't, because we have never been in this world. So if you would like to talk about how content fits as a part of your business growth and just how much energy you should be putting into it, then let's have a chat and we can talk about how my program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, might help you as you grow your business. You can head over to elliscarf.com bookacall and we can talk about whether the program's a good fit, what's going on for you, and all things content and AI. I'll be back next week.