Building an AI Creative Director: From Ideas to Finished Content With Claude

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Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. And today we have a really, really awesome episode. Now, you might not think from the title that you need a creative director, but I'm telling you, you're going to have some serious breakthroughs if you create any kind of content that involves concepts that are in your mind or from your experience. It is going to blow your mind. And I hope you, I would say like cuddle up and listen along, but that's not the right phrase. I hope you, I hope you actually give this podcast interview the entire listen because you really are gonna be blown away. I've discovered a whole bunch of new things that are shifting the way that I think about using AI. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Nikki Saunders. Today we'll explore how to build an AI creative director. My special guest is an AI strategist who helps creators and small business owners authentically create online content. Her community and company is Lion's Behavior. Her content system is Draft Loop. Nicky Saunders, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?

What's popping? What's poppin'? I feel like I haven't been here for a minute, but it's always great talking to you.

I know, but I see you a lot. Like, you were just— we were together at Social Media Marketing World.

Yes. I'm so appreciative of our, our relationship because I get to talk to you at least once or twice a year. So that's, that's— oh yeah, that's all I need in life. That's all I need. Well, and it's great having you as a friend and you're very creative.

And this is why I'm really excited to talk about this with you today. So let me ask you this question. Um, when it comes to AI and creativity, what are some of the big, like, mistruths or misconceptions people have about AI when it comes to creativity?

Yeah, I feel like people think it's a complete replacement, right? Like it's either AI or it's us, right? And depending on how you put yourself out there, there are going to be some haters that are like, no, AI can't do it. It's all human. And then people are like, I'm all for AI. I don't even want to hire nobody. And really, it's about integration. It's really how does both of us, the AI and us as humans, can work together to get what we need done in a more efficient and more productive way rather than like, okay, I'm going all in on this one, or I'm going all human. And Just we've seen this happen too many times with technology, where we should actually learn that the more that we integrate it to our workflows, to our businesses, to even some of our personal life, it just works out so much better. Like everybody is so much happier, gets more things done. We have our time back. Some people are making more money with it. It just depends on how accepting and open-minded you are with AI, and it's neither like neither one is right or wrong. It's just. Preference at this moment.

You know, it's funny because I know you and I have talked in preparation for the show, but we were also— we threw a spontaneous panel together because somebody got hurt at the conference and we had like former Ulta Beauty, you know, creative director and a bunch of people up on the stage. And it seemed like we all kind of felt like AI has kind of unlocked new levels of creativity for us. Do you feel that that's true?

Yeah, I think because when I use it, I can speak for me where I may have an idea, but then I give it to AI And it like drafts up another thing. And it makes my vision a little bit more clearer. I'm like, okay, you're like, kind of there. But actually, you just triggered a whole new idea. And so it gives me kind of a little bit of confidence. I have almost like a creative buddy that I didn't have before that can be like, I kind of get what you need. Let me draft this up. It's probably not 100%, not even probably 60%. But we can continue to have conversations. So I think my creativity personally, and the people that I've worked with, their creativity has taken to a whole new level, because now it's allowing the vision to be clearer.

I love it. And are there any other kind of benefits that we should talk about of it? I'll just free flow a little bit here. I sometimes am not always in a creative mindset. Like for me, I have certain times of the day that I would call my creative zone. And I found that AI allows me to extend that zone. Because sometimes I call it like the flywheel effect. Like, I'll be a little creaky and rusty at the end of the day, but then I'll start interacting with AI to kind of get those creative ideas flowing. And then all of a sudden, I feel like I'm expanding my, my creativity timeframe. Have you found that to be true as well?

I do. But I think for me, the upside more is like having that 24/7 brainstorming buddy, right? Like, I'm more of a night owl than anything. So like 2 o'clock in the morning, I can't call nobody respectfully. For other people, right? So I'm now going, hey, like, so there's this Instagram carousel that I saw. And I wanted to know, like, how did they create it? Like, can we break down the different elements? And like, sure, let's break this. So I'm having a whole brainstorming thing at 2 o'clock in the morning instead of waiting till I wake up. And then, oh my God, I totally forgot it anyways, because I didn't write it down or whatever. That's another thing, the memory. Sometimes I'll forget something. And I'll be like, Hey, what did you know? What was that idea that we had two weeks ago about you know about Instagram or about YouTube or something? And it'll pop right back up. So I think for me, that type of upside of having something that also doesn't judge you, you kind of need that like affirmation validation sometimes of like yo, your idea is pretty good for at least a momentum. Now granted, we have a whole market to. tell us different sometimes. But at least that start, the confidence that we may need to be like, oh, okay, that's a great idea. Here's all the different ways that we could look at this. It's good with me all day, every day for that.

And I also find, because I use it more as a copy editor, you know, helping me with my ideas from a, from a, from a scripting perspective, and also from the written perspective, it'll usually tell me, look, this is what has merit. And I like the direction of where you're going. But here's a couple things I want to caution you about, right. And I feel like that is super, super valuable. So, so the idea, folks, is if you're listening right now, and you do not have a creative person that you can kind of use as a sounding board, or use as a starting point or use as a refining point, we're going to talk about how to actually do that today. Do I have that right?

Absolutely.

Those are the main advantages, right? And then when you, when you have that, what does that unlock for you, Nicky? I'm just curious, other than being able to talk at 2 in the morning, does it lead to other things for you?

What we're going to be talking about today has allowed me to be present online without worry and without dry spells, right? One thing that I think any creative person or somebody who has to be creative, like business owners who have to jump into that creative role, we're not always 24/7 creative. But when you start to use AI as more of a system, then those days that you're not creative, you don't have to worry about it so much. Because now you already had certain things in the queue You have a whole draft folder, whole documents of everything that you've talked about before that can trigger, okay, I could just post this, or, you know, drop this over here. So for me, it's more— I've been more consistent. I've been more engaged with my audience. I've been just more present with different creative ideas. It allows me time to even think of new ideas. Whereas before, I was like, okay, it's Monday, it's Tuesday, I got to post this, I got to do this. And I don't have those issues no more.

Love it. Okay. So let's talk about what we need to be thinking about before we start creating some sort of an AI creative director. Is there any kind of foundational stuff that we just need to unpack a little bit here to help everybody?

Yeah, vision. I think AI is not a magic wand. We would love to think that, right? It's not the genie that everybody is hoping and praying that it's going to be. We still need vision. We still the same way that we would treat a new team member, a new contractor of like, "Hey, I want this done," and you can't just give them that, right? And they're like, "Okay, cool. Here." And it's like, "Wait, that's not really what I wanted." Like, you still have to be like, "I want this picture, this reel, this substack in this kind of way." I probably want it in like. Spaced out into 3 different paragraphs. I want to make sure that my perspective is the hook. You like, you still have to have some type of direction, but also have vision of like, this is kind of the end result that I want, at least bare minimum. This is the kind of the end result. Now, you may not have everything in between. That's okay. This is where AI goes, okay, I see where you're going. Let's talk this out real quick. Right? But If we don't have any type of vision or direction, this is where we start getting into that whole, oh, that's AI slop. And, you know, we've been seeing it all over the place. I know you've seen it from your side of things. I've seen it from videos and written, and it's like, okay, this is— you clearly did a copy and paste. That's all I think AI slop is. It's like, you didn't give it the vision and direction. So you took everything that it gave you. Here we go. And now we have very generic basic, what in the world is that kind of content that's out there? Once we have our understanding of what we want done, then we start to see a shift of the output that comes out.

Well, let's talk about like, because the word vision is broad, what do we need to give it in order for it to get our vision? Does that make sense?

Yeah. So if we're talking about from like a content standpoint, right, you can't just go, I just want an image of flowers. This is very basic, right? Let's just say that. I just want to— I just want an image of flowers. You want to have what is it supposed to feel like, right? What do you want the audience to like, understand at the end of the day? Right? What are some colors that you want to have? What are some things you want to completely not have in this image? That's what I'm talking about. As far as just the overall, you don't have to understand the minute stuff. That's where the conversation of AI is. But If you know, this is what I want, this is the color, this is the feeling, this is what I want the audience to do at the end of the day, like that goal, right? That's what you need to really spend time focusing on, or just even having a conversation back and forth with AI. You could— hey, I know I need this. I'm not really sure what the goal is. So can we actually even talk about what are some of the goals if I make this image? What can it do for my audience? What it can do for my readers? What can it do for those people watching? Like, can we at least talk it out? And then I can figure out exactly the direction and what I want them to do at the end. Is it a call to action? Maybe I want them to sign up to something, buy something. But if I don't know that in the beginning, it's just going to be whatever it gives you. And you're going to be like, okay, I didn't have anything anyway. So let me just put it out there.

Let's talk a little bit about style, because I know that's important to you. And I would imagine that goes here as a foundational thing, because everybody has a sense of what they kind of aspire to have things sound like or look like. What do we need to be thinking there?

I think Pinterest, I think screenshots, I think magazines, anything that gives you any type of inspiration, we need to show AI exactly what we like. It's not going to know what we like just because we say it. It sometimes actually needs to see it. So whether you're walking in the airport and you go to the magazines section, you see a cover that you like, that could be something that you could give AI. Maybe you like a carousel, maybe you like a certain type of reel, maybe you like a business card. It doesn't matter what gives you any type of inspiration. You collect that, you put that in a document, or maybe you could just upload it to AI as you go along, create a project and be like, hey, I'm just gonna dump a whole bunch of inspiration for us to kind of talk it out later on. But here you go, right? If you don't have that, you give up a sense of your brand a little bit. Like you just allow anything to be made. And that is the voice and the heart of your brand, where now you're having a little bit more control of, you know, You know what, I like this whole like black and white, but my shirt is still blue kind of look. I want that on majority of the content that's out there. It gives that dramatic but like the center feel of what I'm doing is important. And you're looking at what I'm doing. I want that kind of style. Here are some different examples of that. And so the AI could be like, I know exactly what that is. And it'll give you the technical terms because I literally talked to AI like that. I don't know what this is. But I like this blue and green thing around the corner of the flower. And so what is that called? Oh, well, that's actually the saturation is up. I'm like, okay, cool, cool. You know it, I don't. But you're teaching me. Then that's the great thing about sharing the inspiration, because it tends to teach you how to talk to it at the same time.

Okay, so we're creating a creative director here.

Yes.

And ideally, we're giving the creative director some examples of things that we think are beautiful. It could be a link to a website, it could be a screenshot of a layout, it could a picture that you took inside of a store and you love the aesthetics of it. It could be an image, like you said, a Pinterest board, all that kind of stuff, right? It's kind of like the same if you were to ask someone to redesign a room in your house, right? You're going to have like a mood board, right? Or you're going to have some sort of inspiration that is going to help whoever the artist is come up with the whole thing. And I would imagine if you don't know what your vision is and you don't know what styles inspire you, you can ask AI to interview you.

Absolutely.

And depending on which AI model you use, Some are better than others because some of them have images built into them. So you probably want to use, you know, maybe Gemini or ChatGPT to show you examples of what you're looking for. Or you might already have that, by the way. If you already have a business and you've already got products and services, you could put pictures up there of your website and all that kind of stuff. And you could ask it, for lack of better words, to create a brand guide for you, right? Like these are the fonts and colors and styles and how we write and all that fun stuff. So once we've got all that done, Let's now talk about like what the heck a creative director can do.

When I think of creative director, I think of a, a person or a role that is going to not only understand my vision, but guide me through different examples, different ways to do it, and then come up with the final piece with going through conversation. And I'm thinking about just a creative director from an AI way, because this is more of a team member than necessarily a here it is and it does everything. So when I'm thinking more of it is, hey, the going back to the, here's my inspiration, and here's my vision and my goal, the creative director is going to lay it all the way out and be like, okay, I see what you're doing. I can point out 3 things over here, like 3 tweets that you have automatically. You may have everything spread out, but this is really what we should be focusing on. This idea that you said out of The whole entry of your journal, that right there, that's the part we need to concentrate on. So let's talk about what that looks like from a content standpoint. I'm talking about substacks, I'm talking about carousels, I'm talking about video scripts, newsletters. We could take this thing that you said, and we could turn it into all of these things. Would you like to go ahead with that? Sure, of course. Let's— but I'm only concentrating on Instagram. So So as you can see, like this is a conversation that I'm having with AI that is my creative director, but it just, I don't have to just, here's a transcript, go. And it does that. It's, let's have this whole grand meeting. And at the end of this meeting, you're going to have tangible content at the end of it.

And just to help people kind of wrap their head around this, I have started doing these little Mike Thoughts from the Porch, these little 2 to 3 minute videos I'm publishing across 5 different social platforms, and they're all unscripted, raw, direct-to-camera video. And I just today literally realized, oh, I could look at my best performing video for the last 7 days, pull the script from it, and then have it written up as an article, short little social post, you know what I mean? And I could publish the same thing across all the platforms, not as a video, but as a little text post with a selfie. And in an ideal world, my creative director would have already come to me with this idea, right? My creative director would have said, hey, you know that video that performed really well? Let's create other kinds of content out of it. Right? That's kind of where we're going with this. Is that right? Like, create some carousels out of it, create some threads out of it, create some— a YouTube video, go a little bit deeper, right? Is that kind of where we're going with this?

Yeah, it sees your original idea and goes, oh, this is also possible. And sometimes we don't think like that. A lot of us, when we're creating content, it's like a one-and-done situation. It's like, okay, I made the video, now I gotta think of the next idea. This one is going to be like, hold on, But did you take this? And we can make it a little bit longer. We can make this into your weekly newsletter. Hold on, we could actually turn this into a long-form video.

Yeah.

Based off the engagement that you got from Tuesday's post, it shows that people are really interested in it. So let's see if you can turn it into a livestream. Like, that's what the best part about this, because sometimes we, we're so stuck in that one thing that we're doing, we're so focused on it, that it doesn't show— we're not even thinking about the other possibilities of content that it could create.

Love it. Okay, where do we start? Let's say we're kind of sold on this. Like, this sounds very attractive to, I'm sure, a lot of people now that we've kind of gone through this. Where do we begin?

We begin with creating the skills first, right?

Explain what that is for everybody, because skills is still something a lot of people are wrapping their heads around.

Yeah, no, absolutely. We're going to focus on Claude in this episode, right? Uh, Claude is amazing at taking some of the instructions that you give it and turning into a repeatable system, what I call a skill, right? So a skill is one of those things that, hey, I want you to write this in my brand voice. That brand voice part is going to be the skill that Claude is going to be like, I know that we've gone over all of your transcripts, we've gone over some of your posts, and I've created it into this, this instructions that anytime you say brand voice, I'm going to trigger it and write it exactly how you would say it. Right. So it's very easy in Claude. It's just really like create a skill. That simple.

You give it a bunch of transcripts of, of you and it will start to study the way that you speak and kind of write it in that style. Is that the idea?

Yeah. So when we're talking about the brand voice skill, you want to have every example of you talking. So that is transcripts from your videos. That's Zoom meetings, Google meetings, where wherever you are talking, that's tweets, threads, anything that you can give it. And then also at the end of it, go, hey, if you don't have enough information, maybe just interview me and figure out my tone of voice, my different keywords that I'll always say, and it'll store that as your brand voice skill. So that's one skill to start this off. The second one is going to be your social media style. Right? So it's going to study your video scripts, it's going to study your newsletters, your Substack, your tweets, threads, it's going to study the way that you write and articulate yourself on these different platforms, because you have different language in each of these platforms, right? And so it's going to remember that, figure out the patterns. And then anytime you're saying, hey, I want an Instagram caption in my voice, It triggers that. You don't have to go. They have slash commands and all of that, but you don't have to. You you don't have to be like slash brand voice in this slash platform with slash. You don't have to do that. Claude is getting really good to where it's like, hey, can you just create a tweet about this idea in my voice? And it could do that once you set the skills. So I think everybody the first thing you do, and this may trigger you to think of different other skills that you may want to do: image skills, video skills. email, how they, they can respond to your emails, however many skills. But for this example, I think brand voice skills, so it always understands how you talk, but then your social media style skill as well, so it can always remember the style of writing and speaking that you do.

Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to talk to you about something I've been thinking a lot about lately. You already use AI, and if you're like me, every single day you're using it, and you're not someone who needs to be convinced that it matters. But here's what I've learned from working with hundreds of marketers inside our AI business society over the last 2 years. The problem is almost never AI. It's trying to do it all on your own. You're testing tools that you're likely not using again. You're rewriting prompts because they don't sound right. You're probably watching tutorials that give you lots of ideas, but you have no idea what to do with it. And you're working harder with AI, not smarter. And that's exactly why I built the AI Business Society. Every live training is led by an expert practitioner who uses AI in their marketing all the time, and I'm personally there on every single one of these training sessions to make sure that nothing gets too crazy or abstract. You leave with something you can implement that very day. Plus, you're surrounded by a community of marketers who are just like you, and they're all there to support each other, and you get to be part of this awesome community. The investment is $497 for the full year. And if within the first 30 days you decide it's not for you and you join, then just ask for a refund. We're not going to ask any questions, but at least you gave it a shot. Head over to socialmediaexaminer.com/ai. That's socialmediaexaminer.com/ai. And now let's get back to the show. You said you had a really cool connector that kind of allows Claude to go out and kind of look at your stuff on the social platforms. Tell us a little bit about this connector.

Yeah, so I use Apify, A-P-I-F-Y. There's an MCP connector. And what it does is you point it to a platform, hey, I want you to get all of my YouTube videos, or I want you to gather all of the comments from my Instagram posts, whatever you want to do when it comes to social media platforms, it will do it. Or if not, it will create a task to be able to do it. And so you can take that, have it store into your Google Drive or your Notion, whatever your, your storage situation is. And so this will give it all the data it needs to feed it to AI so it can train it for your skills. So that was one of the things that I did, like one of the very first things, hey, if I want to make sure that we're going to focus on YouTube, download all of my YouTube videos Transcribe all the videos so you understand the way that I write scripts. You can find the patterns of what I'm missing, what I need to keep in, all of that. And that's just by me saying use Apify to grab all of that.

And it looks like it starts at like $29, or you can get a free version. Does it bring in your insights too so you can look at like what your top performing stuff is, or is it just pulling in the actual like content that you're publishing? Like, can it actually go out there and give you analysis on like, here's my top performing Instagram for the last week kind of thing, or not really?

It goes based more of like the outside vanity metrics, meaning like views and like comments and stuff. It doesn't go more into your backend. Because Apify could do this for even some of your competitors as well. So you could download, and this is great for like competitive analysis and on all of that. So it won't go into the backend of the metrics.

It'll pull views, comments, shares, all the whatever public stuff. Okay, cool.

Yes.

All right, cool. So, so far we've got 2 skills. We have the Your Voice skill, your brand voice skill, and then we've got this social media skill. So now let's start connecting all the dots together. Like, what do we do once we have these skills? And by the way, if you want to share how you're using it, maybe that would help people understand, you know, how it's all coming together.

So I have what I call draft loop, right? So it starts with starts with the skills, but then it starts with a project, right, a Claude project. And so in that Claude project, I am putting instructions pretty much saying, look, I'm going to give you access to my journal, right? What we're going to do when you get this journal entry is that we're going to discuss what can be created. And my focus is going to be Threads and tweets, Substack, YouTube scripts, Reels scripts, as well as my newsletter, my Content Corner newsletter, right. And so I have all of these instructions in that project. It's connected to my Notion. This is where I journal. You could journal in Google Drive, but I journal inside of Notion using AI meeting notes. And so I have this on a daily schedule because the good thing with Claude, they have Claude Cowork. And so Claude Cowork allows you to connect different apps that you have all into one spot, right? So you can schedule it to say, hey, at 8 AM, check this particular Notion page. If there's a new entry, then I want you to break it down into different content. And so So once that's discussed and everything, I have another connector named Higgsfield.

Wait, wait, let's back up. Let's back up the train a little bit because this is—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on here.

Okay.

First of all, you're using Notion.

Yes.

And you're journaling every day.

Yes.

So are you just speaking using like WhisperFlow or something? Just whatever you're learning throughout the day? Or is this from your livestreams? Like, where is this data coming from that's going into Notion that's serving as your source? For all the other stuff? Do you understand what I'm asking?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I actually use the featured AI meeting notes that Notion has, right? So I do have WhisperFlow. Shout out to WhisperFlow. But they have an AI meeting notes and I don't treat it for meetings. I treat it for transcription of while I'm walking, let me hit record and I'm just journaling my day and really going in on whatever's on my mind because I really believe everything can turn into content. Especially since I'm normally talking about personal and business. So one of those two, plus the AI knows me, is going to pick out a personal story, turning it into something valuable for my audience, or it'll pick up the business side and still turning into something for my audience, right? And so even sometimes I go like, I don't know what I— what to talk about. And I'll talk that out. And even that is a piece of content because some people just don't know what to create. And they should feel okay not always knowing what to create.

So you're like me, you go for a morning walk and you talk out loud. You act like you're talking to a human, but you're actually talking to Notion. Okay. And it's going right on in there. It's storing in there so that by the time you get back, it's in there. And then it sounds like you've set up in Cowork a schedule because you're connecting now your Notion into Claude somehow with a connector.

Mm-hmm.

And then at a certain time you have this scheduled routine in Cowork where it's going to look and see if there's anything new from Nikki. Is that what I'm hearing?

Okay. Absolutely.

And then at that point, are you triggering automatically some series of actions with your art director here or what? What happens? Like, what is it looking for when it looks to see if there's anything new from Nikki?

Yeah. So once it like 8 o'clock hits and it notices there's a new journal entry, it will then go read the journal entry and then come up with a document, another Notion page that is going to break down here are all the different content ideas that it came up with, as well as drafts of here are some different tweets, your newsletter, all of that. And then we can further discuss. Also, I made a carousel of different quotes based off of the things that you said. And it stops there because now I have to have further conversations. I'll probably get back to the computer, let's say like around 11 AM, and be like, okay, I see what you made. I like these two different ideas. Let's see if my avatar can write this out as a script so I can see if this works, right? And so this is also where I will connect like HeyGen, right? HeyGen has my AI avatar, and because it already wrote a script idea, it could just send it to HeyGen and it makes an AI avatar of me to see if like, okay, I like this. This is pretty good. And this is more for me, like a practice round.

So just so everybody knows, okay, so wait, so you're using HeyGen to show you what it would look like if you actually spoke this?

Absolutely.

You're not necessarily publishing it. You're just using it as inspiration. You could be, oh, I kind of like that. All right, maybe I could mimic that. This is really, really cool. First of all, this is crazy next level kind of stuff. Keep going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I see how I like it, how it sounds and everything like that. It also has like my little character. Right? So I have like a lion character, you can see it on my hat, if you're watching the video, but I have also like him in full body. So one of the content ideas then turns into a storyboard, and that we can turn it into an AI video that is more like a character video than anything, right? But this is all okay, I like this idea, we could do this. No, this won't be good for the storyboard. Let's skip that one. But that's where the instructions that I gave it, which was just like, I'm a journal and maybe get some tweets out of it. It's like, no, here's, here's how you sound if you was to do the video script. Here's how it would be if it was an AI video. Like you can make this as a real cool character video. Here's what it would look like as your newsletter. Now that you approved it, we're going to go through the format of how you would write your newsletter. We'll go through the format of how you would do your live streams and get bullet points. points on it. So now I go from I'm just journaling to I have my whole content for several days, but definitely that day if I just wanted to go all crazy on one day.

So, so far, here's what we've heard, and we're going to get into the journaling stuff, uh, in my next question here about it, you know, because obviously it's got to have good stuff to begin with to be able to do all this crazy cool stuff. But basically, At this point, we built a skill on your voice and we built a skill on, on like social media, you know, best practices, your best work, the things that inspire you. And then we've got this great source of data that in your case is coming from a walk, you know, in a debrief, just, just free flow kind of stuff. It could be any source. It could be— I don't know if you still livestream, but it could be coming from a livestream. It could be coming from Q&A with a client. It could come from almost anything, right? So that source material then goes through kind of a process which you have designed behind the scenes, right? Which is like, hey, pick the best of these, present these to me, maybe even rank the ones that you think are the best ideas out of the bunch, right? I spoke for 30 minutes, but here's maybe 3 concepts. Rank order the ones that you think are best going to connect with my ideal target audience. Right. And then you're human reviewing it at this point and you're saying yay or nay. And then what triggers it sounds like is a whole bunch of actions in this particular case where it's creating a whole bunch of things for you to review next. Is that— do I have that right?

Exactly.

How are you making all that extra stuff? I want to understand, like, what are the tools that are making, like, the carousels and all that kind of cool stuff?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so if we, we go back a little bit, so cool, journal, then the ideas that Claude is making, the different ideas, the different drafts from a written standpoint, right? Now when we're getting into to the carousels or the images of any sort, this is where I say, okay, I like this. It will then trigger Higgsfield. So because Higgsfield does images and videos, this is where now Claude is acting. Now we see images right inside of it. It doesn't pop up another window. It does it right inside of Claude, that same conversation that you're having.

It's directing Higgsfield basically, right?

Yeah, right. It's like Higgsfield— it has a Higgsfield widget inside of the actual that, right? So now you're starting to see things come to life with, okay, here's some of the images that we spoke upon. And then cool, I like that. Let's turn that into a video, right? Let's turn that into maybe a really dope fast-speed video with my character. Then once again, it'll trigger Higgsfield into doing that. I like that video script. You know what, let me see how I sound with that. Then it'll trigger HeyGen, right? And this is all based off of the approvals that I do from the initial draft that it comes up with. If I don't approve anything, none of this happens. But because I'm approving certain things, cool, then all of this would be taken care of. And like I said, anything with the written side, because what Claude is really good at is is writing. Yeah, I mean, like, if once it understands your brand voice, and once you give it that certain format that you want, it's going to get it very probably about like, I would say 80-85% kind of the way that you would like it. And so now I'm like, okay, my newsletter comes up every Friday, let's do one for the newsletter. It'll come up with the whole draft, come up with different pictures based off of Higgsfield that we say that we need. And boom, I have everything that I would need, plus some on the side when I go through my creative drought that I do sometimes.

A couple quick things. A lot of people that have been on the show have been using Magnific, and I know Higgsfield is kind of similar. I'm curious about what your preference is. And then a little something I discovered for everybody. For those of you that are on the Max plan, Claude Fable 5 Low is exceptionally good for writing really tight Hooks and really short copy. It's better than Opus 4.6. And the only reason I know this is because I had Gemini go out and do all the research on which is best for different kinds of writing.

Have you tried Opus 5 yet?

I have. And Fable 5 Low is actually still really, really, really, really good. Okay.

Of course.

So again, it's like one of these kind of cool things where you got to experiment with these things. What I loved about what Gemini did is it went and did all the deep research and all the stuff that's Wasn't even a deep— it's just basic research. Like, Fable 5 is the most costly of all the things to use, but it's super good at precise, concise things. And I haven't pitted it up against Opus 5 because it just rolled out, you know. But I do know that a little tip is that you might want to use the more powerful models for the punchy, short little stuff because it's really, really good at that. Now back to Higgsfield versus Magnificent. Is this just a personal preference, or is there a reason?

Yeah, I think, I think everything at this point where we are with AI, everything is a personal preference. Whether you use ChatGPT or Claude, whether you use what you said or Higgsfield, like, I think everything's a personal preference.

What do you love about Higgsfield, just so people understand?

The whole all-in-one, all the images, all the videos in one location, and, and the, and the community. The community is really dope over there as far as getting inspiration. They always share what other people are creating based off of their permission, of course. But so I like when I am like, I don't know what kind of videos to make, or I don't know, like what kind of style. That's another place I would go to as far as getting inspiration is actually Higgsville and their community of what they're creating over there.

Now, I guess the question, since we're really talking about social content here Have you been able to get your director to actually schedule this, or are you still doing that yourself?

I'm still doing that. I'm still— uh, yeah, I'm— I have a thing where I'm not necessarily trusting AI with social media platform access just yet. I don't know how this— especially with what's going on with different violations with the Meta side of things, I don't I don't— let me keep that still.

Yeah. And by the way, folks, what I love about what Nikki is doing and also what I'm doing is I am the source of the content. Like, I'm not going to say that this is AI content because it's not. It's human content that I created that is essentially being reformulated by tools, right? It's actually my source material. That's where you get a lot more confidence, right? If you made a video or you spoke into something and it just helped you say it differently, That's not AI content. That's Nikki content, and that's my content. You're just having someone edit it and reformulate it for you. That's my personal opinion. So let's talk about garbage in, garbage out. So like when you journal, like, like, like, what are the things you're talking about? Because for a lot of people, the whole idea of just free-flowing and journaling is kind of like new.

Mm-hmm.

So how can we create really good ideas that can be sourced? For, you know, where we're going with all of this.

So I read a book that actually inspired this whole flow, which is The Artist's Way, right? Um, and they make you do kind of like write 3 pages every single day, right? That's where it started.

Oh yeah. Is this the one where you have to physically write on a piece of paper?

Yes. Yes. Okay. Right. Um, so I graduated to like, I can't do that no more. And Now I at least got to talk about it. Let me go more into my natural. If I need to be consistent, I'm going to speak it out every single time, right? But what that taught me is that not to necessarily come in mind with a structure of how to journal. Like, what we're seeing on social media is more authentic styles than anything else. And so if you already come in mind of like, okay, It's supposed to say this and this and this, you're already lost. So I go more into, first off, 1 to 10, how am I feeling? What am I proud about? Right? What happened yesterday that kind of inspired you? What got you down? Right? Just those kind of like just personal checks that then can trigger a whole conversation. Because once you go, okay, I'm proud of this, and yesterday this inspired me, this got me down, like naturally you're going to elaborate. And And it's not my job to go, this is going to be a really good content idea. So let me go on, on, on, on and about it. I'm just going, this is my life, right? This is what happened. Yo, I contacted inside of my community, this person, and this is what happened. Like, I went live for 3 hours, and here was my energy. And this is what we went over. I'm just doing an overview so that AI picks up the patterns and goes, You know what, based off of your best performing YouTube video, your Instagram, this topic does really good. You know, so let's go and elaborate on that as a, as a tweet, as a Substack, as a newsletter. So when I'm going in journaling, I'm not so focused on the, the content ideas. I'm more focused on how am I feeling? What am I proud of? What happened yesterday? What is on my mind? What is some unfinished business or whatever? And if you do have ideas, drop them. If you don't have ideas, be very upfront. I don't have no ideas. And I don't even know— and break it down. Why? Act like the 2-year-old. I would— I asked myself why at least 3 times. Y'all don't know any ideas.

Why?

Well, because I feel like I'm in a drought.

Why?

Well, you know what, these things are starting to stress me out. Why? And so then while you're saying why about 3 times, you actually come up with the true reason. And down the line, that can turn into something as a business idea, that could turn into a content idea, that can turn into a livestream, something like you just go in however you want to talk about whatever you want to talk about. And it always turns into that.

I love this. And what I do is I go on prayer walks, and I just literally talk to God out loud. Okay. And I tell him everything. Now, I could be recording this if I really wanted to. I could talk about, okay, this is what kind of frustrated me. This is what went really well. And then I'll start saying, okay, let me, let me kind of process what the heck's going on here. I think I have a limiting belief in this area. I forgot about this area. And as I talk this stuff out, you act like you're talking to a friend, right? Like, literally, if you were to call a best buddy, And you just tell them kind of all this stuff. And then what happens is when you— I tell everyone my mouth is my computer, which is privately what I tell everybody. Like before there were computers and before there were keyboards, we spoke by our lips. Okay. And I think I'm a verbal processor. I know you are, Nikki, as well. And I find that when I speak things out, all of a sudden I start connecting things in my brain and I'm like, oh, I forgot about this. Oh yeah, this is how I dealt with this once before. Oh, there might be a moral or a lesson here that I could do in my next little video that I create, right? And you just process it out loud. And then all of a sudden, I find when I process it out loud, bling, a light bulb will go off sometimes by the time I get back. But this is where effectively we're doing the same thing, right? You're talking about your fears, your frustrations, your concerns, what went well, why it went well, what you would do differently, all that kind of stuff. And that's all feeding your journal. Now some people are like, I don't know if I want AI to have access to all that stuff. What do you want to say to that?

It's a preference. You don't have to see— this is the thing.

Yeah.

Even if you don't do the journal thing, you do meetings. So you can set up that same thing that I said based off of, hey, check my Zoom, transcribe that, and then let's do this process. Check my Google Drive for my meetings that I've done over there, then Do what it could be. It could be any source. My source is journaling. But your source could be your YouTube live streams or any type of live streams that you do, your meeting notes.

Yeah, your meetings with your, your assistant or your staff, right?

Exactly.

Talking about, talking about the vision of where you want to go and some of your struggles and stuff.

It could be a podcast interview. It could be anything that you, that you do that has any type of text. That's it.

And the key to all of this I think, and I want to get your thoughts on this as well, is you have to have something for AI to work with. And once—

Yes.

You get it, this authentic, true stuff that's going on and you've given it the vision, hey, I really want to be the person who talks about the things no one else will talk about, right? I want to be the person that's talking about the things that everyone is worried about. Like, for example, in my case, obsolescence, right? A lot of people are concerned that AI is going to make them obsolete. So I'm talking about that. That's like my overarching thread. Like how to adjust your mind and your thinking in a world that's rapidly shifting so that you are not obsolete. That's like my, my arc, right? And everybody has like that kind of arc. When you get that data into AI and then AI is the director, now all of a sudden it can say, ooh, you got— you're onto something here. Oh, remember when you did this last time, right? This worked really well. Maybe you should do this again. Is that kind of where we're going with all this?

When we're looking at the content side of things, as creatives, we normally go more to feeling. But this is going to allow us to go more into the data side. So we can have a balance of like, not— I don't feel like it's working. Well, that's a lie. Because actually, you've talked about this topic 4 other times, and you actually got over 10 comments going back and forth. And so even though you may be bored of it, because a lot of us may feel if we talk about the same things over and over again, it's boring, and no one cares.

Yeah.

Because even though we may feel bored, or we may not like it, now AI is figuring out the patterns and being like, I'm gonna get you right back here. Like, I know you want to go over here, but I'm gonna get you right back here because the data is showing that it works. And I need you to stay right in this path. Because this probably could be your breakthrough if you stay right here. The biggest problems that we have is that we just go left and try to think of new ideas half the time when And really, the data shares, nah, we are in the right path. If we just keep going over, like hit that same spot on that tree over and over again, it'll finally fall down.

Nikki Saunders, this has been a really fascinating unlock for me, and I'm sure many of our guests. There's going to be people that are going to want to reach out to you on the socials. What's your preferred channel? And then if they want to potentially work with you in some sort of capacity, where can they Yeah, @thisisnickys, N-I-C-K-Y with an S.

I answer my DMs on Instagram, but you can follow me anywhere. I'm definitely on YouTube if you want to binge a whole bunch of great videos over there. And if you want to work with me, nickysanders.com, you could just go there. It has everything there.

Nicky, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Absolutely.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com/ASummit. By the way, if you haven't been following me on the socials, I've been publishing daily Mike Thoughts from the Porch on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X. And I'd love you to follow me over there and be sure to follow this show on whatever app you're listening to if you're new to the show. And I would love a review and also let your friends know about this. You can tag me on any of the socials that I'm active on. Do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I am your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

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