How to Stay Human in a Tech-Driven World with Mike Allton
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I'll use ChatGPT or I'll use Claude kind of back and forth depending on what it is I'm actually trying to do. I find, at least for my purposes, Claude is a better writer. Even if I'm telling it very specifically what I want done, the writing that comes out of Claude sounds so much more like me. It sounds very natural. Whereas ChatGPT is still somewhat stilted and robotic, even if I'm giving it the same

kind of information. And I often use a tool called Magi, which is a wrapper for all the different LLMs, which is pretty nice because then I can be in one chat and I can go back and forth between different language models and different custom GPTs. Welcome to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, the podcast that shows you how to leverage the power of AI technology without wasting your time or selling your soul. Let's embrace making AI work for you.

Hey, hey, my human friend, and welcome back to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Kinsey, and today I'm joined by the awesome Mike Alton. Mike,

a longtime solopreneur, chief storyteller at Agora Pulse, and honestly, totally a gem of a human. And especially when it comes to talking about how to use AI in a way that still feels human, right? We talk about what most people get wrong when using tools like ChachiBT,

How to train your AI assistant to sound like you and all the wild ways this tech is showing up in marketing, branding, and all the things. It's truly a real and nerdy conversation with lots of actionable takeaways that you can totally start using today.

So if you enjoy this episode as much as I do, don't forget to share it with a friend who could also use to listen to it. And while you're at it, why not leave us five stars or give us a follow on your favorite podcast platform, because that really will help us to continue spreading the authentic AI word. All right, let's go ahead and dive in. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for coming on Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs. I'm so excited to bring on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be so much fun. I can't wait to geek out with you. Oh, yes. And geek out is the right word for this show, for sure. Before we dive into all the AI stuff, I did already introduce you just a little bit, but can you please tell us who are you? What do you do? So I have a full-time gig with a company called Agorapulse. We're a social media management solution where I'm the chief storyteller. But I also have my own side hustle, the social media hat that I've had

gosh, over a decade. So I'm a solopreneur and a full-time employee side by side. I've got my own podcast on the social media hat and a blog, and I've used that for consulting for many years and always been that single person, that solopreneur over there trying to wear all the hats. Okay.

Oh, we understand that. That's like wearing all the hats. And that's so cool. You're with the girl pulse, too. I love when people call themselves the chief storyteller. I do that for my business, too, because it's so true. But this conversation is all about AI tools. So I always like to kick off these combos by just asking, like, how did you start dipping your toes into the world of AI? What did that look like for you?

Well, I had done a little bit of dabbling back in 2022, early 2023, but nothing serious. Frankly, I've been the unofficial historian of social media and the internet for over a decade. I've written about fads, social platforms and things that have come and gone. And honestly, at first I thought AI was going to be something along the lines of Blab or some other platform.

But then it was late 2023. I was listening to Paul Reitzer on the Artificial Intelligence Show, and he was talking about a quote from Sam Altman about how 95% of marketing jobs are going to be taken over by AI within a few short years. And he was pushing back on that a little bit, but not obviously just saying that Sam's wrong because Sam's probably not wrong. And that really...

lit a fire under me. I have to say it scared me a little bit. I wondered, okay, what does that mean for my role, my job? At the time, I was doing a lot of events and influencer marketing and affiliate marketing for Goropals. And so I was concerned about that, but I was probably even more concerned for my friends. I've been in this industry for over a decade. I've got relationships with so many people, mutual friends like Peg Bitspatrick and Jeff C and so on. They're good friends of mine. And I started to be concerned about what's going to happen to them. Where are their roles going to be? What do they need to know?

And so I started really leaning into AI late 2023, early 2024, and eventually decided to start my own podcast to really help me learn selfishly and then help some of my audience learn, my friends learn. What are we supposed to do with AI? Where are we supposed to go with all this? So that's where I'm at today.

Yeah. Oh, man. So tell us for those who are concerned, because I know I definitely feel like especially when AI tools first started coming into the mainstream online world and stuff, everyone was like, it's gonna take your job. It was like scary. But that's still definitely a big concern for people. I tend to

share with my listeners, I don't think that this is necessarily going to take our jobs. But I do think that we need to get curious about it and understand how this could involve our jobs and whatnot. But definitely the possibility of taking our jobs down the road and in the nearest future. So what have you learned? What's advice that you give marketers now when it comes to that?

I love this question because it really ties into my background as a historian. That was literally what I went to school for was history. And so I've got this deep familiarity with how we progress as a society within the last few hundred years. And so it's very easy for me to say we are living now through the fourth industrial revolution. Most people are familiar with the industrial revolution, mechanizing and so on. But most people don't realize that there have been three industrial

Industrial revolutions that historians have identified over the past five to 600 years. And this is now the fourth one. AI is changing everything, not just marketing, every aspect of our society. And that's important to understand because the reality is some roles will no longer be necessary in a few years, maybe even a year. We're already seeing...

fewer hires in certain segments because the productivity and the efficiency of individuals and other segments like programmers have increased so much companies simply don't need to hire as many programmers or other roles as they once used to. And the historical example that I love to give is the gas lamp street lighters. Oh,

Several hundred years ago, before electricity, major cities, we had gas lamps. Paris was called the city of lights because of its gas lamps lining the streets. That was unheard of throughout Europe. But when electricity came along and the light bulb came along, Thomas Edison's invention, we no longer needed gas lamps. We could...

wire these poles and put a light bulb at the top. And that meant we didn't have to hire people to go around the streets every night and literally light those lamps. Those roles were eliminated. And it's sad for those individuals. Yes, they had to figure out something else to do with their lives. But as a society, it's really hard for us to look back and say, you know what? I prefer we go back to those gas lamp days. I don't really like electricity. I don't think we should have it. No. AI is going to be amazing for a society. Yeah.

But we have to recognize that roles are going to be eliminated and other roles need to change. Your podcast is fantastic because it's helping your listeners understand this is what's happening with AI. This is what I can do with AI. This is how I can reimagine my business and my role alongside of or with or through artificial intelligence and how we can improve ourselves and ensure that we have a place in our future society.

Oh, totally. I mean, I am nerding out so much about the historical aspect of it, too, and whatnot. But it's so interesting because I don't think people realize it's bringing it back to what you said in the beginning where you're like, a lot of us thought this was going to be a fad, right? I remember when people I saw people online being like, oh, it's just like a fad diet for a certain amount.

AI, whatever. It'll be gone. No, this is here. And not only is this here, this is like taking on our world and progressing so much faster than anything we have ever experienced in our culture. You know what I mean? Like how...

And so that was one of my hurdles. I was like, this is part of my story. You might have heard me share this already. But first, when I first heard about this stuff, I was grumpy about it. Like the grumpy grandpa shaking my fist at the neighbor's fence being like, isn't BetterNet fake enough? I was not really into these tools, but

then I had that realization where I was like, okay, no, like they're here. And the best thing we can do is get curious about them now, slowly start to use them, have conversations about them to shape the future we want to shape with these tools. The more we can start getting curious about them now, the easier it is going to be to evolve with these tools and not be left behind or displaced by these tools, I think. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but I think for me, one of the problems is

in, say, early 2023, was that most of the time if I saw somebody talking about AI, they were talking about...

an image that was generated that was very clearly not something that a human made, right? And maybe it was cool, maybe it was interesting, but there was no business impact to that kind of thing, right? Or being able to create a short video or being able to even duplicate somebody's voice visage in an image or a video. There weren't a lot of practical applications for what I was seeing in 2023. But now obviously fast forward just 12 months and the practical applications are

So that's one of the big focuses I have is when I'm talking to folks is how are we using AI today? How can you use AI in an actual practical business use case? How will AI help you grow? Whether you're one person or a thousand person business, there's some really amazing and real authentic ways that we can use AI today.

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Yes. And that's what I love to hear. And exactly what you said is like about there's so many possibilities. It's about figuring out what you need the most help with in your business life, team, whatever. So tell us a little bit about like how you go about using AI tools in your day to day. I definitely want to hear about your Agorapulse GPT team that you seem to create. Tell us about all the things. Yeah.

Yeah. And to your point, that's one of the challenges too. There are so many ways that you can use AI, but it's not a tool. I know some people talk about it like it's a tool, but it's not really. It's a technology. It's like electricity. It's powering everything else that we're doing. ChatGPT is a tool. And because of that, it's not like Canva, where if I tell you, you can go to Canva and you can create images or short video snippets.

You now understand what you can do with Canva. There is no question in your mind. Okay, that's what I can do. With AI, because it's a technology, we need those guardrails and we need those ideas and those use cases and those samples. Because if you simply just open up ChatGPT...

It is literally a blank canvas. What do I do next? I have no idea. And so I'm having a lot of fun exploring and learning about new ways to use these tools. I'll use ChatGPT or I'll use Claude kind of back and forth depending on what it is I'm actually trying to do. I find, at least for my purposes, Claude is a better writer.

Even if I'm telling it very specifically what I want done, the writing that comes out of Claude sounds so much more like me. It sounds very natural. Whereas ChatGPT is still somewhat stilted and robotic, even if I'm giving it the same kind of information. And I often use a tool called Magi, which is a wrapper for all the different LLMs, which is pretty nice because then I can be in one chat and I can go back and forth between things.

different language models and different custom GPTs. I don't know if you've really gotten into jet GPTs or custom GPTs on this show. We can if you want. But one of my roles at Agorapulse for like last quarter was to come up with our brand story. And it was a really interesting thought exercise. I became the chief storyteller in the middle of 2024. That was not my title or role specifically before that. And one of the things I identified early on was that we didn't have storytelling guidelines.

And we didn't really have a true brand story. Now, a lot of people get confused about this. If they have a brand story, they might have it on their about page. And it's like how their brand came into being as a brand. It's the story of their founders. It's not an actual brand story. An actual brand story is what is it that you do as a brand? Who do you do it for? And why do you do it that way? What makes the how and the why of your brand different?

from any other brand that's out there, whether you're a dry cleaning shop or a software as a service like we are at Agorapulse. So, you know, there's a lot of things that we do that a lot of other brands do, but the why behind those things is what's really interesting. So I'd never gone through this exercise before just because I had this title of chief storyteller. It doesn't mean I've like classically trained in storytelling, not at all. So rather than hire a strategist, I turned to ChatGPT and I said, look,

This is what I need to do. I need to come up with a brand story for Agorapulse.

walk me through how we're going to do this together. Start asking me questions. And that's one of my favorite tactics to use with AI is to tell it to ask me questions before trying to give me any kind of output, because we all know AI has been programmed to be super helpful. So if you tell it to write a blog post, it's going to write a blog post without any input whatsoever. It would just do that on its own. And that's not what we want. So it said, ask me questions.

And so, of course, it started asking me, I mean, like this detailed questionnaire, not only who is Agorapulse, but who are we talking to? What are our products? What are our differentiators? And it went on and on. A consultant would to the point where it took me probably a couple of weeks to really work through all the responses. And then the next step was, let's talk about frameworks, because I knew there were a lot of different frameworks for brand story. I'd studied a few, like StoryBrand by Don Miller. I'd studied Tamsen Web Search. A friend of mine actually interviewed her online.

on one of my podcasts and she's got a brilliant book, Find Your Red Thread. And that Red Thread framework really appealed to me in the organization. And so we ended up doing this mix of Tamsen's Red Thread framework with just a little bit of StoryBrand woven in. We were able to craft an actual brand story that took in all the information already applied and applied that brand framework.

which meant that now I've got a brand story, which I can put into a custom GPT along with our brand voice style guidelines. And now anything that I want to create for Agorapulse, I can pull that information in and make sure that we're reflecting our values. We're reflecting who we want to talk to, the way that they talk, why we do business, because it's something that's really interesting. If you've never thought about it,

then as a brand, when you're talking to a prospect, you're simply going to focus on your features and benefits. You're going to say, we do X, Y, and Z so that you can do A, B, C. But if you know your brand story, you can say how it's so important to us that you become accomplished in your role as a business, whatever that is. And it's because of that, that we have set these things up in our business. Right.

It creates true differentiation right from the outset for your brand. So that's just one of the many ways that I'm using AI at Agorapulse. Anyone who has listened to this podcast knows that this is like my bread and butter. I love, love branding. And then especially lately, I've been doing a similar exercise. I actually think you heard me chatting about it on Jeff's podcast, but the brand blueprint exercise I've created is this like

training document that does outline all of those things for your brand. I call it the five core strategies of your brand and like your brand identity is what I consider your brand story. The mission, vision, values, beliefs, opinions. People don't realize that beliefs and opinions, your brand has them. And then that fully shapes like

Your ability to make decisions, to communicate with your people, to really... It's exactly what you said. It threads into all the different aspects of your business. And so I love, love, love going through this brand exercise, this brand blueprint exercise, because...

Chat GPT can communicate with you, outline, explain to you all these different things about your brand that you might not even realize. And it's so interesting. And it gives you so much confidence to be able to show up and understand more about your brand in that way. But then also being able to use that with your AI assistant to train it. Yeah.

The responses that you get from AI at that point are so much better. I always chuckle when people complain about AI being generic and it can be. But if you give it all these details about your brand that literally one person can hardly hold in their head all on their own, but AI can understand an 80 page document and...

Hold that and think about it and then write your social media caption. Totally reflects your brand's values, talks the way you would talk, reflects the opinions. It's so awesome. If you can't tell, I'm squirming in my seat over here getting excited.

Yeah, that's exactly what I did for myself. I created a custom GPT for my voice that I could apply to anything that I needed to create quickly on the fly. And so I fed ChatGPT a bunch of my long form content that I've written because I like to write. I've got really long articles on my website and identify right away because you ask it. Here's all this information about me. It

Tell me what you think of my style. Describe it for me. And it was spot on. It talked about how I was conversational and approachable. I like to break down complex tasks into or topics or themes or ideas into very simple to understand ways. It talked about my love for science fiction.

And my love for history. Right. And so now it knows I love to weave historical references into all of my content or science fiction parallels. I say, don't do both.

It knows I like to write in prose. I'm not the kind of guy that writes in short sentences or bullet points. That's not me. My answers are long and convoluted. I'm very old fashioned in that way where I can have a whole page that's one sentence. That's just the way that I not only write, but it's the way that I speak. Because one of the things I learned early on as a writer, it really behooves me to write the same way that I talk. So when people meet me after they've read a bunch of my blog posts or something like that,

They're not surprised. It's the same thing that they've been reading on the page. So now I'm able to use that GPT for all kinds of things. And it really does sound like me. I love my little heart is so full of excitement right now because literally it's I get this is why I love the idea of I myself. My original brand is Feel Good Social. That's the brand I've been growing for five years. And our whole like...

foundation message is like about showing up as yourself, right? That's one of my stories that I went through, like trying to show up like everyone else. And just like it was exhausting, finally leaned into who I am and show up as I am. And that made my business so much easier. It made me attract the right people. And thinking about that when it comes to AI tools, it's like my AI tool is completely different than your AI tool. Like I just heard you use the word behoove. If my

AI tool spit out the word behoove, I'd be like, what the heck are you doing, ChatGVD? But that's what's so beautiful about it is that we are all individuals and really thinking about these tools, using them to get to the core of who we are, understand who we are, and then also training them to reflect exactly who we are.

There's really so much opportunity here for us to all embrace who we are instead of turning our brand into robots, which is just so easy to fall into if you skip this first big step, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. I have to tell it not to use delve, even though I would delve into things all the time. I've probably been using that word for many years. I hear you. It is so funny because, yeah, there's so many little AI tropes that like,

People are becoming more and more recognizable. And there's two camps that I hear when I talk to people. For me, it's crucial. And I was especially rolling my eyes when Chachi PT was like, hashtags are crucial. I'm like, no, some medical emergency is crucial. Not a hashtag. But we all have our words that are like, ew, no, I wouldn't use those. But then I also hear the opposite end of the equation where they're like, wait,

Wait, I can't use unlock anymore? Like all my marketers, their little hearts are sinking because they're like, but...

I like to use the word unlocked. And I'm like, I mean, you can. AI loves it too. And people are going to think that AI wrote it. Or I don't know who was using the rocket emoji before AI, but guys, we need to stop using it. Totally ruined. What like mistakes do you see people making with AI when it comes to using these tools? Or have you noticed any weirdness that AI's thrown your way that you've had to work around? Yeah, definitely the first one that you already mentioned, which is they're not

training their artificial intelligence tool of choice, who they are, who they're trying to talk to. And they're just trusting that the copy they give back is good. Yeah.

And it's not, right? Language the way you would use it. And they're not using language the way your target audience would use it. And that's the real differentiator when it comes to marketing, right? I don't know how many of your audience are maybe business owners that have to do marketing for their business, but that's not their role. And this is where you can save yourself so much time. If you go through the exercise of training the AI, you know, who it is that you're trying to reach with your marketing copy and who you are,

As a brand, that's going to make everything else that you do just so much more accurate and effective. But it's also that accuracy that's the second mistake, which is like into depth. They assume that...

The output is accurate. And that's a little bit different from whether it's appropriate or not for your brand. An easy example I'll give you is I do a lot of podcasting. I do a lot of guesting and that sort of thing. So I'm often feeding transcripts into Cloud or ChatGPT in order to generate social copy or pull quotes, right, for a blog post and that sort of thing. First of all, you have to be very explicit with the AI, particularly when you're dealing with transcripts. You have to say, look,

I want a quote from the guest or from this person, and it's got to be from the transcript. Because early on, I did an interview with Chris Penn, who's just a titan in this industry. And I wanted to do a summary that pulled a couple of his quotes out for a LinkedIn newsletter. And I did this great summary of the conversation that we had. And I'm looking at the quote, I'm like, I've never been really saying that.

I went back and I searched the transcript. Sure enough, no, he did not say those things. He may have said them someplace else in his life, but he did not say them in my interview. I said, look, it's got to be specific from the transcript. And it's been perfect and flawless ever since I gave it that direct

to tell it, I'm not the guest, I'm the host. The guest is Chris Penn or whomever in this case. Make sure you pull a quote from them directly from the transcript. It's been great since then. But I still have to take that step of checking. I still have to verify. And this is even more crucial if you're using AI for any kind of data analysis. If you're feeding it spreadsheets full of data,

You need to start small with limited sets of data so that you can verify that the AI knows what you want to accomplish with that data and then still have to go back and verify, all right, does this make sense? Is this true? Whether it's doing calculations on your behalf or it's analyzing large data sets. One lady I talked to, Sunny Hunt, worked with a university where they were surveying students.

about something that they wanted to do, a particular kind of campaign. And with those kinds of surveys, they were very open-ended responses. And so something that would have taken them four weeks to analyze as a human, where you've got to read every response, then you've got to put it in a bucket and tag it and label it, and then analyze the tags and labels. AI was able to do that in mere seconds. So that was fantastic. But they still had to go through that process of training the AI, validating in short

Right. Was it actually pulling that data or did it make some assumptions to pull data from something else? Did it come to a conclusion that we didn't intend based on some other combination of the data and then do the whole report? So those are my two big things. Make sure that you're training the AI to know who you are, who you're trying to talk to, and make sure you're validating everything that the AI comes up with. Oh.

Totally. I'm so glad that you're driving home that point too, because I do think firstly, it's easy for someone to not realize that when they're first starting to use these tools. And then it's also easy to forget about and to get sucked into that hole of, okay, this tool's like doing it for me. It's great. Okay, wait, but I'm not going to check it this one time. And then like you end up

eating your foot or whatever it is. But it's so true. It always needs the human touch and you need to hold yourself accountable to that. And that's why I always encourage people as well to make guardrails for yourself. Give yourself guidelines on how do I want to use these tools when you are working these tools into your workflows and your processes. Make sure that you are also adding that checkpoint

of, okay, going to listen back through this podcast now that I've used the get rid of filler words thing. Even if it's on double speed, I'm listening back through, making sure it all sounds good and it's okay. Or reading through. I never once have copy pasted something that AI written into a social media post and just hit send without reading it through. Never. A horrible idea. There's easy checks and balances and it will still make you more productive. Not sacrificing the quality of your work or the

factual of your work and stuff. But, oh man. And then also too, what you brought up was like bias in AI tools as well. Like being aware, really what I encourage people to do too is always put your critical thinking hat on. For example,

I was writing prompts for my AI Reels prompt library with AI Reels hooks and stuff. I wanted my ChatGPT to categorize my prompts into different content buckets. Different versions of AI are better, worse. And I do think that ChatGPT has grumpy days where it gives me horrible answers and I come back tomorrow and it's better. It sucks.

categorize them into buckets really quickly. And I was like, yes, awesome. And then I was looking at them. I'm like, no, this does not make sense. This prompt does not fall into this busting bucket or whatever. So just making sure you're thoughtful about it too. Another thing that this brings up for me, this is why I really encourage...

teams, like people in businesses encouraging their team members to use AI tools. I think we need to be talking more about training our team members to use AI tools in the right way. Often on this podcast, I don't want to throw any guests under the bus, but I'll ask people, how are you using these tools with your teams? What are you doing? And they'll be like, oh, yeah, I'm just encouraging them to use them. And I'm like,

Really? You're not telling them how or giving them guidelines or making sure that you're setting a standard for the quality of work? What have you guys been doing at Agorapole? So just like in general. Right.

We're definitely not setting any kind of standards at Agorapulse, I'll tell you that transparently. Part of it because I don't have a team personally, so I don't have any direct reports that I can give them any kind of direction that they have to do anything. But as an organization, it's a little bit fits and starts. Some people are finding great uses for AI, some people aren't. And one of the things that we're doing from my perspective, from the storytelling perspective, is I'm working with our product marketing team.

to develop case studies and success stories. They're going out and they're finding customers to talk to and interview. And I've been working with them on ways that we can build a custom GPT that will take their transcript, which might be 30, 60 minutes long with a customer. And they might've gone in all kinds of different directions, right? But at the end of the day, what they're hoping to pull out of that transcript is who was the customer? What was their challenge? Right?

Right. What was their journey? What were they using before they used Agorapulse? How did they see that solution? How did Agorapulse help? The typical customer success hero's journey thing, right? Something AI can absolutely recognize. So I've developed a custom GPT where they just dump the transcript in and it's going to create initial draft case study.

Following the format that I prescribed, pulling out all the storytelling topics, pulling out specific quotes, again, hopefully accurately from the transcript that I can then hand over to our content team and say, here's a draft.

Do whatever you'd like to do to it, to clean it up, to expand on it. Here's the original transcript. You can refer back to that however you want to. And it's speeding up the process, right, of how our content team can publish really good success stories. They don't have to read or listen to a 60-minute interview and try and digest all of that. They can take that

draft, which is really good. And then massage it, change anything that they'd like to change to make it sound more like a Goropals or fit more into whatever it is that we're talking about. That's just one way that we're trying to explore ways that we can use AI. Another really cool thing that I'll share really quickly is we identified an issue where our sales team was struggling to find information quickly.

And that might be, do we or do we not have a particular capability within Agorapulse? Do we have any stories of customers who have come to us from other brands? Do we have any stories at all of a particular customer vertical? All these kinds of questions that, yes, they could go to our Slack page.

And they could ask or they could go to our blog and do searches and that sort of thing. But that was time consuming. Not the kind of thing they could do while they were literally on the call with the prospect. Maybe if they were drafting an email or a social post, they could do that. So we built for them our own internal RAG, that Retrieval Augmentation Generation System, that was powered by our blog, our support center articles, our internal documentation, all of our stories and testimonials and quotes.

And it has a Slack integration. So now, even while they're on a call with a prospect, they can go into Slack real quick and ask 1UP, as the platform we're using, do we have any testimonials from higher ed students

or universities in France. And it'll say, yeah, here they are right there. And even link to them if they want to. And to get that answer in seconds. And it's a great use case for having that kind of internal AI system and how we're doing things to Goropulse.

Oh, man, I love all these other ideas of ways that we can use AI in just steps in a process or like behind the scenes. So many times when you just start hearing about these tools, they're like, oh, it's a copywriting tool. No.

new. There's so much more. I also think it's really cool because so many people are talking about creating customer service chatbots and stuff that's like on the front end of your business, which that's awesome. But also, yeah, what if there's like a chatbot that you can create for a team member to really help them along in their process or help them do their job better? One of the things I keep preaching is that AI, the AI tool doesn't have to do

an entire task for you. Think about the little steps in the process that this can help with and stuff. Last thing I want to ask you about is I know that you mentioned before we hit record, you have developed a new process for taking interviews that you've done on other people's shows and then using ChatGP to transform that into easily content that you can repurpose to set yourself as the expert on your social platforms and whatnot. Can you tell us what that looks like?

Yeah, because we all know or most of us probably know that, you know, it's great to be on other shows like I'm doing for you and you're going to be on my show in a few weeks, which is fantastic. That's great for getting in front of other audiences. And we probably also have been told that it's really great to repurpose that kind of content for our own channels. But that's often challenging to do. It's time consuming. Maybe you do or do not have access to content.

The original recordings in the file. So maybe you can or can't even create the video posts. And so you just end up sharing the whole interview to social media.

And that's not very effective. People don't want to know that you spoke for an hour. They want to know what was the one thing that you can teach me right now on social media about that topic. And then maybe I'll listen to the whole interview if it's of interest to me. So that's a problem. And then the other problem is if I want to create social content out of a 60 minute interview, that means I need to go back and I need to relisten to the interview and identify a segment where I think I said something smart and that's a problem. And so what I developed was,

A custom GPT. It was just a chat with chat GPT, but I already had my voice and my audience GPTs, right? So I went through the exercise of identifying who my target audience is and what my sound voice is. And then I copied and pasted the output into a custom GPT so I could call them those anytime I wanted to. So I did a couple of interviews recently.

Got the transcript by just giving the video to Descript and generating just the raw transcript. No editing necessary, right? I just wanted to be able to dump it into a text file and pull that into ChatGPT and then use first my audience GPT.

to help identify, okay, what are 10 or 15 themes or topics or answers that I gave in these interviews that my target audience would be interested in? And I said, absolutely. Here's 10 ideas.

10 things that you talked about. One was my AI journey, which we talked about the outset of this show, right? Somebody else asked me a very similar question. That's normal. And then a bunch of other topics and themes that we talked about, like one of the presentations, one of the talks was to marketing students at a university. So we specifically talked about the future of marketing roles and how agencies are being impacted by AI, right? So that was one of the themes. Yeah.

So then I brought in the voice GPT. I said, cool, we've got these themes. Now let's craft a social media post focused primarily on LinkedIn. I can repurpose it to the other ones, but I want to focus on LinkedIn. And here's the framework. I used a Justin Welch framework.

that starts with a hook. Then there's the body, the meat of what you're going to teach, right? And then there's some kind of call to conversion at the end. And for me, that's typically just going to be a question or prompt to get them to talk about something related to what I'm saying. And I said, hey, let's just start with number

number one, and let's draft together what that post is going to look like. And we went back and forth a little bit. At first it was really short and I actually wanted a little bit longer, a little bit meatier. And we came up with a really great post. I created an image in Canva. And this was another tip from Justin. He said when he's posting to LinkedIn, some of the highest performing images that he includes with his post are basically a, what looks like a tweet.

It looks like he shared something to Twitter and screenshotted it. It's not exactly I can tell that he generated it himself. And I said, okay, cool, in my head. I'm like, I can do that in Canva. So I created a template for myself. And I asked ChetGPT,

summarize this post 180 characters or less. And it gave me two great sentences that summarized the meaning of that post. I put that as text into Canva and downloaded that as an image and posted that. And it got hundreds and hundreds of impressions, a dozen comments, a lot more reactions than I typically get.

on social media. And now I've got this thing that I can replicate 10, 15 times until I run out and I put in the next interview and I can do it again and again. And now I have a really easy way to create personal from me thought leadership content on social media. And it's something, frankly, we're going to replicate at Agorapulse because we want our CEO to be more active. Right.

on LinkedIn and he doesn't have time to write copy, but he does do a lot of interviews. We're going to be able to take his interviews and use this same format and create posts that sound just like him because they're pulling the text from the transcript. It's not like it's creating copy out of thin air. It's just taking your text, editing a little bit, massaging it, making it sound like it's from you and not a prompt from a question. And it works really well.

Yeah, yes, I love that. It's so cool how much we can repurpose from podcast interviews. Exactly. It's not just like video clips. They're fine and it's good to share them, but those really don't perform like that. I tend to go on Instagram and stuff. So I know every week my podcast clips aren't going to be the best performing.

But I have used transcripts from podcast interviews to create reels hooks based on the topic. Then I'll write captions to go with the reels and all the different stuff. Also, I pull quotes from my guests, like really interesting poignant quotes and stuff. Something that I just thought about is you will find out when I share this episode because I'll send you so many clips and so many different things if you want to share it for yourself. But something...

haven't done yet and I've played around with a little bit is I wonder if I could take that to the next level with my guests where it's like I could share a list of quotes from the interview with them. I always like to think about how can I make this as easy as possible for my guests to share, for my guests to be grateful to me and stuff like that, to really develop relationships and stuff. And man, there's just so many possibilities. But I...

have loved this conversation. Thanks for geeking out with me about all this stuff. Can you please share with everyone how they can connect with you and find out more about you? Because I know they'll want to.

Sure. This has been an absolute blast. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all of you for listening. If I've said something that triggered more questions in you or you just want to connect for fun or you want to listen to my podcast, go to the socialmediahat.com forward slash connect and you can learn all about me. You'll find all my social channels there. I'm not going to list them all because I'm active on all of them. So whatever your preferred social channel is, you can follow me there, read my content, listen to the podcast, whatever you'd like to do.

I love it. Thank you so much, Mike. My pleasure. Thank you. How great was Mike, you guys? I truly enjoy Mike. He is such an awesome human. And also, I was lucky enough to be a guest on his podcast, and we have collaborated in many ways. I just got to say that I truly appreciate how Mike is an ally for women in the AI space, especially, and all the things that he's doing to

share a human first approach to AI tools as well. So make sure that you connect with him. And don't forget, if you loved this episode, give us five stars, give us a follow on your favorite podcast listening platform, because that really will help us to continue growing our authentic AI audience and just spreading that authentic AI word. Thank you so much for tuning in my friend and I will catch you next time I catch you.

Thank you so much for tuning into Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, my friend. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your shows.