Following up on my report from the Generative AI conference, today's guest has transformed a social media dashboard into becoming an AI ghostwriter for digital and social media marketing.
Meet Greg Starling, Head of the Innovation Labs at Tailwind, who is helping to create a new generative AI product there.
- Using AI to brainstorm ideas
- Using AI to streamline marketing processes
- When & how to partner with AI for maximum effectiveness
Take a deep dive into A.I. and how you can better leverage it for your business.
Key Highlights
[03:53] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Greg Starling
[07:51] How Greg Got Into the AI Industry
[10:30] Pushing AI Into Create Tools
[12:41] Getting the Right Queries and Prompts
[18:46] Areas Where Tailwind Has Implemented AI
[22:39] Transition from Social Media Dashboard to AI Marketing Tool
[23:48] Leveraging the AI Engine
[28:54] Streamling AI Into the Marketing Process
[33:19] Greg's Quick Tip on Writing Summary
[34:37] Where to Start the Process of Using AI?
[40:01] Where GPT Technology Is Going?
[45:08] Connect With Greg
Notable Quotes
- People just think chat GPT is only chat GPT When, at the end of the day, you're gonna get something very generic from it, as you said, compared to other tools that are that are putting, you know, secret sauces on top of it.
- Anywhere where you're writing content that you want to that you're using to try to market yourself market your brand, we probably have some AI assistance there that could that can move you along quicker.
- We're trying to do things where we can give you a full on marketing plan, but then help you execute that plan with AI.
- There's this concept that people romanticize a blank page, people say, Oh, well, there's endless possibilities. But the truth is, a blank page stops people from doing what they need to do.
- We're trying to get you off of that blank page, and onto the next step and actually moving forwards, in your kind of marketing process.
- I think people who get really good at this will actually replace people who who ignore it or fearful of it, I know a lot of people aren't I get it, but it's not going to you being fearful of it is not going to stop happening. So I think everybody's got to figure out how they can fit in and, and take advantage of it.
- Start finding a platform that you like that you trust, that you think has your best interests in mind, and figure out how you can start implementing those into your product.
- You need an AI strategy. Even a company like tailwind, had an AI strategy implemented it and you can see what's happened. So every one of us needs to think.
Guest Links:
- Greg Starling on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregstarling/
- Try Out Tailwind Here: https://nealschaffer.com/tailwind (affiliate)
Learn More:
- Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/
- Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
- Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/freebies/
- Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
- All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com
All right, Neil, I am bought into the fact that I need to use AI for my business. What are the next steps? Well listening to this podcast episode, where we talk all about how humans together with AI can unleash the power of AI marketing. That's the topic for this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast, specifically, episode number 308. This is almost a continuation of the conversation from episode number 307, where I talked about the future of AI is now 15 takeaways from Jasper's generative AI conference. And in some ways, this is almost an extension of episode number 304 Chat GPT AI and search engines my new perspective and advice for you. So over the last four or 5678 Yes, I can do the math over the last five episodes. This is the third episode on AI in marketing. I think that it is the newest and most important technology that will impact marketing that's come around in some time. And that's why I want to make sure that you're well equipped for the challenge. And really, from my perspective, the amazing opportunity that it provides you. This is not an AI podcast, I am your digital marketing coach. And this is a podcast that covers a broad range of issues and technologies and platforms and concepts. And when I see something pop up that I think is important, like I did with clubhouse back in the day, or Google Plus, before that, I will bring it up. I do believe that AI is a core technology that has a lot more staying power than clubhouse or Google Plus, although they evolved in other things. So I hope that you'll stay tuned and just know. I mean, if you want to hear more of these, let me know. But you this will be the last AI centric episode that you'll probably hear at least in another few weeks, we'll see how this plays out. Because AI really is starting to appear in many, many things. This email newsletter, the latest one that I sent, if you're not on my newsletter, make sure you go to Neal schaffer.com. The latest episode I sent was actually the summaries were created using AI using not the tool we're going to be talking about today a different tool. But I'm sure you can achieve similar results with the tool that we're going to be talking about today. I was in YouTube uploading a new video. And that video tool that I use has a new API title generator, I ended up using the title from that I was in my social media dashboard, they introduced a new AI social post creator, boom done. It actually ended up being better content. And it saved me time. And it was more creative than I could have been because now I'm basing my content on something that has access to a lot more brains than just my own. So now I have more time to go into more depth and spending more time with you here on this podcast. And spend more time on videos that don't want to just uploaded to YouTube or LinkedIn. So that's really one of the messages here. But before we get to that, there's still some tactical things you need to learn. And I can't know of anyone better to talk about this than today's guest, Greg Starling. Greg is director of tailwinds Innovation Lab. Now, you might have a question mark, you're thinking tailwind? Okay, Neil, I heard Melissa Megginson on your podcast maybe a year or two ago talking about tailwind? Yes, it is the tool I use everyday for Pinterest. It's the tool that I use for my smart bio in my Instagram profile. It's a great tool for Pinterest for Instagram for Facebook. And guess what? Over the last few months, Greg, who has been charged of their innovation lab has rolled out a new tailwind Ghost Rider tool. Go over. I'm going to drop an affiliate link. If you want to show your love your support. If I could speak normally, by the way, I speak Japanese is my first language at home so sometimes the English comes out a little bit weird if you're wondering why sometimes you hear those slurs, that's what it is. But nevertheless, telling ghostwriter go to Neal schaffer.com/tailwind. I'm gonna put that link into the show notes as well. It really helps me with every click obviously, it helps free up more time, just like AI will help you free up more time to create more content like this. So if you find it of any value, I'd be honored if you clicked on a link and you did a free trial hotel and check it out. But telling ghost writer is what he has been developing and I was blown away. There are already 40 different recipes or templates that it has. And I'll just go over this tail and Ghostrider use our AI based technology to generate natural sounding, engaging copy and half the time. Maximize your time creating content and power through brain fog and writer's block with ideas and inspiration. There are things from general copy to Instagram captions AI generated images YouTube video script I outline blog article topic ideas tic toc video description, Shopify product description, Amazon product description, improve your content, simplify your content, blog, editor and proofreader. It goes on and on. So today, before we get really tactical, we're going to talk about three things that you can immediately begin to implement in your business today. Whether you use telling ghostwriter, I hope you do, I hope you at least check it out. But nevertheless, we can use AI to brainstorm ideas, we can use AI to streamline marketing processes. And we can also understand when this is really critical when and how to partner with AI for maximum effectiveness. Man, I I get really excited about this, because I have started almost on a daily basis now trying to figure out what are the pieces of AI that I can begin to use in my own marketing processes. And I want you to get started on that earlier rather than later. So without further ado, here is my interview with Greg Starling of talent. You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neal Schaffer. Gregg starting Welcome to the digital marketing coach podcast.
Greg Starling:Thanks, I appreciate you having me on.
Neal Schaffer:Now. I'm really excited to dig in today to talk all about AI, not just AI for AI sake. But AI in marketing. Greg, I've gotten to know you over there a tailwind. One of my favorite tools for social media marketing, and you're slowly but very aggressively bringing AI into your tool to help all of its users, which is just awesome. And in fact, of all the social media dashboard setting tailwind, has actually been the most aggressive. I think every day now I'm getting an email from another tool saying oh, you can, you know, create captions in our tool. But I think tailwind even though the history of this really started a few months ago, has really been the most aggressive on so congratulations on that. And, and I hear that you're the man behind it. So I can't wait to dig in. I guess Greg, why don't we start by just you know, how did you get into AI? Let's start there. I know you've been in the space a while I'm really curious.
Greg Starling:Yeah. So I'll just super quick, the real fast version of my background. So I've been in technology, my whole adult life, which now is getting old. So it's been about 25 years, going back to the the early days in Google been, you know, CIO and CTO various places. And my last job, I got to work a lot with Apple and Airbnbs innovation labs, fell in love with the idea of running a lab and some of the fondness that comes with thinking, three, four years, five years ahead, as opposed to always happen to just right in front of us. And so Danny Maloney the CEO of tailwind, and I have known each other for a while, and he asked me if I wanted to come over and run their innovation lab. And that was a really exciting opportunity for me. And so that was about four years ago, we were talking about how we can improve marketing, through AI, one of the biggest we hear, really to two things a lot from from the people they used to, and that's I don't know what to do, a lot of times, they're just don't know where to start. And I don't have enough time. And so we thought that AI could potentially solve that I don't have enough time, peace, to an extent, some of the I don't know what to do. And so we started looking at about 18 months ago, two years ago, into the space and seeing what we could do to try to incorporate it. It's been a little over 12 months ago, we actually acquired a company called reply, reply or.ai. They were mostly doing things and kind of the space where if you got a review online, it would automatically reply using AI. And actually it was using GPT. Three, which is kind of the underlying technology with chat GPT and some of the things that everybody hears about to do that. So we acquired them and and the expertise behind it. The people who had been doing it, that's been about 14 months ago. So since then we've been running, you probably didn't see anything at all for about 910 months while we were really trying to understand. But once we really started rolling things out, I think you mentioned this, like we're really aggressive. We've gone from basically having zero AI components to having 50 Different AI components in about three months. Maybe maybe even faster than that. And so that's how that's how we got into the space, we knew it was a need, we particularly need in the space. And so we started looking around and found some people that were that were really good at it. And so now, we're running as fast as we possibly can.
Neal Schaffer:That is an amazing story. So Greg, I assume since you've been there for years, you were also behind like tail and create.
Greg Starling:I wasn't behind talent create, but I was very much involved in telling create, and we're actually incorporating a lot of AI pieces into that as well.
Neal Schaffer:I was gonna say, that was very innovative, to really using best practices and Pinterest design. And somewhat, you know, I don't know how much machine learning was involved at the beginning. But I'm assuming you've added that. And that's just a really compelling product as well, it doesn't really get talked about as much as it should. But if you are looking for a social media dashboard, that can also help you create those images without going to a Canva. I mean, there's really no one else outside of Tallinn that does that. So
Greg Starling:yeah, it's a it's it does. And we actually just recently, I think, in the last week or so are brought in AI image generation with Dali into it. And one of the nice things that we can do that you can't do it, Dali is formatting those images for the right image sizes for places like Pinterest, which is not the square image, like you might see on on some other social platforms. So yeah, we're actually pushing AI in our create tool as well. Yeah,
Neal Schaffer:there's another AI tool that we just talked about. And they also have an art tool. But I was surprised they could only generate square images. Yeah, it's like, wait, wait, wait, I need like 1200 by 630. You know, I mean, so that's huge value right there, actually,
Greg Starling:yeah, it's, it was it was easy for us to implement, because we'd already done all that work in advance with create. So it was pretty straightforward. And soon as we thought, hey, we can do that we, we jumped on it. So that's the fun thing about working where I work is, we got people that are ready to jump and do some cool stuff. As somebody comes up with an idea. We're like, alright, let's, let's figure it out. And so it's a lot of fun.
Neal Schaffer:Very cool. So you mentioned this, jumping into AI, and that you've been working behind the scenes, really, I think that sort of defines AI in general. It's nothing new. It's been there, but it's really the emergence of chat GPT, just over the last three or four months that's really brought this I mean, you know, I got home last night from this conference. And, you know, my wife is like, go chat, GPS, my best friend. So when my wife was not even in social media starts talking about these things related to my work. I know, it's like, hit the mainstream. That's right. So you know, a year or two ago when you started working on this, and my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong, is that GPT? Three is still a database only up to about June 2021. It's not correct. Yeah. Okay. So when you started working on it, what was your original thought about how this could be used in a product like tailwind?
Greg Starling:Well, so what we wanted to try to figure out is how we could do something to make it easier for somebody to generate things like, you know, we're organic social media tool is primarily where we do and we know people have trouble coming up a lot of times with ideas. And so we thought we could use it to generate ideas for people to post about it. But we could also use it to, to augment their posting and say, Hey, I'm posting about, you know, an apple pie and be able to generate a nice tweet or Pinterest pin description or pin title from what they're talking about. And so that that was kind of our original push was, how can we make this really, really easy for people? And I think one of the things that that we've done, I love to chat GPT two, I was on it for well over three hours last night, I pretty much live on it. But one thing that I think that that Talon does, and some of these other social media or these other AI companies do, that's a little maybe different. And so I think sometimes people don't realize all the prompting that goes on kind of behind the scenes. And so whether it's it's Jasper or it's tailwind or copy AI, or a lot of these people in the AI space, what we're all pretty much wearing the same back end. There's there's not a whole lot of differentiation that's going on, we might do some different trading on some models and things like that. But there's not a lot of differentiation going on with what we're doing. But what we do, and what I think we do really, really well at tailwind is prompt, prompt the engine ask the question to to the API in a way that gets the best possible results. So even if you're just putting a generic chat, we're putting a lot of things kind of in the background to make sure that query whenever it's going through when that question is going through to the API, it's coming back in a way that that's going to be a higher value and a little more what you're looking for than if you just go to kind of like a plain naked chat GPT.
Neal Schaffer:So two important things here. So first of all, chat GPT, open AI GPT, two, three, they're the developers of this, this engine, the database, but they provide the API that everybody in the space is basically tapping into that correct. So. So you're also tapping into GPT GPT, two, three, and so are all the other tools and I think that's an important thing. People just think chat GPT is only chat GPT When, at the end of the day, you're gonna get something very generic from it, as you said, compared to other tools that are that are putting, you know, secret sauces on top of it. But the other important thing you talked about there was how you query. And this came up at this conference, this agenda conference I went to yesterday, which is just being able to give the right queries, the right prompts, it's almost like you're speaking a different language. And that is a skill set that's going to be highly desired, desirable to have. It's like, you know, internet literacy, understanding how to search to get the best results in the least amount of time is still a skill that not everybody has, right? This concept of AI literacy now, and it's great to hear that talent in the background is doing all that I'm curious. If you have a any sort of loop that says, based on this user feedback, you're sort of optimizing that AI engine even further, do you have that, you know, give three variations, choose your favorite or copy and paste as a prompt or whatever was used in tailwind to publish as a as a way to get feedback?
Greg Starling:Yeah. So we have a couple we have a couple of flavors of that to to answer really specifically. One is, we do have the ability to analyze your blog posts, your Pinterest pin description, especially if you're scheduling through us, we can see what that is. And we're using the the natural language processing in the background NLP models, to categorize what you sound like. So maybe you're optimistic, maybe you're adventurous or what so we're looking at things like style, tone and voice specifically. And so we can then put that on top of the recommendations to you in terms of what you say. So it sounds like you. So that's one kind of piece of that, in terms of really trying to customize it back towards you. And then yet as, as we figure out, it's not even just you as an individual. But as we find out what specific results are performing better, because we can get those analytics back, we can start to tailor even how, how our prompts are structured. So we're, we're kind of doing two things, we're looking at individuals and how an individual sounds but we're also looking at like the group as a whole. And using kind of some hive mind concepts of, we know these types of prompts are performing better than these types of prompts. So we can do a lot of abc and abc testing. And so we can we're finding our prompts based off what we're seeing in a large group. But we're also we're finding prompts at a at a local level based on what we're seeing an individual person do.
Neal Schaffer:This really jumps into something that I've been very passionate about having run a marketing technology conference called the social tools summit several years ago, whenever I talked to companies like tailwind, I always say you have the data, do something with it, to make it easier for me to publish better content, instead of just sitting on the data and showing these analytics screens that don't give me any actionable information. So I love the fact that with AI, you're actually taking this information and making it better, making it easier for us. And I think that's always been a missing piece. And I think it drives up the value of a tool like tailwind even higher. So it's, you know, I'm sorry that it took AI to get there. But I'm glad to hear that's happening. I think with that in mind. And getting back from this conference on generative AI you know, last night there just so much potential here. And I know that we're just at the very, very tip of the iceberg. I'm sure you can share that. I'm sure a lot of our listeners, you heard they heard you say there's like 50 different areas that, you know, we're using it now until and so I want to get into the How to for the listeners. So how, how is this going to impact their marketing? How is it going to save them time? How is it going to help them be better marketers better businesses? So why don't we? I know we brainstorm a few ideas beforehand. But these 50 areas in which tailwind has implemented AI, can you sort of give an overview as to what those what those specific pieces are? Maybe we'll start there?
Greg Starling:Yeah, sure. So at a high level, we're looking at like social media. So whether that's Pinterest or Instagram, or Facebook or Twitter or tick tock where you're helping people come up with ideas on things to post about but also helping you generate content, including content that you create, as well as responses that you might give back to people to help you stay more engaged. I know for me, that's one of my big, big problems and things I wish I was better at and things I've actually started using tailwind with personally for like my kind of personal brand, is I need to engage more in the community, but I don't often have time. So this allows me to find, you know, the 10 or 12 posts that I'm really interested in and quickly generate responses. And I go through it I make sure it sounds like me and but it's much quicker than having to think through how I'm gonna respond, as well as being able to put out some some things really quickly some some new posts to some new areas. Another area is email. We have a lot of email prompts that are based on some of you know, some of those best practices, whether it's like, like an AI da framework, you know, the attention, interest, desire action, we have several different frameworks that you can choose that will help you generate an email. That's just not that actually is trying to get to like a selling email that's trying to get somebody down to a point of making decisions so we can quickly help you write email subjects, email bodies, write product descriptions, we have a lot of people already, that are using us for writing things like product descriptions for their Etsy products or product descriptions for their Amazon store, their Shopify store. Video, we're doing a lot around scripts, video ideas, coming up with ideas for videos, but also writing scripts. For videos, we have some really, really cool stuff that's coming out soon in that space. And as well as in the kind of the blog slash article space where, yeah, we can help you brainstorm ideas for your blog, we can also help you come up with really good SEO headlines, we have a whole SEO section that makes sure you know that your SEO, we can ingest the article if you if you are an outstanding writer, and you just love writing. And that's all you want to do. But you want some feedback, you can you can pump your blog post and and we can give you some feedback on some ways that you can improve it. As well as just generally, if you're not as inclined to writing, being able to write the paragraph or being able to write pretty paragraph or the concluding paragraph, we are, I didn't personally I didn't like our ability to provide long form blog content, I didn't think we were very good at it. So I wasn't comfortable releasing it. But we are weeks away, hopefully a couple of weeks away from being able to generate really long form content. So if you came up with an idea, today, you wanted to say hey, let's talk about generative AI, or I want to write something about generative AI. And that's all you have to go from that idea to complete a blog post in 15 minutes, that's kind of our goal. And we're getting really close to that to be able to write anywhere from 1200 to 2000, blog posts, that's really high quality. So I think that's another thing too, we know what high quality looks like. And so we're able to be like that ditch didn't hit the mark, that wasn't what we were looking for. And so, so blog, we do have some really good blog posts, but we're not putting things out there that that aren't high enough quality. And then we do some other things like expanding a sentence or summarizing content summarizing content can be really great if you find run across an article that you like, and you just want to summarize it. So then you can we have some things where you can summarize it to create three or four different tweets, or three or four different LinkedIn posts or, or things like that. And so, so those are, we're doing a lot of different things in a lot of areas, but really anywhere where you're writing content that you want to that you're using to try to market yourself market your brand, we probably have some AI assistance there that could that can move you along quicker.
Neal Schaffer:So you are really over the past few months transitioning from becoming a social media dashboard, to an AI marketing tool, and really competing with the other tools out there that just focus on AI for marketing, but you also have the social media dashboard functionality. Is that is that the right way we should be looking at LML
Greg Starling:I think that's a really good way to put it. I think one of the, the, how we feel like we may differentiate ourselves to this out is we've been doing this now for 10 years. And so we have you mentioned the data, we have eight years of posting the Pinterest data to be able to kind of rely on and pull things in. And so we're trying to do things where we can give you a full on marketing plan, but then help you execute that plan with AI. And so yeah, we're very heavily into the AI space. That's really where we're heading.
Neal Schaffer:Yeah, pretty amazing. I haven't jumped into the dashboard of late. So I assume now there's a whole space that has all these places where I can leverage the AI. So for those listening that are like, I get it you mentioned, I mean, there's just so many ways in which you can use it. And that's the reality of today. Take advantage of it. Where do we get started? So you mentioned using AI to brainstorm ideas? So is this for not just for market? Is this like for anyone? Right? Yeah. How would the marker though? Or how are your customers? And when you conceived this product? How did you see it being used by marketers?
Greg Starling:In terms of the the idea idea generation? Yeah, so we knew that a lot of times, you're just stumped. Like most of our customers, marketing is an afterthought, or they're really great at, they're a great painter, or they're great. You know, they're great jewelry maker, they have all these different skills. But marketing isn't necessarily at the top of the list and, or even they're good at marketing, but it's an and they're a procurement person. And they're this And of that, because most of the companies that we work with, they're very small, like solopreneurs, very small, three, four person shops that don't just have the, they don't have a full time marketing team. And so we wanted to try to be a marketing team for them. And one of the things that that you run into at the very beginning is like, I don't even know what kind of video to make. I know, I know, I need to be on Tik Tok. But I don't know what kind of a tick tock video to make. Or I know, I know, I should be doing a blog post. I should be posting and spinning but I don't even know where to start. And so that's really where we started with. How can we help you generate ideas? If you're a painter, you're like, I have a new painting. Well, how can I write blog posts or you're a fashion designer and I have, I have a new clothing line that I'm launching or I'm about to launch and swimwear for the summer or whatever it might be like, how can we take that idea and or that concept, it gives you a whole bunch of ideas for you to actually start to be able to build con Turn around. And, and whether that's you just take those ideas and do it yourself or you take those ideas and then start to incorporate it into other pieces in our, our platform, we wanted you to be able to get off of kind of high center, because I think there's this concept that people romanticize a blank page, people say, Oh, well, there's endless possibilities. But the truth is, a blank page stops people from doing what they need to do so often, and so we're trying to get you off of that blank page, and onto the next step and actually moving forwards, in your kind of marketing process. So that's really a lot of the thinking around how we can generate ideas quickly.
Neal Schaffer:Yeah, that's awesome. And actually, as you're talking, I was searching for a photo, you're gonna have to give me one second here to find this tweet from this event yesterday, that sort of speaks to that. It reminds me and I think that a lot of people see AI as it's going to replace humans, it's going to SAP our, our creativity and make us sound more like robots. But that ideation seems to be something that is the easiest way, I think you'd agree for everybody to start using AI. And and the quote was from Maya Angelou, the famous poet, you can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. And there was an anecdote of a auto tints company, that just, they were going out of business, they couldn't find customers, they didn't know what to do from a marketing perspective. They went into an AI tool for ideation, why would people want to buy, you know, auto tents. And the number one thing that came up from that was this idea that it saves your children from harmful UV rays. And they had never thought about that, even though it was right in front of them. And that became their main marketing message. And they exponentially grew their business, from an idea that came from, you know, AI. And I think that just speaks to the potential right, and I'm sure you'd agree, that even ideation can have from a marketing perspective in so many different ways.
Greg Starling:Yeah, I think that's that's a fantastic story. And maybe this is a little bit of a controversial take. But I am very much don't think that AI will replace humans, I don't think AI will replace human creativity. But I do think people who get really good with AI will replace people who aren't, because I think it's a, I oftentimes liken it to like, if you're playing a video game, and you can put your experience points on different things, it's like putting all of your points on productivity, because it can it can 3x 4x 10x your productivity. So I think people who get really good at this will actually replace people who who ignore it or fearful of it, I know a lot of people aren't I get it, but it's not going to you being fearful of it is not going to stop happening. So I think everybody's got to figure out how they can fit in and, and take advantage of it.
Neal Schaffer:It's just like the internet itself, right? Doing your work. Now, you know, using the internet every day, and then not using the internet every day, it's sort of a no brainer. And I think this is what AI is going to become as well. So you may be afraid of it, you may want to avoid it. But think of your competitors that are using this on a daily basis. Like you know, you have stayed up last night for three hours, just the amount of information and ideas and productivity that in content that can come as a result of that. I agree wholeheartedly. This is technology that's going to come after white collar jobs and blue collar jobs. Right at this event. I mean, we only talk about marketing and in the coding space, the ability to I think they said that chat GPD past this Google software development test, they would have gotten like, you know, level three, a starting salary of $180,000. So yeah, I think it actually impacts the coding world more than the marketing world. But clearly, this is technology that we should all be I mentioned a few weeks ago should be experimented with, I'm now thinking this should be something we should be using, and use it as a competitive advantage, while it still is a competitive advantage, while so many are still afraid of it. So you also mentioned this concept of using AI to streamline the marketing or marketing processes. So how what would that look like from your perspective,
Greg Starling:so you again, kind of so what you can do, there's there's so much, there's so much to do, if you want to market effectively, especially if you're a solopreneur, it can be a little bit overwhelming. And so what what AI can do, it can go from you generating an idea to your you mentioned, the ability to come up with with things you hadn't even thought about areas you hadn't even thought about going into. And so that ideation process, oftentimes that can be really complicated and take a lot of time and your energy and a lot of cognitive overhead as you're thinking through like how to how to come up with ideas. And so AI fixes that for you it. And it's not that AI the AI idea is the end idea. In that case it was which is amazing. But sometimes you see something AI generates and it gives you another idea. And so it's like bouncing ideas off of somebody. And so you can start there with an idea. And then you can then take it through the entire pieces of a typical market and I'll just go like the concept of like long form content and what you can do with that so you can come up with you come up, whether it's a podcast like we're on right now, or it's a blog post or whatever long form content you might be creating. You can use AI to come up with the ideas to generate the outlines, even to generate the longer form script, or the longer form outline that you might have for for your blog posts or your article, whatever you're writing. In the case of, if you're doing podcasts, you can use AI to come up with questions to ask, like, what kind of questions you know, I'm interviewing this kind of a person, what kind of questions should I come up with? And then from there, you can use it to create actually create the longer form content, and then you can then work backwards. And you can use AI to pull out like, what are the key themes from this longer, longer piece of content, like, like, if I would have thought about it and yawn I wish I had, I would have probably been using something like otter AI or whisper to be recording this transcript. So I could have summarized after the fact you know, what I covered off. So I could have been like, had a great time talking to Neil was, you know, what we what we talked about can't wait for the podcast to come out. Because you can then take that long form content, and then you can convert it into all those little pieces of content that you need, you can convert it into your tweet, you can convert it into your Instagram posts, your Pinterest pins, you can say well, I can do shorter videos from this for for Tik Tok, or, or reels or, you know, whatever, you know, platform that you're on the Pinterest, the idea pins, whether it's a video, so it can go from an idea, all the way out to long form content than using that long form content all the way backwards to all those little pieces of content that are driving people back to your website or product.
Neal Schaffer:That is a excellent summary of just the many different ways in which we can inject AI. And I think that hopefully one of those things, you don't have to do all of that. I think we all start with one or two things, right? Yeah, I'll give you an example. I have a weekly newsletter. And I actually tried this out yesterday, but I went in to chat up to basically summarize the main points of, and then I just added the URL. And I'm sure if I was using a tailwind, the result would be even better, more fine tuned for my language, et cetera. But I was able to get in a few seconds. And this was how to get on the for you page on tick tock blog post. I basically got a paragraph tick tock is a fast growing platform with lots of potential for businesses. It can be used to create content quickly and easily target specific audiences with ads, and even conduct experiments to help measure engagement and growth. To make the most out of the platform. Businesses should focus on creating original video content that resonates with the target audience. Leverage influencers to give the brand more visibility, optimize their profile page with emerging visit with engaging visuals, use analytics data to track progress and ROI of campaigns post content strategically throughout the day, and explore creative ways to collaborate with other users on the app. That was a beautiful summary on this blog post. And so how am I going to use this summary? Well, this weekly newsletter, I summarize various blog posts to give people flavor as to why they may want to click on the link and read them. And this is now done that work for me will I publish that as is probably not there a few things that can tweak. But it saved me a lot of time that I could spend in the beginning of the weekly newsletter, where it's personal, where I talk about my experiences of the week reflections of the week, I can now spend more time there and more energy there, and less on these other more mundane tasks, especially when considering 90% of these links. I'm recommending the newsletter or not my own content. I'm sending people elsewhere of content that I liked. But this this literally is a time saver, the 1015 30 minutes you save there, you can invest elsewhere in the creative process.
Greg Starling:Yeah, and I'll just give you a quick tip that you might be able to use next time. And of course, to your point, I would love people to use tailwind. But if you're not going to use tailwind if you're going to use chat GPT once you get that summary, if you were to tell it to rewrite this as an insert your insert your favorite well known marketer or your favorite well known speaker. So rewrite this as Simon Sinek rewrite this in the voice of Gary Vaynerchuk or whomever it might be a big enough person that it has some data on or if you want to go more generic, rewrite this as a TED speaker, or rewrite this as you know, whatever. For copywriter, you'll get a rephrase that will be even one level closer to probably a finished product.
Neal Schaffer:Very interesting, awesome advice. Thank you very much for that. So we're sort of bouncing around here. And I want to get to this other idea that you had, which is, you know, this other takeaway from our conversation, which is when and how to partner with AI for maximum effectiveness. And I think we've already sort of hinted at it, and I sort of showcased one idea. And then you went one, as the AI expert, you went went above that, and and it gets into being able to speak to AI, which is a skill that we all need to learn to get a better result. But you know, where do we are, you know, when and how do we start this process of of using AI as our co pilot of partnering with it?
Greg Starling:I think it's your point, I think you mentioned earlier like, it's not a matter of experiment anymore. It's a matter of figuring out how to implement it. And if you want to get down so you mentioned prompt engineering, which is a prompt designed depending on who you're talking to. Some engineers get frustrated, whatever you call it prompt engineering, but a lot of people call it prompt engineering. So kind of depending on where you're at, but that that concept of being able to ask the right questions in the right way. That's becoming an industry I saw job listing today offering $250,000 a year salary for a prompt engineer that somebody was hiring, which is it blew my mind. But that's it's a complicated thing. But if you want to go down that path, there are a lot of ways to figure out how to learn. If you just Google prompt engineering, jump out on LinkedIn, find some of those prompt engineering catch up groups, or you partner with somebody like a jasper or a copy AI or a tailwind. And then you don't have to query so much you don't, you don't have to understand like, all the different ways to to talk to the AI. And because it sounds a little complicated, not not that you I think anybody listening to absolutely learn, it could absolutely figure it out. But maybe it's not something that they're interested in, or they want to spend the time doing. And if you don't, I would think right away, start start finding, finding a platform that you like that you trust, that you think has your best interests in mind, and figure out how you can start implementing those into your product, because are your your kind of marketing, marketing cadence or your marketing systems, because there is not a single marketing system that I'm aware of, from SEO, and that'd be an interesting conversation to what search when all this goes but from SEO to, you know, to making sure from ideation, to creating content to SEO and content to make sure you're gonna be found on various platforms and videos, there's not a single piece of marketing, that you can't improve with AI, that you can't shortcut with AI that you can't use AI as an assistant or somebody to bounce ideas off of. And I say somebody like it's a person that you start to feel like you're almost talking with a person, oftentimes, whenever you're, you're kind of conversing in these ways. And so I would just think, if I if I, if it were me, and I owned a company and I, I was a small business, and I was you know, selling products, or selling, or some kind of selling some kind of a platform, if I had a brick and mortar store, whatever it might be, I would be thinking, what am I doing for marketing now? And how can I incorporate that? How can I use AI to speed that up to give me more time to either do something else, or give me more time oftentimes do more marketing? You know, I know, I know, a lot of people that we work with, they set aside a day a week or four hours a week, half a day to do all their marketing. Now, instead of doing maybe instead of doing the four hours of marketing you're doing you partner with AI, and all of a sudden you're getting 16 hours, you're getting four, so you're getting two days worth of work for your four hours you're putting in. So I think wherever your marketing is, wherever you're feeling successful today, jump in there first. And then one thing that we talked about a tailwind all the time is you need to expand your channels because you don't own you rent your audience really, unless you're talking about an email list. It's a little different. But when you're talking about, you're holding everybody, everyone talks about the algorithms, right? You're beholden to the algorithms. And so it's really nice to have your your content across multiple social media platforms. And so I think what this does, you might be a Pinterest expert. But this allows you now to take some of that content and put it on Twitter, to put it on Facebook to put it on Instagram and really expand out where you're uploading your social media. So one, hopefully that generates a lot more incoming, a lot more incoming leads and sales, hopefully for you. But two, it also reduces your platform risk significantly. If there's an algorithm change in one place or another, you don't have all your eggs in one basket. I think that's one thing that AI really does allow you to really spread out across multiple platforms quickly. Yeah, a few
Neal Schaffer:of the messages from your conference yesterday, one definitely was don't focus on the AI just to create more content, focus on the ideation, you know, on the one hand and distribution on the other, right. And I do want to hit on the point about SEO, what is that site that developers often use that the biggest site, the forum where they go looking for like coding problems,
Greg Starling:or stacking Stack Exchange, or Stack Overflow? Or Stack Overflow one of those overflowing? Yeah,
Neal Schaffer:we're since the since the emergence of char GPT. They said that their month to month traffic has been dropping 15% Every month, because developers are finding answers on chat. GBT. And I think this speaks to the message yesterday was in a different angle, the same thing you were saying is, you need to mitigate your risk by being on other channels, and leveraging every channel that is available. And I think with SEO, I can see a scenario Greg and I want to ask your opinion as well, where search is done using chat GPT technology, whether it's on Bing, or using Google bar to whatever happens, you know, a few years from now, that is going to be a percentage of searches. And those searches are using our technology that we're creating our content, but there's obviously no attribution to the source. There's no link and therefore that doesn't generate traffic. So is this a world where three years from now we're going to be talking about how do we influence the chat GPD results so that our technology comes up our product name comes up combined with the fact that search engine traffic will will peak and sort of decline? What what is your your take gotten where this is going?
Greg Starling:Again, I may be overly opinionated here, but I have some pretty strong opinions. I want to hear this. Yeah, yeah, we work really closely with Microsoft, Microsoft is a really great partner with tailwind. And so we get, we get to talk to some of the people and some get some of the inside scoop. And Microsoft right now is estimating that in two years, search traffic will drop by 50%. And so then that will be replaced by chat. Now Microsoft is trying to use this to try to take a massive swing at Google basically what Google did to Microsoft, Microsoft is trying to do to Google. And I don't think that's wrong. I think that's probably where we're heading. I think what we'll see you mentioned influencing some of the the large language models, the GPT models. In the future, I think we'll see a few things I think, I think we'll see much more of a turn back towards audience building. And trying to create your own people, I think email list will explode as people will not necessarily want their, their secret sauces or their their ways to be gobbled up by these these large language models. We'll see a lot I think of email list growing, I think you'll see more walled gardens more, more some more communities built in whether you're using some type of software, or you're using a Facebook group, or whatever it might be, I think, I think that's what we'll see a lot of people move to, to try to figure out how to continue to, to put out good quality content, but not get gobbled up by these these big, big models. And I think if I were reliant today, on SEO, to drive the vast majority of my business, I wouldn't be worried. But I'd be very aware that I need to start doing some things differently. Because if Microsoft is right, half of your traffic is going to go away over the next couple of years. And there are ways that they're absolute ways to mitigate that by to your point getting on some of these other platforms, becoming experts in some of these different social medias wherever people are looking to you as an expert, but I think it goes back to providing value it always that's where it always comes back to right. I go back old old days of you know, where keyword stuffing and tone on tone text and all, you know stuffing keywords and images and those kinds of things. We all text images and those kinds of things we used to do to try to trick Google. But in the end, it always goes back to just providing value and providing value for your customer. And I think I think that will become much more prevalent over the next few years as you can't necessarily just rely on ranking well in Google, or Bing, or wherever it might be to drive traffic. And that won't go away completely, but it will drop dramatically. So how can you provide value in other areas, and I think you can use AI to go out and create more content in other areas, but also doing things like creating, really cultivating that email lists you mentioned, you have an email list that goes I think those those are really where you'll be able to differentiate and drive traffic. And so that's where I'd be thinking I would be thinking SEO will not go away. But it's going to become much less a chunk of the traffic that you're used to. And so where do you get that traffic from? Can you direct people from other social networks? Can you grow your email list? Can you write ebooks or whatever it might be all that you can you help doing? Ai, I personally know several people that are making really solid wages, basically just using AI to write ebooks in areas, they're experts in to your point, like, I'm not just gonna take the straight out, but I'm gonna get a really good outline, I'm gonna go back through and edit it, check it for content. One thing that maybe everybody should be aware of is I think one of the better terms I've turned is AI sometimes all hallucinate. And that just means it'll make junk up, and may not be accurate. But if you're, if you're an expert in the space, or at least knowledgeable in this space, you can correct those things and really grow. So that's where I think I would be heading. If I were, if I were heavily relying on on on SEO, traffic search engine traffic, I'd be very much looking. How can I grow my audience and other areas?
Neal Schaffer:Yeah, I think that that's really awesome advice. I don't know about, you know, going down by 50%. Because I do think we're seeing an explosion and people using AI to generate ideas. But they might not have been searching for that in the first place. We might not have used a search engine for ideation, right? So you're seeing this, definitely the explosion in the use is going up. But definitely it is going to take a chunk. And does it mean you don't need web copy? Well, if someone, if you're an e commerce Store, someone's on your website, you definitely want to showcase your expertise in them anyway. Right. So there's still going to be some of this needed. But But yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out how Google fights back, because they have the ability to they just sat on this technology, apparently for a few years. But yeah, it's definitely evolving. And I appreciate your advice that don't, don't change what you're doing, but be aware of it. And start to once again, as was talked about yesterday, mitigate that risk by looking at all these other channels and providing value. And that's at the end of the game. We were fighting for the hearts of people, right? That's right. That's exactly it. Awesome. Well, Greg, this has been a really awesome conversation that I think is going to help a lot of people. Obviously, you know, I'm an affiliate partner of tailwind. So that affiliate link is going to be in the in the show notes. And I hope that people if they haven't looked at tell them before, because I think just like people think of LinkedIn just for jobs search, some people think tail is only for Pinterest where you have evolved way beyond that. And with AI even further beyond that in a very, very short time. So Greg, where can people go to find out more about you and more about what Taylor is doing with AI?
Greg Starling:Yeah, so I would just say as far as me, LinkedIn is the best place to go. If somebody wants to hit me up on LinkedIn. Anytime. I'm always I'm always happy. It's just a Greg Starling. You'll find me. Shoot me an email. That's always fine. Greg at tailwind app.com Jump on tailwind. You mentioned you're gonna have an affiliate link, go there. That what we call our tool internally as ghostwriter. And so if you want to go you can search tailwind Ghostrider it'll come up we've SEO code that was there, SEO Singapore. And so Ellen Ghostrider, it does a whole whole lot of work for you. So yeah, just jump out there, see what it's doing. And, and use use your affiliate link. So that way you get credit for for introducing people to what I think is a really cool technology. I'm very, very proud of it. Like I mentioned earlier, we're not rolling out anything that I don't, I wouldn't use personally my wife runs a small business that she doesn't use herself. We're not rolling out anything that I feel is not really, really high quality. And so please check it out. And I say this and and I mean it wholeheartedly test us against the competitors to test us against just a generic chat GPT. Get all these places have free trials, see what fits you and see to see what results you feel like are giving you the best. I'm very, very biased. And so I think everybody would know where I stand. But I would I think it's really important that people get up tested against some other people see what fits you your style. And and choose one because you need to choose something because your competitors are.
Neal Schaffer:Yeah, and this goes to the the conclusion of today, which is you need an AI strategy. Even a company like tailwind, had an AI strategy implemented it and you can see what's happened. So every one of us needs to think and I also appreciate that advice that they are not all the same. The original data might be the same but the way it's been implemented in the variety of natural language processing models and which ones you choose for what prompt, the technology is going to evolve even further. So that I assume that's going to be further differentiation six months from now, in terms of how you perform compared to the competitors. So if you haven't jumped on the AI checkout, tell it if you have checkout tailwind. And thank you once again for your time today.
Greg Starling:I very much appreciate it. Thanks for the invite.
Neal Schaffer:All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview. my conversation with Greg actually kept on going even after that interview ended. It sounds like tailwind is also working a lot with Microsoft. As you can imagine being a big investor in open AI. And their strength as a platform is that they've been in social media. They've been in visual social media. So you can imagine the unique IP that they have. And I really excited about what investments they're going to continue to roll out and the refinements and enhancements they're going to make in that tool. So if you're looking for a tool to get started, definitely check out Neal schaffer.com/tailwind. Look for the link in the show notes as well. Next week, we're gonna have another interview. As I mentioned in episode number 307, I normally go solo than interview solo interview, I went to solos in a row because I thought it was important to share with you that information from the conference. And then I literally interviewed Greg just like two days later after the conference. So I thought it would be a great time to publish this episode as well. Next week, we go back to another interview, and then it'll be back to me solo, I don't know how much AI is going to appear in this content going forward. These are some initial thoughts, initial ways that I think it can benefit you today by listening in. But as always, this podcast is for you. I want to hear your feedback. If you have any ideas, opinions, things you want me to talk about guests you want me to have on the show. Reach out Neal at Neal schaffer.com ping me anywhere on social media. I am Neal Schaffer, the real Neal and the Al sch FF er. And well if you're a real fan, let me know by sharing a review, or even a little five star link if you click on Apple podcasts or Spotify that really really helps the show get found by more people, which well, there's a network effect just like with any AI tool, there is a network effect with podcasts and listening as well. And I would just appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. So that's it, everybody. For another episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. I look forward to continuing our conversation next week and in between then on the socials. Until next time, keep your eye on the goal be an option. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.