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Vol. 40 No. 5 — June 2023

LET'S GET STRATEGIC

“When used ethically and with purpose, ChatGPT can help with a number of work processes,” says Carla Bevins, assistant teaching professor of business communication at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. This might include the following:

• Managing social media accounts by automating responses to frequently asked questions or generating content for social media posts
• Curating content from multiple sources and helping to quickly create high-quality articles
• Reaching a broader, larger audience through prompt and accurate translations
• Automating responses from customer support chatbots to improve response times and overall customer satisfaction

ChatGPT can be used in combination with CMSs, analytics tools, and social media management platforms to improve overall content performance, Bevins says. “By training ChatGPT on specific topics and content types, content organizations can ensure the generated content is tailored to their audiences and aligned with their brand.”

HOW SOME AGENCIES ARE USING GENERATIVE AI

Red Door Interactive, says president John Faris, is “building generative AI, like GPT4, into our workflow to help us automate many tedious and time-consuming tasks, freeing up our teams to focus on higher-value strategic work and iterative testing.” The agency has started the process by identifying specific use cases in each practice area in which generative AI may play a role. It has also documented some best practices. “If you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out,” Faris warns. Red Door Interactive has created a policy for employees and vendors, guiding their appropriate use of these tools to make sure they understand the limitations of the platforms. “We also require them to be transparent with our clients and us about their usage of generative AI, disclosing when and how they’ve used it to create a deliverable,” he says.

Shafqat Islam is CMO at Optimizely, which is a digital experience platform. Opportunities from AI are real and tactical, Islam says. AI, he believes, can “spark ideation and creativity with writing, images, videos, and music.” For instance, predictive text “can help get words on the screen when writer’s block strikes to solve the ‘blank page problem’ and help get timely content drafted quickly.” At Optimizely, AI is being used “for things like tagging images, generation of blog posts and landing page copy, headline creation and variation generation, image generation, SEO research, and content summarization,” Islam notes. These examples are really just the tip of the iceberg.

MORE WAYS TO INCORPORATE GENERATIVE AI INTO YOUR WORK PROCESSES

Here are some additional content marketing applications for generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT) to get you thinking about how they might aid in your content creation processes.

Idea Generation

Jeff MacDonald is a social strategy director at Mekanism, an ad agency. “Mekanism creatives are using tools like ChatGPT to help them brainstorm better ideas by feeding their first ideas into the app and asking for a critique from the world’s smartest minds, virtually assembled on a panel by AI,” MacDonald says. AI can also take those ideas a step further.

Creating Outlines

While most textual content creators love to write, many don’t love to create outlines. ChatGPT makes that process easy. Simply enter in a prompt and wait for the results. Then, refine the results you receive by asking for additional detail on certain topics or rearranging content.

Research

Research is another useful application. Keep in mind, though, that ChatGPT only searches older data. As the tool will tell you, “I’m sorry, as an AI language model, I don’t have access to information or research that has been conducted after my knowledge cutoff date of September 2021.” A research-related task that generative AI can do, though, is help distill research results, such as poring over documents to find the salient points to save time. MacDonald shares, “We’re using tools like ChatGPT to read over lengthy contracts and email threads to help us find the key items we need to bullet point.”

Updating/Refining Existing Content

Repurposing content is an important and ongoing task for content creators of all kinds. Generative AI can vastly expedite what can otherwise be a very tedious process or, at least, provide a significant jump-start. Simply supply the content you want updated and prompt your AI tool to do so; this includes asking for more recent links depending on when your piece was published. You might also use these tools to make complex content more reader-friendly. For instance, you could make “doctor speak” make sense to the average patient or revise content designed for a continuing education audience so it’s digestible for grade school students.

Content Promotion and Distribution

Let’s say you have a white paper that you want to pro­mote. Generative AI can help with many aspects of this process. Simply provide your content and create prompts to gen­erate copy for email blasts and sequences, social media posts, email subject lines, recommended keywords, meta titles, and more. Abbe S. Depretis, assistant teaching professor of business communication at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, says that ChatGPT “can provide content, keywords, and market research for SEO in a system that is fairly simple to use. [It] also has the capability to organize and analyze data in audience-specific ways that is very useful for content organizations.”

Training and Development

Training and development are ongoing these days, and generative AI can help. For instance, as you begin to help staffers adapt to how these new tools can be used to support them in their jobs, consider how the tools themselves might aid that training by creating exercises and quizzes. Mekanism has taken a creative—and competitive—approach to familiarizing staffers with the potential of generative AI that gets them to dive into the tools in practical ways. “We’ve asked our staff to create a series of fake movie posters, taglines, and reviews,” MacDonald shares. Mekanism’s “employees will submit their movies for an award show, and the best AI creations will win cash prizes. We’re using this competition as a fun way to train every department on how AI can be useful in their everyday process.”

ASSUAGING FEARS OF AI TAKEOVER

One ongoing fear related to technology such as generative AI is that it is poised to replace people. That’s simply not the case, many say, including Depretis. She points to a meme she recently saw circulating on Reddit: “AI won’t replace you, but people using AI will replace you.” Depretis notes, “I thought that was an interesting way of thinking about how generative AI like ChatGPT is impacting the workplace. I don’t think that this technology should be replacing people for important tasks, but I think that it will help people improve productivity when used correctly and efficiently.” MacDonald agrees. AI, he says, “will not be replacing anyone anytime soon.” That’s a fear without much foundation. Instead, AI will help each team member work better: “Think calculators—they don’t replace the mathematician. They just allow them to work faster and on bigger problems.”

Generative AI holds the same promise for content marketers. Although, Bevins warns, “as a writer and storyteller myself, I caution content organizations to not become too reliant on ChatGPT to generate content. This can lead to a lack of creativity and originality in their content. Readers will pick up on this, and it can lead to a loss of brand identity, audience engagement, and a possible negative long-term impact on the industry.” Generative AI is a powerful tool with a wide range of applications, but it is not a replacement for skilled content creators of the human variety. How many ways might you put this technology to work in your organization to save time, improve processes, and free up staffers to focus on higher-level opportunities?