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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
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- [01:02]
Erica Stanley
Welcome to the AI Explored Podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [01:14]
Michael Stelzner
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. 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. People say AI is really good as an AI intern, but are they thinking too small? What if you could build an AI CMO that becomes your most valued strategic partner? In today's episode of the AI Explored Podcast, we'll explore how to build your very own AI Chief Marketing Officer. My special guest is an AI strategist who helps women business owners easily build systems that grow visibility and revenue with AI. She's host of the AI Queens Podcast and founder of the AI Queens Society. Her creative agency is Mile End Digital. Erica Stanley, welcome to the show. How you doing today? Hi.
- [02:08]
Erica Stanley
I'm so great and so happy to be here.
- [02:10]
Michael Stelzner
I'm excited that you're here. So let me start with this question. How did you get into AI?
- [02:16]
Erica Stanley
Oh, gosh. Well, we're going to go way back. I have always been an early tech adopter, and it wasn't even always my fault or my choice. My dad worked for Apple when I was really little, so I literally don't remember not having a computer in our house, which is rare for someone my age. I'm mid-40s, so when I went to college, I started in 99. Those gorgeous, colorful imacs were all the rage, but it was not in our budget. So my dad took me to the computer junk store. We got a bunch of pieces and parts, and we built what we called the Frankenstein PC.
- [02:57]
Michael Stelzner
I Remember those days where you could get all the parts and kind of build your own computer? I also remember those neon colored, like orange and red. Oh yeah, computers. I used to work at Sears and I sold those darn things back in the day. I'm aging myself, but keep going with the story.
- [03:12]
Erica Stanley
The silver lining here was that I was the only kid in my dorm with a CD burner and this was the height of Napster. So I became the go to tech person for that and I kind of always have been doing that. So I was doing digital marketing since before Facebook even had business pages. I know you probably remember those days too. I started coding in the MySpace era. So when ChatGPT launched, there were a whole lot of creatives and marketers in my circles that were really hesitant and scared. But I just by the nature of growing up the way that I did, I dove straight in. I totally seen this pattern before. New tech that seems intimidating, but it ends up becoming essential to what we do. And I work with a lot of women entrepreneurs and a lot of them over the past few years they've been feeling really left behind by all of the bro culture marketing and in particular the AI content out there. So I've tried to position myself as the go to person in my communities for making AI accessible and practical for everyone that wants to learn it.
- [04:22]
Michael Stelzner
I love it and it's been one of my objectives because my audience is so overwhelmingly female across social media examiner to try to get more people like you on the show. So I'm very excited to have you here today. One one of the questions I've got is in your opinion, what do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions that creatives, marketers, entrepreneurs face when it comes to leveraging AI inside of their business.
- [04:44]
Erica Stanley
The biggest misconception I hear, and honestly I'm guilty of perpetuating this misconception myself, is that AI is best used as your intern. Like hey Claude, write me a social media post or help me brainstorm some ideas. But the more time I've spent with AI and the better that these tools are getting over time you realize that we are massively underutilizing them. AI can be your strategic partner. Really like a second brain, your right hand person in your business. When you treat it like an intern, you're just, you're leaving so much on the table.
- [05:23]
Michael Stelzner
I love it. So let's talk about when properly utilized and in this case we're talking about creating a chief marketing officer for lack of better words to help you with your marketing efforts in your company. What are the benefits? What are the upsides? Because I'm here to say that I bet most people listening have not created an artificial intelligence CMO for their business. So they have no idea what the benefits are. Right? So let's just talk about what it makes possible.
- [05:49]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, So I primarily work with solopreneurs or small teams, like one to two to three people. And these businesses, they don't have a huge $150,000 budget to hire a CMO or even like a fractional CMO or a marketing director. But, and I'm sure you see this too with the people in your audience. The women I work with, they are incredibly scrappy. The highly capable, a lot of former gifted kids, and we're used to doing everything ourselves. But what happens is, is you hit this plateau where you literally, you cannot take on any more work. Your referral network starts to dry up and you're asking yourself, like, should I be running Facebook ads? Do I need a content strategy? What is a content strategy? How do I get more visible and get myself out there? What they need at this point is a strategic marketing partner, and that's exactly where this AI CMO can step in. So I want you to imagine having the collective wisdom of every marketing expert at your fingertips. Right? So someone who has read everything that Gary Vee has ever written, someone who is well versed in Amy Porterfield and all of her courses. And even you, Mike, if they've read every blog, every newsletter you've ever published and really knew the insides and ins and outs of social media. And then you take all of that expertise and you can apply that specifically to your business, your brand, and your goals. That is what an AI CMO can do for you.
- [07:29]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and it can do it for as little as $20 a month.
- [07:33]
Erica Stanley
Yes.
- [07:33]
Michael Stelzner
And that's the part, right? Like, I want to bring this home because you said maybe you don't have a budget to go out and hire $150,000 a year marketing person because you're a tiny, scrappy little team. Well, what if you could have access to all the insights and wisdom that have been written by all the greatest marketers, that maybe you don't even live anymore, like Ogilvy or professional copywriters and all this kind of stuff, when you have access to that. And it's not just access to knowledge, it's access to insights that can be highly customized to your business. When that happens, I would imagine you can now have a strategic sparring partner, thought partner, who can Help you identify problems with your current marketing, help you figure out paths forward, come up with strategic plans for you. Am I right?
- [08:23]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, absolutely. It is incredibly powerful to have all of that knowledge at your fingertips, which, I mean, anybody can have by reading all of these books and having these resources. But when you are able to tie that in with AI and with business insights that are specific to you and your business and your goals, it just, it really turns up the volume on what you're able to do with that knowledge, with that expertise.
- [08:49]
Michael Stelzner
Now, folks, some of you are really smart and you're saying, well, what if I don't want a marketer? Or what if I want an OPS person? Or what if I want a finance person? Or what if I want a salesperson? Well, guess what? Everything we're about to talk about, you could just twist it a little bit, right? And you could create a role for whatever that special category is, Research assistant, whatever. But we're talking about marketing because that's something Erica and I are very passionate about. So I love this. I want this for my business. I do not have something like this, but I will confess that I do have a co CEO, which is AI. So I'm fascinated to learn from you today. So when it comes to the beginning stages of where we begin, when it comes to creating an AI cmo, let's just start unraveling this. Where do we start?
- [09:35]
Erica Stanley
Well, I'm so glad you brought up the other team members that you could create this for. I actually got this idea from a colleague of mine who had built an AI cfo.
- [09:46]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [09:46]
Erica Stanley
Because bookkeeping and finance was just, I mean, it's just the bane of her existence. So she needed somebody that she could tap in and, and just gut check, like, hey, I want to invest in this course. Is this in my budget? Is this in my best interest for my goals of my business? And so just every business decision that she makes, she runs it by her CFO first. And so I got that idea from her and have just like built on top of that.
- [10:11]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so where do we begin? Now if we're going to do this, Chief Marketing Officer, I want to start.
- [10:16]
Erica Stanley
You off on the right foot and not the wrong foot. You don't want to start with the tool. Don't worry about jumping straight into ChatGPT or Claude. I want you to start with the strategy. You've got to start with the foundation. So this is actually, this is the first phase of my brand to bot blueprint that I do with all of my clients. And there's three really critical pieces that you need to gather before you start building anything. These are the foundational elements. So first you need to document your brand. What is your brand? Or really like who, who is your brand? What makes you different from the dozens of other people in your market, in your space, in your niche, who are doing the exact same thing that you do, but why would they work with you instead? So this is where you can really kind of get into the authenticity of AI adding in these, these little pieces of you that are going to transform it from generic outputs. And we've all been there where you ask a question and you just get like, that kind of sounds like everybody else or it's a little bit mediocre. Adding in those pieces will take you from generic to like, wow, that sounds like it just came out of my mouth.
- [11:31]
Michael Stelzner
Can you give us a quick example of what this might look like is, you know, you said authenticity and what makes you unique, like maybe from your own experience or any of your students experiences.
- [11:41]
Erica Stanley
Yeah. So you can start with something as simple as your bio, your about page, things that you have already written about you, client testimonials, transcripts of phone calls where you have been on the call with clients and they have just been like raving about how happy they are about working with you. Those little pieces, those little like magical puzzle pieces that really start to paint the picture of why somebody would work with you instead of somebody else who does the same. What is your unique perspective or approach? How do you tackle a problem that's different from everybody else? What is your soapbox that you would stand on your hill that you would die on in terms of your industry? Like those are all of the little things that you can start to add in and start to build a profile for your brand that will go into AI word bank words and phrases that are things that you say over and over again. Like I, I always sign off my emails with cheers. And so having, having little things like that that your AI can reference, just make it that much more authentic, make it sound more like you rather than the, the little AI tells that we see when we're reading content and we're like, that sounds like the robots wrote it.
- [12:58]
Michael Stelzner
I love that. Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is first of all, we're at the very beginning here and we're talking about gathering information specifically around how you brand yourself. Right. And in the case of people that have a bigger business that they work for, they might have a brand that they've come up with for like their business, like my business is more than just one or two people, but that brand happens to be built on me because I'm the influencer. So there's certain things that I say over and over again, and people that listen to the show kind of know that stuff, but you might not know that stuff. And I like the idea that, like, if you're not aware of these things, just give it some of the things people have said about you, the way your bio is written, the transcripts from happy client calls and. And all these unique things like who you're for. Right. Obviously, Erica is for small business, women entrepreneurs. Right. And that's important. Right. That gives it a unique perspective. And there's probably things that you believe. Right. Certain presuppositions or creeds or whatever you want to call it. All that stuff goes into DNA of your personal brand, and that stuff needs to go in there. And I know that's just one of a couple things that go into this early stage. Did I get that right?
- [14:10]
Erica Stanley
You did, yeah. Voice values. Values is a huge one. And voice can be hard for people to pin down themselves. And those of us who have an AI little assistant that comes to all of our meetings, we are sitting on a literal goldmine of voice information. So that's a little trick that I have learned is, is that you can go into transcripts of any of your calls. It doesn't even have to be client calls, and pull those Transcripts and use AI, use ChatGPT to help pull. What are some common words and phrases that I use when I am talking about things that light me up?
- [14:48]
Michael Stelzner
I love it. And by the way, folks, you know, if you're. If you're on a workspace account with Google, you know, and you ever record one of these little Google Meets, you've got probably endless of these things, you know, where you've probably had a transcript with your team, and usually it does identify who's talking. Right. And you could just feed all that right into AI and you could say, hey, pull out some of the recurring messages that I seem to say over and over again, or give me an. Give me an analysis of kind of the way that I communicate. So. Okay, cool. So so far we've got a really good, like, starting place with this documenting your brand. What else do we need to be doing, you know, at this early stage as we're preparing to build the cmo?
- [15:25]
Erica Stanley
Okay, so the next step, you're still in the gathering phase. You haven't started building anything yet, so don't skip Ahead, where do you see your business going? What are you trying to accomplish? Right? So when you start a marketing campaign, you're not just going to start with like, I want 10,000 followers on Instagram. Why? Why do you want 10,000 followers? What is that getting you? What's the big picture? Right? 10,000 followers doesn't mean anything if it's not converting into revenue for your business. So you have to think about what's the big picture? What's, what is the end goal? You can pull this from your business plan, your vision statements, even those like late night Apple notes meeting, like notes to yourself where you kind of dream and you're honest about where you want to be in three to five to 10 years. Any of those can go into helping to define the business goals that you want to share with your new AI cml.
- [16:22]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. What else?
- [16:24]
Erica Stanley
Okay, the last little piece here, and we talked about this a little bit, is you're going to define the role. So of the three pieces, you've got your brand, your goals and then the role, this is where you are telling AI that you want it to be a cmo. Again, if you had unlimiting marketing budget and could hire any expert, if we could hire you, Michael, if we could hire Seth Godin, what expertise would you want them to bring? And now here's where the magic piece comes in. You can actually feed all of this expertise into your AI cmo. And you might have to think a little bit. You might have to dig or use ChatGPT or Claude's Deep research, figure out where you can pull that expertise from. Do they have blogs? Do they have podcast? Are the transcripts of those podcasts available? Can you pull an RSS feed? Do they have a YouTube channel?
- [17:18]
Michael Stelzner
Who are we talking about when we say they? Because I lost you there.
- [17:21]
Erica Stanley
Whatever experts you think are going to be best to serve you and your business goals. So let's say that one of your major business goals is to really improve the organic traffic to your website. So you want to focus on SEO and AI optimization. You might decide, oh, if I could hire Rand Fishkin to come in here and take over that piece of my business. Now where am I going to find the thought leadership that Rand Fishkin is sharing about SEO and AIO and how we as business owners can utilize his strategies in our business? So you can pull in that thought leadership and start to create these documents, start to create little repositories of information. It's like you're making a little reference book.
- [18:13]
Michael Stelzner
I love this.
- [18:14]
Erica Stanley
Not Even in your head. Like it's. You're making a little, a little reference document for yourself and you're going to feed that straight to the AI.
- [18:21]
Michael Stelzner
This is where this gets really intriguing. I thought where you were going to go was, hey, use ChatGPT to define a really cool role, job description for a cmo. And instead where you went is, no, you want to define the ideal cmo. They have all the experience of Seth Godin when it comes to like creative purple cow kind of marketing stuff.
- [18:43]
Erica Stanley
Yeah.
- [18:44]
Michael Stelzner
They have all the search knowledge of Iran Fishkin. They have all the savvy marketing savvy of Amy Porterfield. Right. And you pick these people and then you actually go out and you find somehow data out there that summarizes some of their stuff and you're gathering up, for lack of better words, this insight. It's one thing to say they have the insights of Seth Godin. It's another thing to tell AI that here, Seth's blog and go read everything. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say? Like, talk to me a little bit about that.
- [19:17]
Erica Stanley
Yeah. So Seth has been, he's been publishing his blog, I think for 25 years. So he has a huge encyclopedic reference on different marketing. So it's going to be a lot for your AI to pull from all of that. So it would be who of you to go and read and find the best pieces that serve your particular goals. But yeah, I mean, it's all out there. Michael, you've been publishing newsletters for decades.
- [19:48]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, well, and I am not really an expert, I'm an interviewer of experts, but I have written a couple of books and I would imagine that those books probably live in the LLMs, unfortunately. But yeah, you know, I mean, like, what I like about what you're saying is like, if you can take someone who is known in public and has produced a lot of content and maybe their YouTube videos, I can imagine you can go into deep research in any of these AI models and you can say, go find some of the signature pieces of content by Influencer X that are on this topic. Right. Maybe growing a small business or whatever. Right. And then it will go out and find that information. Then you could probably ask it to reverse engineer the essence of that information into a piece of data that you can add to your knowledge base. Is that kind of where we're going with all this?
- [20:34]
Erica Stanley
Yep, that's exactly where I'm going with this.
- [20:36]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, sweet.
- [20:37]
Erica Stanley
It's kind of like, and this, this was unintentional when I started with my story, but I feel like we've come full circle. You're creating a Frankenstein cmo, but.
- [20:48]
Michael Stelzner
But much better outcome.
- [20:50]
Erica Stanley
Yes.
- [20:51]
Michael Stelzner
I want you to read something a business owner told us after Social media Marketing World 2025. She said, quote, the AI teaching was mind blowing. I realized if I hadn't attended, there's a good chance my business would have been obsolete within a year. I'm now so far ahead of my competitors, unquote, said agency owner Melanie Miller. That hit me hard because that's exactly why AI feels so urgent right now. It's not hype. It's a real competitive advantage. So here's what we did. We created AI Business World 2026, our first dedicated AI conference. An entire conference focused completely on practical AI marketing training. It takes place April 29th and 30th at the Anaheim Convention center in California. Walking distance to Disneyland. You get 20 sessions to choose from with AI practitioners who will show you exactly which tools work, how to build workflows that save hours every day, and how to implement AI without losing your authentic voice. You'll leave knowing which AI tools to use for each marketing task. No more guessing, no more tool paralysis, just clarity and confidence. If you have a Social Media Marketing World 2026 ticket, this is included free. Otherwise, early bird standalone Tickets are only $597. Don't get left behind. Get your tickets at AIbusinessworld live. Finally, AI training that actually makes you irreplaceable. Okay, so up to this point, we have talked about three different things. We've talked about documenting your brands. We've talked about identifying where the and why it's so important, what the vision statements are. And then we've talked about really defining this role in a way that is super precise. Ideally by calling out certain people that are known thought leaders. And ideally you can even use AI to kind of gather up some information on them. But even if you don't, there's a good chance that the AI models understand a lot of the the stuff because they've scraped the entire Internet. So we've got now this massive stuff. Now. What's next?
- [22:58]
Erica Stanley
Okay, so now that we're out of the data gathering phase, now we're going to start actually building it. My own process with this has been a bit messy, but I want to share this journey. I want to be super transparent. I like to work messy when I'm working with AI. So I will usually have my AI screen on one side and I use Apple Notes for everything. So I've got an Apple Notes document and I will just like copy and paste and I'm constantly switching and moving, which is not what I preach by the way. I preach that, you know, pick a platform and get really good at it. That's not what I do. I bounce. But I started off this journey by creating a custom GPT and I started, I did a workshop on this. I created a freebie, I called it my Bish Please system, my brand informed systems hub. And it basically it was a way to gather all of this information and put some in the instructions for the custom GPT and then some stuff that would go in the knowledge base. And so I have my own mile end Bish system. That is my cmo, that is a custom GPT that I can either start a conversation with or if I've already started another conversation in ChatGPT. You know, you can tag a custom GPT into a conversation if you have not done that. It's very cool if you've got, you know, over on the left hand sidebar where you've got all of your custom GPTs pinned. If you're in just a regular conversation and you want to bring in like imagine this is an actual person, you're bringing them into the conversation, into the room and you type the at symbol and then start to type out the name of that custom GPT and they'll pop up and you can select them. Then their entire knowledge base, their custom GPT, all their instructions are now into that conversation. So that is how I started was by creating this custom GPT that was the CMO for my business that I could bring into conversations that I was having. Then I moved over to Claude and the reason I did that I started using Claude projects more because it would generate artifacts. So if you have not seen that, it will pop up over on the right hand side, separate individual documents. So as I was using this CMO and I just, I took the easy route, I copied the same instructions from my custom GPT. It was almost the exact same knowledge base but I had been building so the same knowledge base from my custom GPT and I just popped that into a cloud project. But as I was talking with it, I could tell it to create an artifact. And hey, here's your LinkedIn posts for this campaign, here's your blog post for this campaign, here's your three newsletter ideas. And so it puts those into separate artifacts which are then super easy to save and it helps me stay organized. I just, I love the artifacts portion of working with Claude. Projects.
- [25:56]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. Let me add a little bit to this, because I am a heavy cloud user, as regular people who listen to the show understand, I use artifacts. What's great is artifacts look like little Microsoft Word documents or Google Docs, but they can also do a lot more. They can create interactive charts, they can create HTML code, so they can kind of render what it might look like if it was a. If it was a graphic or something like that. And they are very, very sophisticated. I understand that Chat GPT has something called Canvas, which is very similar. I don't use Canvas. I'm a big Claude user. But what I like about Claude is it just seems to be a more sophisticated creator of the written word, which is really what drew me in. And projects are very, very easy to use. Have you found that to be the case as well?
- [26:41]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, totally agree. And I've used Canvas a bit with ChatGPT, and I end up getting frustrated because you'll go to change something in the canvas and then it will just change it back, and I don't know why. So I just. I kind of gave up on Canvas and have switched over to Artifacts.
- [26:56]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so your journey was from ChatGPT to Claude projects. And for the record, folks, yes, ChatGPT has projects as well, which I sometimes use, but I know that your journey evolved even more beyond that. So let's get into some of the other cool tools that you've been using.
- [27:12]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, so I have been using Poppy AI for about the past eight months. I don't. Gosh, they're all over the place right now. And so if. If you have seen what it looks like, it's really cool. If you've ever used Miro or any of the, like, virtual whiteboards, Poppy is like a visual way to seed information into AI. So with my AI cmo, I was able to gather.
- [27:37]
Michael Stelzner
It's like a flowchart, right? Almost like those flowchart things where you just draw things on the screen and connect them. Is that kind of how it works?
- [27:43]
Erica Stanley
Yes. And you can pop all kinds of links. So I was able to pull some Alex Hormozy TikToks. I was able to p. Instagram reels. I can pull YouTube videos directly. And one of the cool things about Poppy versus NotebookLM, which NotebookLM will do for this AI CMO, it will do almost the same thing that Poppy will. But Poppy will let you pull in unlisted YouTube videos. So I've got things that I have recorded that I have unlisted on my YouTube channel that wouldn't Pull into Notebook ll.
- [28:14]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, really interesting. Okay.
- [28:16]
Erica Stanley
Yeah. And it's able to see the video within TikToks, it's able to see what's in an Instagram reel. It can see the individual pieces of a carousel. So instead of you having to take screenshots, it's really cool and really advanced. And because I'm a visual person, I know so many of us are visual people. Being able to actually see what pieces are connected at any given time, it helps me to stay organized, ask better questions and stay on task when I am talking with my AI cmo. So if I'm working on an email campaign, I don't necessarily need all of the stuff connected. I don't need it to think that hard about all of the other pieces. I might just tap in the information on my brand, on my goals and on the high level email strategy and have it focus its attention on that. Whereas with both ChatGPT and Claude, it's just, it's pulling from the entire knowledge base the whole time. And the bigger the knowledge base gets, the slower it gets and the more it can get confused. With Poppy, because it's visual, you can just X out and you can actually see the little connection just disappear and you can just connect the pieces that are useful for whatever you are asking it to do at the time.
- [29:34]
Michael Stelzner
So let me try to help people understand a little bit about this from my perspective and you tell me if I'm right or wrong on this. Erica Google's Notebook LM what's fascinating about that is that it only works with the data that you give it. It's powered on the back end by Google Gemini Pro, but it's effectively just working with whatever you load into it. That's why they call it a notebook, right? So you have to add stuff into it, you add docs, you add videos, whatever into it and then you can query all that insight. Multimedia Poppy AI, it sounds like, does the same thing, but has a larger base of content in which it can pull from and it does it in a different way, which is more of a drag and drop visual kind of a way. And both of them effectively are aggregating information from multiple mediums and then allowing you to do something with that information. Is that correct?
- [30:24]
Erica Stanley
Yes, that's correct. The other benefit of Poppy over notebooklm is that you have access to web search. So it's not just pulling from those documents, it's also pulling from the models that you're using and you can choose the models. So you can choose to use Gemini or Claude or Chat GPT. I usually use Claude Sonnet 4, but you can switch it up if you're not getting the responses that you want. If you're looking for something a little different, you can switch the model right there within the chat window and try and regenerate that response with a different. With a different LLM, which is really cool.
- [31:01]
Michael Stelzner
So for those people that are like, okay, I'm really confused. I'm probably going to advocate you go with a custom GPT or a cloud project. Right. And for people that are a little more advanced, you could start experimenting with Poppy and or Notebook. Right. Because I would imagine you could successfully build a CMO with any of these solutions. Is that correct?
- [31:21]
Erica Stanley
You absolutely could. And I still use my custom GPT cmo. I use it all the time.
- [31:26]
Michael Stelzner
What is the one you're using the most now? Is it Claude projects or is it Poppy or which is the one that you use the most now?
- [31:31]
Erica Stanley
I use Poppy.
- [31:32]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, interesting. Erica, I love the fact that we've talked about all these different tools, Claude Projects, custom GPTs, and Poppy. But the part that I'm confused about is how do you actually query the whatever in order for it to act as a cmo? Like, I understand how it would work with a cloud project and I understand how I work with a custom GPT. You just ask it whatever you want. But I don't understand how it would work with Poppy. And since you use Poppy, maybe you could explain that a little bit.
- [32:03]
Erica Stanley
It. It kind of works the same way. I have the information gathering piece that we started with. So I have all of that information saved in a folder that I call my brand board, and I've got all of the documents in a little folder. And so the very first thing I connect in Poppy is I connect my brand board and I say, hey, I am working on this campaign. I'm going to be on Michael Stelzner's podcast, and I want to make the most of this opportunity. Let's brainstorm some ideas for marketing campaigns. First step is I want you to learn about my brand, my goals, my services. And so I connect that piece and I have it learn about me. This is the difference. It's kind of a downside, but it is the difference between Poppy and ChatGPT or Claude is that with those, when you're starting with a cloud project, when you're starting with a custom GPT, it already knows that, that it's in the instructions, it's in the knowledge base, so you don't have to connect it and say Learn about me. So with Poppy, that is the first step that I do every single time I see.
- [33:11]
Michael Stelzner
And you do that by attaching somehow these documents and telling it to go study this. So every time it starts with, like, amnesia, for lack of better words. Right. It doesn't know what the heck it's supposed to do or what you're supposed to do. You're almost setting a little workflow in place. Is that kind of how you would describe it?
- [33:26]
Erica Stanley
Yes.
- [33:27]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, and then what do you do once you attach those documents? Then what comes next on the Poppy side of things?
- [33:32]
Erica Stanley
So I attach my brand board, I have it learn about me, and then I use the voice dictation within Poppy, and I just stream of consciousness have a conversation. Hey, here's what I'm looking to do. Here's what's going on. ChatGPT has this as well. It's not the one where you can talk back and forth. With ChatGPT, it's really. It's just the little microphone there in the query window where you can dictate and just talk to it. Just tell it what you're thinking, like what ideas you have, and then have it do its thing. And it can use the expert knowledge that you have already gathered. Already hooked in. I forgot that step. So once it learns about your brand, then you're going to connect the little marketing pieces, then you're going to connect your experts. Right. So I've got a Seth Godin folder, I've got a Michael Stelzner folder, I've got an Amy Porterfield folder. So I can connect all of those and then dictate like, okay, this is what's going on in my business. I need to come up with a marketing campaign. What can I do? Let's brainstorm together.
- [34:39]
Michael Stelzner
Love it.
- [34:39]
Erica Stanley
And then you can have a conversation back and forth with these experts through the chat window that's connected to Cloud. For me, it's Claude.
- [34:49]
Michael Stelzner
Got it. Okay, so, folks, I'm going to translate a little bit here just. Just so that, like, everybody understands. Because Poppy AI is one of those, like, aggregator services. It uses the APIs of pretty much all the tools that are out there. So in this case, what Erica's done is she's chose Claude Opus or Sonnet or whatever she uses. Sonnet. I think she said four. And so that's the interface in which she's communicating. And it's kind of similar to her actually being in Claude, except it's just like a fresh little window. So if you all are super creative and experimental and you want to go down the Poppy route, which I'm going to call the advanced, like 301 class. Go there. But for everyone else, choose chat, GPT or Claude projects. Because honestly, what I love about both of them is they have memories, you know what I mean? So they'll remember the prior information that you've interacted with them on. And that can be incrementally more valuable for you down the road because if you have a bunch of threads, all that information is available in the memory. And I'm kind of like advocating for that unless you cannot get the data you need because of the, you know, the mediums and stuff like that. But I love the fact that you are like on the advanced trail using Poppy, because I know some of our audience is going to be like, I'm going to go give it a shot. So at this point, with all of these models, we have loaded in a lot of information, we've begun interacting with it. And I want to go through some use cases which we're going to talk about next. But I also want you to give any guidance on, like, how you prompt these things to get them to do what you want them to do. Because my guess is in these use cases you're about to share, I want to know if it's as easy as just saying in a sentence, do this, or if you need to give it really sophisticated insights. So go ahead, why don't you share a couple of ways that you're using your AI CMO.
- [36:36]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, so I am going to use ChatGPT and Claude for my use cases because those are the simplest and they're the ones that I have the most, most experience with. The first, I want to start with analytics. So I am right now with the AI Queens podcast. I'm in between seasons. I just finished up season one, I'm about to launch season two. And so I was able to pull all the analytics from my podcast platform. So I got analytics from them from substack from YouTube and that's information on how many downloads I have, how long people listened, where were they listening? What are the titles of those podcasts? And so I'm able to put all of that information into the custom GPT and ask, hey, here's all my analytics. What are some of my best performing podcasts? What did they have in common? I'm trying to plan out some topics for next season based on what performs really well. What are some ideas for podcasts that I could plan for in the future? And you could do this? I mean, I have A podcast. But if you've got a blog, if you've got an ongoing newsletter, I mean newsletters are great because most newsletter systems have a ton of analytics that you can just export as a CSV and you can upload your open rates, your click through rates. What were the subject lines, what links did people click on when they did click through? So all of those analytics exist. Oh, you could pull, if you're looking for a social media campaign, you can pull all of your analytics from Meta and you can put all of that into this custom GPT and say, hey, let's analyze. What is the data telling us? What worked well? What are some gaps? What could we be doing next? Also by using ChatGPT and Claude, you've got these deep thinking, these research capabilities where you can ask it, hey, go out and look. What are people who are in my audience? What are they talking about? What are they saying on social media, on Reddit, what are some pain points that they have? And now how can I create some campaigns based on what was successful for me in the past, what my business goals are for the future and what my audience really, really needs from me? What are some campaigns that we can create for this next chapter of my business?
- [39:07]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. I'd love to hear some more examples of different ways that you're using your AI cmo.
- [39:11]
Erica Stanley
Okay, so analytics is the first. The second is as that advisory role, as that strategic partner and this is where you can really dig in and work with those different geniuses, where you have gathered all of the information and all of the insights, the thought leadership from them. So I can say basically like, okay, you've got all this information. You know my brand, my business goals, my growth trajectory, like what do I need to be doing over the next six months to help me hit my year end goals? Here's my revenue for the last six months and here's where I want to be. What do I need to do? Oh, AI CMO advisory friend of mine. What do I need to be doing over the next six months? What shifts do I need? And they can act as that brainstorming and advisory partner.
- [40:08]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so we talked about analytics and in that case we're pulling in external data or screenshots. You didn't even mention that. But you can definitely grab screenshots on these models and they'll read the screenshots. And then on the advisor, I love the advisor thing because especially if you are an entrepreneur, often we don't have people to talk to that are super smart because our Friends are also entrepreneurs and they're busy, you know what I mean? And having some system that's been well trained that you can kind of spar with and ideate with and, and say, what do you think about this? Or how would you go about doing this? Or what are your thoughts on this? Super, super valuable. Keep going. I know you have another one.
- [40:49]
Erica Stanley
Well, one thing I want to caution people about with this, with the advisory role is that we know ChatGPT likes to be super agreeable and positive and like, hey girl, that's the best idea ever. And so I will challenge you all to push back if it's seeming too positive, if it's seeming too agreeable, ask it to help find your blind spots. We all have them. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. But what are some blind spots that I might have in my business that are holding me back? Ask me questions. Cmo, ask me questions until you can help me really get to the root of what is holding me back to getting to the next stage of my business.
- [41:32]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Oh, by the way, Claude is not as, what do they call it? Sympathic. I don't even know.
- [41:37]
Erica Stanley
Sycophantic.
- [41:38]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, Claude is not that, not that like Claude. What I found with Claude is you can ask it to. And mine does this all the time. Yeah, it'll say, yeah, that's 8.5 out of 10. And it's just waiting for me to say, well, how can I make it a 10, you know, but it'll tell you, like, skip this thing that I recommended. Like, it actually is, it's much, I find it really valuable in that regard. So. Okay, I know you have one other example. Why don't you share that?
- [42:01]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, I mean, my last example is what a lot of entrepreneurs are using AI for already, and that's content creation. But instead of just asking it, hey, create social media posts for me. You are really, you're, you're using the best and brightest minds and thought leadership to help you come up with social media, with blog posts, with newsletters that are really tapping into your ideal audience. We talked about, like, what are your soapbox topics? So helping to pull that information that you fed into it at the very beginning, where you're training it on your business and your brand and your audience, and it's helping you come up with better campaign ideas than you as a non marketer would have come up with on your own.
- [42:50]
Michael Stelzner
Well, we have just, Erica, scratched the surface of that brain of yours and I know there's so much more available for people. So if they want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them? And if they're interested in possibly working with you in some capacity, where should they go?
- [43:03]
Erica Stanley
Well, I can be found@aiqueens.com that is my primary website. You can get to the AI Queen Society from there. You can get to my podcast from there. And I actually, for your listeners, just because we're having this conversation, I created a custom GPT that is a cmo. I created the Frankenstein CMO with all of the best and brightest brains. So if you want to get a version of that CMO, you can actually go to aiqueens.com CMO and sign up up for that. And then other than that, my podcast, which is on a hiatus right now, but you can go and listen to back episodes@AI queenspodcast.com and then if they.
- [43:51]
Michael Stelzner
Want to connect on the socials, do you have a preferred platform?
- [43:53]
Erica Stanley
Yeah, I am on Instagram at Erica, the AI Queen, or I am on LinkedIn EJStanley on LinkedIn and LinkedIn has become my preferred platform. I just, I feel like. I feel like those are my people lately. And I've gotten away from the highly curated world of Instagram and meta and all of that, so LinkedIn's probably the best place to find me.
- [44:18]
Michael Stelzner
Erica Stanley, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.
- [44:21]
Erica Stanley
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- [44:24]
Michael Stelzner
Well, folks, I hope you found that interview to be exceptionally valuable. I wanted to announce here that Erica will be be speaking at Social Media Marketing World and our AI Business World sub conference that's going on at that event. So if you want to learn a lot more from her, be sure to grab your tickets if you're confused about any of the things we talked about, because we did address a lot. We took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com a77. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app. And if you've been a longtime listener, I would love a review, whatever platform you're listening on. And do let your friends know about this show. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn and or X and do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I am your host. Michael Stelzner will be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.
- [45:20]
Erica Stanley
The AI Explored Podcast is also production of Social Media Examiner.
- [45:28]
Michael Stelzner
Don't miss AI Business World 2026, our first ever dedicated AI conference, taking place April 29th and 30th in Anaheim, California. Learn from top AI practitioners about which tools work and workflows that will literally save you hours daily. It's included free with Social Media Marketing World 2026 tickets tickets or it's only $597 as a standalone ticket. Secure your spot at AIbusinessworld live before pricing increases.