Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm Ellie Scarf. I'm a senior executive coach of, just about 20 years. But now I spend most of my time working with other coaches who are looking to grow their businesses with more corporate clients. Today I wanna talk about how to use AI without ruining your content and without ruining your connection to the people who read your content.
And I would say that this is becoming a bit of, not just a trend, but a movement , in social media. So if you are on LinkedIn as often as I am, and. It's a bit embarrassing to admit that, but I'm on LinkedIn every day, multiple times a day. And there is definitely a trend that people are moving away from purely AI written content.
There's a real recoil , from that. From wanting to engage with purely AI written content, and I get it right, you can spot it. I think people are getting really savvy about what is purely AI written content and what is not. Now, I am not a. Purist in the sense that I don't think you shouldn't use AI content just for the sake of it.
My take is that if content is helpful, content is helpful. The issue is that a lot of AI content is not helpful, is overly genericized and is using. Really predictable phrasing, and certain tropes and even exact words that start to feel so predictable that we kind of recoil from it.
And, that's, where how I'm engaging, how I'm feeling about the AI content that I'm seeing at the moment. You'll all see like the M dash, if people see the M dash now, they're running for the hills, so make sure you are deleting them. From anything that you get AI to write for you. And also, our LinkedIn coach, Kate Merriweather, she has, she gives us lots of advice on different , different things that AI is doing a lot of the time.
So, there are these real predictable patterns and whether you know what those patterns are or whether you just intuitively feel it, I think we are. Pushing away from the purely ar I've written content, even if you have the world's best custom GPT. and , don't get me wrong, I've used all these tools, but I'm moving away from it.
And I wanna show you some ways that we can still use AI to help us write our content and to come up with our ideas and to plan. And there's loads of different ways we can do that, but in a way that keeps our. Connection and our unique insight and our unique voice based on our experience in a way that keeps that front and center.
So that's what I wanna talk about today. Now, I'm going to be really practical. I'm talking about real things you can do if you do not want AI writing your content. As a whole, right? If you want to use AI as a tool and not be outsourcing your content to ai. So,the first tip I have is that AI is really great at extracting relevant themes and questions to answer and suggested topics from the conversations you are having.
So that might be, for example, if you are, , having sales conversations or and assuming you're recording them. And of course that needs to be very ethically and transparently done. , But assuming you're recording those, , from potentially from, any other conversations you're having, tools like, , fathom ai, I'm sure a lot of the other note takers.
When they put together your summaries of those calls, they also have the capacity to, , you can often edit how those summaries are presented. And so I've been experimenting with having fathom give me a section that is, what are some potential podcast questions or podcast topics that emerge from this conversation?
Obviously with all identifying features removed, now we have to be a little bit careful, I think from an ethical perspective here. Because firstly,we can't record people without them being aware of it.And we just need to be conscious of confidentiality . But then again, those conversations we are having are the most, the best insights we have into our ideal clients.
What's going on for them? And so, even if we put AI completely to the side, what I would say is take a moment after your meetings to write down two or three topics that came up. That could be LinkedIn , topics could be stories you'd wanna share. On LinkedIn could be ideas that you had for future content.
So you can do it that way, but you can use AI to help you. And it could be that you simply have a transcript, you feed it into your preferred large language model, whether that's chat, GBT, Claude, Gemini, whatever. And you get it to give you some suggestions based on your conversations. It could be that rather than taking a transcript from a conversation, , you could feed it what you are engaging with, right?
So it might be posts that you've read or it could be reading you are doing, , anything like that. It could be . Articles, snippets of articles that have sat with you, things you wanna capture. , And it can make suggestions , from now on. And interesting. Interestingly, there are some tools now, like the note takers, the digital note takers, like the fathoms, the otters, , the thousands of them, , the ones, the ones that show up in Zoom as if they're a person.
They're quite intrusive. And so, , there are now tools that are less intrusive, where it is not immediately evident that there is recording going on. Now I wanna be really conscious that I'm not suggesting you secretly record your conversations. Even in your in-person meetings, you can use these tools on your phone in an app.
Of course we must use them ethically and let people know about them. It just means that they're not sitting there like a person in your Zoom meetings. And they're sort of a bit more, , a bit less, I guess less intrusive, is the best way I can describe it. Now, one of those tools I heard about from Samantha Imba in her podcast How I Work, she's recording a series called How I Ai.
, With her colleague, Neo Alphin. , And so if you look up the How I Work podcast , there was a great episode recently called 13 AI Tools We Use Every Day. So I recommend you listen to that. Samantha says she uses a tool called Granola and Granola, , is something that captures conversations, but without showing up as a person in the meetings, you can simply click record.
When you have , on your phone in a meeting, on a desk. So there are a lot of tools out there that can help you do that, that can help you with this notetaking. But beyond note taking, I guess what I'm saying is they can take the notes and the AI tools can add a layer of intelligence to help you extract themes.
For content questions, you could answer pain points that have emerged and suggest topics. So that is one, , one thing you could do if you don't want your AI writing your content, it can tell you what you could write about based on those conversations that you're having. Of course, with all of those ethical points kept in mind.
Another great use of ai, I think , in our content is that it can be your copy editor it can do it in a few ways. So it can simply be like a grammar checker, right? A grammar checker, a spell checker, a, , sense checker, but it can also, you can also ask it to give you very specific feedback, and the feedback will depend on what you want.
And the success of using it in this way really will depend on how specific you are able to brief it. How specifically you are able to brief it. So for example, do you want this piece to come across with a certain tone? Do you want to be particularly clear on one particular point? Do you want it to encourage a certain type of engagement?
Do you want it to speak to a certain type of person? What it can do. You could ask it in fact, to edit it, to do those things or what I like is for it to give me a few points of feedback and you can say, give me three points of feedback or give me three suggestions of how I could improve it in this way.
Or you could be a bit less , less determinative in that way, but it is really great, as a feedback giver, sometimes better than it is as a writer, to be honest. And the tool you would use for this is just whatever your preferred, preferred general , general AI tool is. So the chat GPEs, Claudes, Geminis of the world.
Another way we can use AI is with converting your content in one of a number of ways. And so this occurs when you have got some writing that you have created. So it's your intellectual property, it's your voice, it's your words, and you have it in some way. Now, this could be, for example, you have a. A huge back catalog of LinkedIn posts.
You may have a bunch of blogs that you wrote for your website. You may have programs that you've written or speeches that you've written or keynote addresses or any of this pool of ip. And I always suggest that you do a bit of an audit on all of the IP that you have because it is likely a huge, a huge repertoire of.
Content that you can use. What AI can help us do is a few things. It can refresh an old piece, right? So you could get an old piece, you could, , get it to refresh into , your new business voice. It can refresh it in light of new happenings in the world. New challenges emerging in your ideal client industry.
Really just to take it from being an old piece and then just, refreshing it. That is something you can totally do. It can change the length of a piece. So you may have written a blog that blog may be quite lengthy, but you would like to repurpose it , using your words, and you have to be clear about that.
You may want to repurpose it for LinkedIn, which is going to require shorter pieces of text and a slightly different way that we write in ,more bullet point style. So it can do that. It will also help you shift the audience that you are writing to. So you may have written a lot of your content to an individual buyer or an individual coachee, but as many people that I work with are doing.
We're shifting more to targeting corporate buyers. And so that is quite a different audience and it's a different way that we would write, so we could ask the AI tool to do that shift for us. We might be shifting our ideal client, shifting sector, shifting industry. And so we may wanna say, okay, whereas in the past I'd written this piece targeting an education market.
Now I want to target professional services. Could you please rewrite it with that in mind? So. All of those are ways we can use your IP in lots of different ways for lots of different audiences. And really not reinventing the wheel every single time we write something. And using AI as a tool.
Now editing is key. So when we get the AI to do this, think of it as getting you 75% of the way there. But you still have to apply a strong edit, which is bringing your voice back into it because it's very easy for the AI to take your voice and sort of for it to be lost a little. And I would always brief it, say, I want this to be in my voice, using my words as much as possible, but it will lose some of that,and it may sort of not make sense in the same way.
So make sure you are infusing that voice back into it. Another way you can use AI is for your planning and content. Planning is one of the best ways you can spend your time and is one of the things we are least likely to do. And the problem is, and look, honestly, I find myself in this bucket. Often as well.
I'm not perfect at this. I don't know many people who are, but I do know that everyone who plans out their content in 90 day bursts finds it extremely valuable. So how can AI help it? Well, it can help us in.Probably infinite ways, but here are just two that can, I think is a good way to use it.
One is that you can do a brain dump, right? So if you are like me, you have captured ideas everywhere. You have lots of ideas, , and the problem is that they're swirling around your head and your inbox and your notes app and all of that. And so what you can do with AI is you can do a bit of a combination of a brain dump, a copy and paste.
I really do think using the voice feature is really great for this, the voice recording feature. And you just, you might go for a walk and just talk at it. Say, you might have to say, don't interrupt me until I tell you to. Otherwise it'll stop and think you're finished, , repeatedly. But then once you've done that, ask it to create themes, suggest posts, , and get it into your schedule.
Now you'll have to give it some detail about how you want your plan to be structured. So you might say, please create a draft content plan based on the following parameters I want to post on LinkedIn four times a week. In those four times a week, I want two of those to be value based or sort of thought leadership posts.
I want one of them to be more personality or content driven and I want one of them to be sales or promotions focused. Everything should be oriented towards speaking to my ideal client and answering the questions that they have. It should use language that they would be likely to use, and a lot of it, as far as possible, should refer back to their challenges and pain points and goals.
So you would give it that information and it can then create a bit of a draft. For you. Of course, again, you edit it, you overlay your thoughts on that, and you can go back and forth with it, or you can just take it and then work from there. Another way you can get it to help you with this planning process.
If you don't want to just go freestyle brain dump, stream of consciousness style is you can ask it to interview you, and to ask you questions about your ideal clients, about their challenges, about your offers , and to help you identify. These topics and these pillars,that can go into a content plan.
So whereas the brain dump style is more about you leading it by saying, this is what I've got, this is what I want back, getting it to interview, you are saying, I wanna create a content plan. Can you ask me what I need? What, you need to know to help you come up with some post ideas based on these following categories.
So that is a really great way that you can use ai and it's not writing it for you, it's giving you prompts and it's taking it from your brain. And then the final way that you can use AI to help you write your content without it writing your content for you is to help it help you produce easily, right?
Help you to produce content easily. And part of that is, getting, helping you to get things out of your head. And I'm really thinking about advanced level dictation. So this is sort of a slightly different thing to the brain dump, but it's when you are actually writing the posts, if you are a person who doesn't think in writing and you think more in speaking, this is particularly for you.
So what you can do. If you can dictate, and this will work with any of your large language models, so your, Chat gpts es, your, your Claudes. If you give it enough, pre-warning of what you're gonna do, you can ask it to, capture what you're saying, and then produce a sort of a clean, edited version of what you've said.
And then you can see what it comes out with. However, again, I learned of a new tool that I'm considering. Testing out, from, Amantha Iba, and How I work, podcast or how ai , podcast on the 13 AI tools they use every day. And this tool was called Wispr Flow. So W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-W.
You can check out the links in that, how I Work. Show notes of that episode. And it lets you dictate, but it also has the smarts to, if you sort of say, I'm going to share five ways of doing something. It doesn't capture the four. Oh, no, I mean section. It just says, I'm going to capture five.
And it says, it lets you say, oh, hang on, cancel that. Go back. And, and restate it without you having to sort of edit it or go backwards or anything like that. So that seems like a really great tool if you are someone who prefers to talk your content out. And there is something I think that is quite magical about content that starts as speaking, because of course you'll wanna remove all the ums and the , and I believe that tool would do that , and any of the tools could do that, but.
Spoken content is. Very much more likely to be your voice, and it's literally your voice, right? So , it's what comes out when we're not .Now, you might want prompts, you might want bullet points. And of course if you're gonna script it, you might as well just use your script because we're not actually recording video recording content, but.
Capturing you talking something through is much more likely to capture that true voice, and be therefore, so much different to that generic sterile AI content that we're trying to get away from. So there's a few ideas. I really hope that this has been helpful for you today. Honestly, just thinking this through has made me realize that I could be doing even more in this area.
So I will get back to you, as I experiment with more and more ways of using AI without writing my content for me. And I have really, , moved away from using too much AI in my content, certainly on LinkedIn. I'm not writing any of my posts at the moment. I use it to help me go from the episode to create show notes and to create a newsletter.
But truthfully, I do so much editing. I'm not sure that is the best way. So anyway, just know that this is live for all of us. If anyone is saying that they're an expert on this, , they really aren't because we have never been in this world. So, if you would like to talk about how content fits as a part of your business growth , and just how much energy you should be putting into it.
Then let's have a chat and we can talk about how my program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, might help you as you grow your business. You can head over to ellie scarf.com/book a call and we can talk about , whether the programs are good, fit, what's going on for you and all things content and ai.
I'll be back next week.
