← Embracing Digital Transformation
Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:00]
A
To go with your analogy of the executive summary, it is to. Yeah, there's bullets at the top. What a nice, clear structure. Throughout. Bullets throughout your structure. You know, all of what works, what makes it easier to read for a human, makes it easier to read for AI.
- [00:20]
B
Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process, policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host. On this episode, SEO is Long live AI visibility in geo with special guest Diane Hammons, Director of digital engagement at WG Content. Diane, welcome to the show.
- [00:53]
A
Thank you.
- [00:56]
B
Hey, Diane. Anyone that listens to my show knows. And my vast audience of about 300,000 listeners now, it's grown. It's amazing. They all know one thing. I only have superheroes on the show, and every superhero has a background story. So, Diane, what's your background? What's your origin story?
- [01:14]
A
My origin story? Gosh. Well, my origin story. Gosh, if I go way back, my. My degree is in graphic design. And if I go way back in terms of superhero kind of stuff, the first thing that popped into my head was that I was glad that my mom from day one always supported that and therefore any journey from there on out. Because there was a time when I was in the bookstore in college and I was searching for, you know, Matt there. And back then you had the bookstore.
- [01:52]
B
You had to have a book. Yeah, I remember those days too. Yeah.
- [01:56]
A
And I was having trouble finding things and I sent, you know, I handed it over to the woman who worked there and she looked at it, she looked at all my art classes and I kid you not, she said, the crayons are over there. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah.
- [02:12]
B
So that was, that was rude. That's awful.
- [02:15]
A
Quite rude. Quite rude. But, you know, also talk about your origin story. I was like, I will prove you and everybody else wrong from here on out. It's worthwhile endeavor. And yeah, so I, I like to think that that's like summons everything that came after that. Me, man.
- [02:35]
B
You'Re like she Hulk a little bit.
- [02:37]
A
Yeah. At least in my head.
- [02:39]
B
Anything feelings to your head?
- [02:41]
A
I. I love it.
- [02:42]
B
That's a great. That's a great background story because you're resilience. You're like, no one's going to beat me down. Right. I'm, you know, I know what I want to do and I'm going to go tackle it. That's. That's awesome. And that's led to where you're at today, which is another major shift coming especially for graphic designers or Anyone in the art field, Generative AI is disrupting.
- [03:07]
A
Yes, very disruptive.
- [03:09]
B
And you've kind of gone a different route. You kind of embraced it a little bit.
- [03:13]
A
I have because, you know, resilience. There we go. It's. And I, I work primarily when it comes to content creation. I work more now with writing than graphics, but a little bit of both. And yeah, it's, There was that like moment when ChatGPT. ChatGPT blew up and it was kind of evident. It seemed like, is this gonna be a gimmick? Is this gonna have actual practical application? And you could, when it started to seem like, I think it could, you could bury your head in the sand or you could say, I'm going to, you know, embrace it and learn it and just try to decide for myself when it's appropriate, when it works for me and when it doesn't. So that's kind of that point of resilience. Like sometimes you don't get to choose when things are going to change in your world.
- [04:08]
B
So have you seen any kickback from your co workers in the industry and content creation, both both in graphic and in writing? Have you seen kickback for people that are saying, no, I'm going to embrace this, I'm going to use it to its fullest extent?
- [04:25]
A
Oh, absolutely. There's, you know, I, I don't know if it's 50 50, but there's certainly those who are taking that same path that I am that are saying, well, and even starting to say, gosh, okay, this has even given me some good things that I didn't anticipate. Now it's not just I'm being forced to use this, but I'm choosing to use it. But yeah, there's some resistance. And that's part of my role in the company I'm in now is to help guide people along through that change. Resistance. Help them, you know, be not, be fearful that their job is going away, but that it's just changing. And that's what I'm comfortable to hear. But you can start to, when you find, learn how to use it. When you start to find things that work well for you, suddenly, you know, hate it or resent it so much.
- [05:20]
B
So, you know, a term that we started using here on the show is AI augmented. So these people kind of embraced it. They become augmented by AI, which I noticed a difference in my work style has completely changed. I don't worry about grunt work and I use more creative part of my brain to come up with new ideas and new, new ways of exploring. Are you seeing the same same thing with people that you're helping go through this transition?
- [05:49]
A
Yeah, I think so. When you, once you let yourself use it in, we'll just say more. Not aggressive isn't the right word, more nuanced ways. We'll just say. So if all you do, say, generate a blog about this topic, it's pretty mundane, it's not terrific, and you probably feel like you might as well have done it yourself. But if you instead, say, analyze this transcript of an interview I did, help me draft an outline, maybe help me with the parts that I struggle with, even the intro, the closing. There's always going to be struggles for a writer. Or give me some ideas of how to. I might visualize this as an infographic, you know, and use it more as that brainstorming partner. Then it can take you in different directions. You just, you know, you have to be careful that you aren't using it instead of using your brain, but you really are using it as an augmenter. So I try to think about it as if I had a person I used to love when I worked in an office. I don't anymore, but when I worked in an office as a designer, I used to love sitting down in a room, closing the door, sitting down with a writer and just approaching it from those two different, just braids sort of bouncing off each other. So when I try to think of AI as that partner now, like, I'm not, like, here are some things I'm thinking, what do you think?
- [07:20]
B
I do the same thing. I treat it like it's my brainstorm partner.
- [07:25]
A
Yes.
- [07:25]
B
So I say thank you. I say, what about this idea? And can you give me five other ideas that we can talk about? And you're doing the same thing. That's awesome.
- [07:35]
A
Absolutely. I find myself as you're probably will be able to tell from this podcast, the one of the things I tell it most often is I give it all my thoughts. When I say make this more concise.
- [07:47]
B
Though, the reason I laugh is because I just did that this morning. I just had just brain dump and I was like typing feverishly and I, I could have turned on the voice thing, which would have been even more, you know, horrible. Right. Because just stuff coming out of my brain.
- [08:03]
A
Yeah.
- [08:03]
B
And, and then I said, have I, have I talked to you about this before? And it goes, yeah, you have actually, because I keep all my context and I, I, I push it back in and I go, oh, and did I add anything new to it? He goes, yes, you actually Added this new concept over here and. All right, let's explore that. To me, it's almost like when I was in school, we learned about engineering notebooks where we had to sign every page. And so I spent all my early career writing everything in notebooks. And then, you know, I got lazy and stopped doing that. And then I saw patents just fly out the window. But now with, now with generative AI, I can treat that like my engineering notebook with a partner that's. And I can capture all my brain thoughts that are incoherent and it can figure things out for I. I love it. I love that.
- [09:14]
A
I love that analogy. Which brings up new book LM as well, I assume. Are you using that as well? Because that fits very clear what you're talking about. All right. Yeah.
- [09:26]
B
So. So this is fascinating because we, we all know that this content creation that we're doing, it, it's up leveled quite a bit. And like he said earlier, we all, we still need to own it, meaning we need to review it. I've made huge mistakes in not reviewing things I've sent out that was really bad. So we have to own it. But how then do I get in all of the content that's being generated? And it is tons. How do we, how do we shine? How do we get our stuff seen to the rest of the world?
- [10:02]
A
Right. I would say, you know, just because you mentioned it there, it made me think right away that sometimes we overthink AI and the more that I can try to bring it back down, I'm always looking to not dehumanize in a way that I confuse myself. Yes, it's a machine, but if I think of it as that partner, I think about like you're saying, ugh, things have gone out in the past where maybe I should have had was just email or I should have someone say where you go before I hit. And I mean always need that, you know, that moment. So AI is so different. You do need to look at it before it goes live, but it can get you there, get you to, to different places. So one of the things. Gosh. Is to realize that you can use AI. You know, we get a lot of questions when it comes to content generation. Will you be dinged for it? Will Google no and ding you for it? If you use AI generated content, will the AI, you know, the AI assistants, the LLMs, the ChatGPTs, will they also know? And the answer is that no, they don't care. They care if you have bad content. They don't care that you Use AI to help you polish it or even help you do the first draft and you polish it, you know, whichever end. But yeah, so you need good content. So we focus a lot with our clients here lately on remembering the SEO best practices that you, you know, had to put in place to get rank in Google to be page one, you know, top five or 10, ideally, all of those things are still important. It's just the also. And so if you think about AI, it's kind of like, like I said, if you humanize it a little bit, think about it's going out and it's looking for all this information and it's pulling from all these different sources. But the difference is it's like, okay, I've got bits from here, here and here, and I want to put all of this into a great answer for my user. So if you're, if it doesn't have to do as much digesting, if it can pick up what you have there and deliver it, great. So that's some of the practices going through, you know, so if you, you'll, you start to see it on a lot of things now, but say a blog post, you see a lot. You can call it key takeaways. Two of them didn't read. You know, you'll start to see bullets at the top and not. So it's like, hey, AI, here are three core things you can put out and plop over here. You also know exactly what you're going to find if you read on down. So we're not going to, we're going to make it easy for you to digest.
- [12:52]
B
So it's just, it's the same, it's the same tricks we play with executives. Because I used to be an executive.
- [12:59]
A
Yes, right.
- [13:01]
B
And if you have eight sentence paragraph at the start of your email, they get through sentence one and hit delete.
- [13:11]
A
Right, Right.
- [13:12]
B
But if you have three bullets at the top that says, I'm talking about this, this and this, read down below for more details and the story then. So this, I like that approach.
- [13:25]
A
Yeah. So then a couple other things you can do. It's. You can, well, incorporate questions within the body of your content. Maybe headlines phrased in a question format. But you could also include kind of like FAQs, but not, not a page of FAQs, because that can be real random combination of things. But let's say again, we'll just say bog. We'll stick with that theme. Let's say you put a few at the end that are kind of, what else would people ask? So now you have places where you can link out to your other page. You've also satisfied AI's curiosity because it just like Google, you know, gives those people also ask those recommendations at the end. So that's another, another way. But to go with your analogy of the executive summary, it is to, yeah, those bullets at the top, but a nice clear structure throughout. Bullets throughout your, your structure, you know, all of what works, what makes it easier to read for a human, makes it easier to read for AI.
- [14:42]
B
Yeah, it's, that's really funny because I, I've had English professors say, oh, bullet points. What, you can't write prose. Right. I mean we've heard this before. Yeah, but you're, you're, you're saying, and of course I know this, I'll read a bullet point and I can skim through much quicker.
- [15:02]
A
Right, right.
- [15:04]
B
And it's the same for AI. It's doing the same sort of thing. That makes total sense.
- [15:08]
A
Yeah, I, I mean as, as writers, as creators, we want to believe everybody is reading everything we put out there for some last. But most people skim few some will go read the whole thing. So it's important to have everything there and, but yeah, I just like people, we like to skimming and at least get the major points out. And I'll decide for more. I'm going to go back and read the whole thing.
- [15:41]
B
Right. Because of this. Have you seen language change? The way that we communicate? Has it changed because of generative AI? And how has it changed?
- [15:53]
A
You mean what, person to person or do you. Yeah, person to person.
- [15:58]
B
Yeah.
- [16:00]
A
Gosh, that's a good question. I like to think that you can take some of those same practices throughout. So for example, we just recently had a workshop with a healthcare organization and there were a range of marketing professionals, about 80 altogether. So some were working more directly with external content, some were internal communications. So you know, so some of the, what we're talking about and being able to show up in AI visibility, being cited in answers isn't really relevant when you're an internal comms person. So what we did, we turned that around to say everything you hear today is a good lesson in just communication. Apply these same principles to email, to press releases, to. Because it just makes it easier for people in general to understand things. So hopefully, you know, that starts to sink in and that just makes us better communicators all the way around.
- [17:10]
B
You know, it makes me want to go back to school and learn more about communication.
- [17:14]
A
Yeah, right.
- [17:16]
B
I mean, I mean these basic concepts because I guess. Or change my prompting to say, you are a communications expert.
- [17:24]
A
Exactly. Yeah, that would be a great.
- [17:27]
B
That'd be a great way. Yeah. But I kind of want to know if what it's spitting out actually follows, because we all know I, I call it lying. But they, they hallucinate, they make stuff up. They're not always right. They don't like to be corrected. They're like a teenager. Right?
- [17:47]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Or they're just, you know, overly flattering.
- [17:52]
B
Overly. Yes. That's the empathy.
- [17:54]
A
That's a good. It just showers me with compliments. Compliments every day.
- [17:58]
B
Yes, exactly. It's like, no, I want you to be critical of what I'm writing here. I want some honest. Feed that. Right.
- [18:05]
A
Which you can do. So that brings up a very important point. And we build, We. We tend to build a lot of custom GPTs for ourself and for our clients. I'm sure that's a topic you've covered here before. Oh, yeah. So here's an example that goes along with what you were saying. One of our content strategists said, you know, I've. I've thrown some of my drafts, like my content. They'll do a content audit of a website and they'll have all these recommendations of improvements, changes that can make it more user friendly, that can make it more serviceable for to be seen by AI, to be seen by Google. And she said, you know, I gave it to Chachi BD to review to see if I missed anything. Were there any glaring gaps or not so glaring, but just like little things that I. Just little nuances. Yeah, yeah, but it could make it just that much better. And she said, you know, it did a good job. I'd say the recommendations that it made were on point for the most part, but they weren't spectacular. I said, well, did you ask it to be critical? So then she went back and we created a whole new prompt that said, you know, you are, you know, your role is like supervising a team of content strategies, strategy strategist, supervising a team of content strategists. And your role is to push them to be better. Your role is to look for this, this, this. It's not about just being nice, but really getting them to see things differently and it made a world of difference. So in your example, it's like, you know, be, you know, my. Not. Not my English teacher, because your English teacher might use that more formal style, but a journalism professor or something like that, that would force you down to be a little bit more critical.
- [20:02]
B
Why? Why do you think that? Why do you think that? Is that the I. It's probably the way they were programmed to be. Hey, I want you to be pleasant. I want you to not ostracize the person you're talking to. That must be in. In their system prompts.
- [20:22]
A
I would imagine so too because most of us don't want to be corrected all that or corrected or you idiot, why'd you do it that way?
- [20:34]
B
Although I imagine very interesting Gen AI that was highly critical on everything you did all the time.
- [20:41]
A
I imagine there's a Persona on X that would. That's really what really pushes you.
- [20:50]
B
But you brought up a really good point. If you really care about your content being better and for a target audience, then you need to ask for help to make it better and be more critical. And having the right prompts is an important aspect of all this.
- [21:20]
A
Right? Give it more and more as much information as you can. When we're working with companies, you know, we include a brand guide, train it so it knows I'm supposed to be looking. I want to make sure for consistency sake and anybody who presents a communication from this organization, it follows this brand guide most of the time, not always depending on the size of a company, but most of the clients that we work with. That includes a pretty robust editorial guide guideline as well. So page after page that says this is how you capitalize. Do it here, not here, use am, PM with periods or not periods. You know, it just spells all of that out. So more. The more and more if you have preferences, the more and more you can feed it, the better results. So if you're getting the same kind of trait phrases from chat, TPT or any others, tell it not to use that. Let's exclude those when we are excluded conclusions list.
- [22:21]
B
So all right, so that brings up another. It sounds like this is a whole new type of job description that didn't exist three years ago. So it's creating. It's creating a new way of working. Do you see any other new types of jobs starting to form coming out of coming with this transformation that we're seeing that are surprising to you?
- [22:48]
A
You use the term augmentation. I guess I would say evolution maybe here. I don't know that it's a new job. It's an evolution of a lot of roles. Like it or not, they're going to revolve into. Someone mentioned the other day, I won't take credit for the concept but I thought it was really smart. It's realizing sometimes in your role now that you are becoming more manager, the supervisor of things than the creator, the doer. So you know where you were doing things to say you were writing, you were analyzing, you were compiling data. Now it's more AIs doing that and you're responsible for making sure it did it right. So it's almost for a lot of people who are maybe comfortable in that role of being the doer, it forces you to be the manager of things in a way, if you want like that. So that's a different skill set that some people aren't prepared for, but that's some of where. Some of where the jobs may be changing. So understanding how to get the most out of your team, your AI team, say your AI team now and then being able to review it and spot when it's not doing things correctly.
- [24:06]
B
So, so you brought up that's a. That's new skills we need to learn. So there's a whole new training on managing technology or managing gen AI or GPTs or whatever we want to call it.
- [24:20]
A
Right.
- [24:20]
B
That sounds like a whole new executive training area that, that needs some attention.
- [24:28]
A
Yeah, well, and you're right to say, you know, executive all the way down. I just happened to read a study today that showed how that has shifted as well and that the companies that are on the leading edge of AI we're talking about, they're doing more than just content creation with it. But those companies that are on the leading edge and they're seeing success, not we, you know, we tried a few shiny objects and we didn't get really.
- [24:59]
B
No. Like fundamentally changing their company. Is that what you're talking about?
- [25:02]
A
Right. The ones who are really okay, we fully integrated it, we've met use AI to really transform a workflow site. Those companies have executive. Increasingly more executive involvement. And I don't think that doesn't imply that it's like Big Brother watching you. It implies that all the way up the chain it's becoming apparent in those organizations the culture is changing. They're an AI forward company in those months, how the culture is shifting and everybody all the way up realize it's important to learn and continue to improve those skill sets. So it's not just, let's say a chief marketing officer saying, you guys go figure this out. Chief marketing officer and let me know. Do it too. Yeah.
- [25:57]
B
So this, when you were talking about that, it reminded me of the shift in the 90s, in the early 2000s, to Internet strategies. Oh, we have to have an Internet strategy. No one has an Internet strategy anymore. Because it's baked in to your business.
- [26:14]
A
Right.
- [26:14]
B
So. Right. I mean that's just how it is.
- [26:19]
A
I think this will become. Yeah, it will become just kind of. Yeah. Right now it requires a lot of thoughtful training. It requires planning and diligence. But yeah, I agree with you that eventually it'll just be a component you don't think about. You just automatically incorporate it.
- [26:41]
B
Well, and what also happened in the 90s too? Eight, well, 90s and 2000s, it happened. Whole job descriptions disappeared and new and whole new ones were created. In the 80s and 90s there were typing pools, there was inner inner office mail. I, I still remember it would show up twice a day. Right. The memos. And everyone had a printer on their desk and they print out stuff.
- [27:08]
A
Oh yeah, I had the inner office envelopes. Just sign your name, scratch off the envelope.
- [27:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's gone. And look at all the industries that were supporting this that are gone. The envelope companies that built those special envelopes with the lines on them and the holes.
- [27:26]
A
Exactly, exactly. All going. Yeah, yeah. And so you said, you know, are there going to be new jobs? I mean, and I said, certainly there will be some that come up and there will be some that go away. We have to be realistic about that. But I think the bulk in the middle can just evolve if you let yourself follow that evolution.
- [28:00]
B
This, this has really been fascinating. Any, any last tips for people listening on? All right, I, I've been focused on SEO, right. For my content stuff and I was doing great, but I'm not doing as great anymore. You talked about, hey, right up front, keyword section bullets. Right. More than keywords, key takeaways is what you mentioned, right?
- [28:25]
A
Key takeaways, yeah. Incorporating questions, maintaining that, that structure, that great structure with clear headlines, subheads, you know, short succinct paragraphs, bulleted lists, things like that. And I'm trying to think just because.
- [28:45]
B
GPT can create out of your five bullets, you know, a five page document, that's not necessarily the good way to go.
- [28:53]
A
Yes, exactly. Because it's probably going to compile that from a bunch of different sources. What you want to be is one of those sources, sources so that you're sighted because you know, instead of with Google, you could maybe, maybe not be seen, but you could more guarantee if I do this, this and this, I'm going to appear maybe not as high as I'd like, but I'm going to be an option. Not necessarily with AI. It is more. We've, we were talking again in a, a recent workshop about it's serving this different dual purpose. Now. It is on one hand your target audience. You need to. Just as right now as marketers as any content creator, any communicator, you're thinking about who, who am I writing for? I gotta use messaging and, and themes and things that analogies and all of that that is gonna resonate with them. Well, now, AI is also one of those audiences. You can't ignore AI when you're creating. But then on the flip side as well, AI is also an influencer. So we've gone through this period, 10 years or so ever since like TikTok especially right where you have your, your dawn of influencer marketing. Should I be trying to collaborate with one of these influencers? Because especially younger generations are getting their information, their content from these, from TikTok and Instagram. Well, AI is also an influencer. So you have to consider that.
- [30:28]
B
Never thought of it that way.
- [30:29]
A
Don't do this because, yeah, it's taking, it's deciding what to present to you. It's deciding that it's not. If I use these, you know, Google, if I do this, if I follow these things, I'll, I'll be able to satisfy the algorithm and I can guarantee for the most part that I'm going to show up, at least show up, maybe page two. But I'm going to show up and if somebody scrolls through, they'll find me. Now it's like maybe it's only going to mention five brands in the response. So how do you make sure you're. That it's an influencer. It decides what's best. Oh, it's a different shift.
- [31:09]
B
Major shift. So Diane, if people want to find, obviously we have to have you come back on the show a year from now. It's what's changed because it's changing so.
- [31:19]
A
Oh, I know it'll be. I'm sure we're drastically different. Yeah, yeah.
- [31:24]
B
If people want to get engaged more in this and find out more, how do they find out more about you and the company that you work for?
- [31:31]
A
Yeah. Where our company is WG Content. And if you go to WG Content and you check out our blog, you can see based on how our blogs structure, that will start to give you an idea of how you structure things for AI. So I recommend you do that. That's a good place to start. Feel free. Follow me on LinkedIn as well. And we're constantly putting out blogs and webinars and you know, along these topics we. AI visibility. I would say a month ago, Geo Generative Engine optimization was hot. It was the. Oh, not just SEO, but this and now this month that quickly, AI visibility is hot because it's like, okay, I'm waking up and I realize I need to understand these optimization techniques. And now that I understand it, I need to see if it's working. So how do I view all of these across all these AI assistants? How do I know if what I did is working? Am I showing up or not? So then enter AI visibility. So that's kind of the next thing.
- [32:40]
B
Yeah, Whole new industries are being created from this. And this is.
- [32:43]
A
And products. Yeah. There are so many products that have drops now to do that to measure AI visibility. So that is one of those new things. As you were talking about. What's new? This is a new field, new branch of products that are satisfying that need.
- [33:00]
B
That. That is awesome. That is totally awesome. Diane, thanks for coming on the show. This has been great.
- [33:06]
A
Oh, you are welcome. It has been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you.
- [33:15]
B
Thanks for listening to Embracing Digital Transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. If you want to go deeper, join our exclusive community@patreon.com embracingdigital where we share bonus content. And you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources@embracingdigital.org until next time, keep Embracing the digital Transformation.