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Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

 

Mariah: Hey, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Brian Piper, he is our special guest today. Brian is the founder of airflow solutions. He helps organizations integrate AI responsibly and ethically with a focus on content creation, optimization and data. Brian is an author award winning international keynote speaker, and he’s the host of the AI for you podcast. You probably know him from his fabulous books, Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education, which he wrote, and then he coauthored the second edition of Epic Content Marketing with Joe Pulizzi, the godfather of content marketing. So welcome to our show, Brian. Thanks so much for joining us.

 

Brian Piper: Well, thank you so much for having me looking forward to this conversation.

 

Mariah: Yeah, yeah. We love having like-minded folks on who are curious, who want to try new things, who are just excited about all the technologies, but, you know, taking it from an approach of, let’s not get too crazy here. Let’s implement things that make sense. Let’s do things with intention and purpose. So let’s, let’s just dive right into our questions here. Brian, so you we were talking a little bit before we clicked record here, you’ve had a pretty unique mix of agency, academic, entrepreneurial, in house experience over your career. So what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned from both sides of that fence that you can now pass on to your consultancy clients?

 

Brian: Yeah, I mean, one of the kind of key things to remember, whether you’re on the agency side, or the, you know, institution side. Something that we used to hear in the military a lot is that local knowledge is king. So it’s important to understand that, you know, if you’re on the consulting or agency side, working with institutions, these are the people that really understand, like the specific process processes, the problems you know, and the people that they have to deal with in the you know, in the environment that they’re operating from. So it’s easy to be able to come in and recommend, you know, solutions and ways to solve problems, but if you don’t really understand, like, who it is you’re working with, and where the barriers may be, what the culture is in the organization, then you’re going to start running into roadblocks. And then on the reverse side of that, if you’re on the institution and you’re bringing in an agency or a consultant, you have to remember that they have seen a variety of different you know, other instances of the problems that you face and the operational issues that you encounter, and they have, you know, expertise in very specific areas, and they may have recommendations and solutions that you haven’t thought of before that might fit your you know, specific organization, people, culture and. You know, the real magic happens when you can start blending, kind of the inside out and the outside in knowledge. That’s where you really get, you know, the innovation, the practical solutions, things like that.

 

So I think it’s important to have both sides of the fence. I think it’s critical to be able to get outside knowledge, to look at your problems, but also to have that in house expertise, you know, of really what the situation is, who you’re dealing with, what the roadblocks and the infrastructure is like. So that’s what I, you know, that’s, that’s what I would say is is kind of the key things to be aware of on those sides, is that it’s important to have both of those perspectives, and especially if you’re trying to solve big problems, strategic problems, brand problems, those sorts of things.

 

Mariah: Yeah, we see this a lot, especially being kind of a smaller agency. We’re about 35 people deep right now. You know, growing it ebbs and flows with what our clients need. But we’ve seen that a lot, like coming in as a big agency thinking, you know, all the things and like, here’s the process and here’s what’s going to happen. And then we get our groups, they’re like, “Yeah, that’s a nope. That’s not how that works.”

 

Stu Eddins: Yeah. And we get to hear about that from our clients every now and when they’ve ended those engagements, it’s as though the the larger agency comes in and says, yeah, yeah, you’re unique, just like everybody else. And then they, they proceed to overlay their plan. That works. I have found it. And I think you may have probably encountered the same thing too. You do have to have a theory. You do have to have some map of how you do things. Otherwise, it’s anybody. It’s a commodity, and anybody can do it. But I think that one thing that I have found is that what’s pain to another is simply discomfort to the one you’re talking to the gaps they have don’t line up. What was truly painful for one is not for the other, as I just said. But tell us a little bit about the discovery you might go through to find what those pitfalls are. How significant is the discovery process to the then the planning process that follows?

 

Brian: Yeah, it’s incredibly critical. And whether you’re, you know, doing content, or, you know, digital optimization, or you’re doing AI integration. The first step in either of those processes is really to understand, you know, what the strategic goals are, what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to do? And so many you know, solutions don’t include that as an initial starting place. It’s really important to examine the landscape, examine the players, and to talk with people and get an understanding of, you know, where it is they want to go. What are the roadblocks that they’re facing and encountering, and then only then can you really start, like gathering the data and start to look at integration. I mean, especially on the AI side of things, AI is not a technology adoption project. It is a change management initiative, and it has to be approached like that, if you are not getting leadership on board, if you’re not bringing in your frontline employees and getting them on board and creating that awareness and education before you start giving them tools and telling them about use cases, you’re just going to confuse the situation. You’re going to create more, you know, tension, more friction in the process, and you’re going to start hitting roadblocks pretty quickly in any kind of process like that where you give a framework that’s kind of a cookie cutter framework that’s not set up to adjust to all of those new people, new processes, new cultures that you’re that you’re addressing with every new client.

 

Stu: Yeah, and I’ve kind of seen that happening, particularly when you bring it, bring AI in right now, of course, not just flavor of the month, but, but Hero of the Year to everybody. It’s almost as though the random application of AI is a sure way to dilute efficiency. It has no bumpers, no guardrails, no anything else other than everybody thinks it does something different. Now, when we start talking about bringing our skills and our talents and our plans to a client. I imagine that AI is going to have to be a bigger part of the conversation constantly. Are you finding that to be a challenge to keep it within, you know, a reasonable scope, or do you find there’s a lot of magic eight ball and wishful thinking involved at this point?

 

Brian: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of both. And I think really establishing right up front, you know, the goals, the focus, what you’re trying to accomplish, is the only way that you are going to be able to, you know, not only responsibly and ethically integrate AI, but integrate it in a way that has an impact, that has a direct ROI anytime I work with an organization. And start off with pilot projects, you know, I mean, we’ll come in and we’ll, we’ll talk about some tools, and we’ll showcase some like custom GPTs for specific processes. But you really have to, you know, look at what you’re going to select as your pilot projects and make sure that those are measurable, that you can actually show ROI on those and that they are solving a specific business problem. Because once you have that proof of concept, you know, kind of low risk, high reward projects to start with, then it’s going to be much easier to figure out. Now, how do we scale that? How do we, you know, bring that into new pilot projects? How do we create more opportunities to really have an impact on the business.

 

Stu: Okay, very nice. Good.

 

Mariah: You had some really interesting use cases for AI and as a content person, you know myself, I was, I was one of those super hesitant, like, Ah, it’s going to steal our jobs and, you know, wreck our lives, kind of things. And over the last year, I think, like a lot of people, we’ve realized a lot of ways that can make your processes better, make your life easier, without stealing that creativity. So let’s maybe shift gears just a bit and think about how we can effectively use AI tools for content creation, content optimization. Could you walk us through maybe some ways that you have used it, say, to get past writer’s block or to generate some ideas.

 

Brian: Yeah, I mean, lots of different I mean, AI is so great at ideation and brainstorming. And, you know, like with any process where I’m using AI, I always like to start with my own brain dump. First, I like to get all of my thoughts and my information out on the table, and a great way to do that is to ask AI to interview you. So you know, you give it a role. You’re an expert content marketer in higher education. Now interview me about this particular topic or this particular problem we’re trying to solve, and once you get kind of all your information out there, and I use, I’m a huge fan of the advanced voice mode, and I use whisper flow, and I love just talking to the tool. So it’s very easy to have, like, a 10 minute interview with the tool and get all of your information out there. And once that’s in there, then you can ask it, what am I missing? What gaps Am I not seeing? What is my customer going to think about? What is my you know, potential client, whether it’s, you know, a prospective student or, you know, a donor, what are they going to think? What concerns do they have that I haven’t addressed? And it really helps you kind of flesh out the story.

 

And then it can help organize your thoughts. It can give you an outline, and then you can go in, you create the first draft, you put your writing, you put your initial thoughts in there, you know, whether it’s a script for a video or, you know, a blog piece or content for your website. And once you get that all in there, then you can have it analyze it, and have it look at it. What am I missing from an SEO perspective? How are, how are AI engines going to crawl this content? Where are the best places to put this content? And then once you figure out the strategy behind the distribution. Then it can help you take all of your original assets, your long form videos. It can break those out into smaller pieces, into social posts, into, you know, social videos, into podcast ideas, newsletter content, and you can automate a lot of those processes. You can create. You know, there’s all sorts of tools out there to take these kind of structured workflows that you’ve created within the AI tool and dynamically create 50 different pieces of content from one original piece of content that is all based on your expertise and your thoughts. So, so many different ways you can use these tools, you know, and that doesn’t even get into like your virtual personas and virtual focus groups, and, you know, lots of different opportunities there, but yeah, it really helps you scale your own expertise, and, you know, efforts.

 

Stu: You know, you’ve just said something very important, and don’t hear other people saying no, that that, let me finish that thought completely. Interview yourself. That puts a unique spin on something on AI, application that I’m not used to hearing. Everybody’s looking for an outward application of AI. How can I make the client do this? The tool do that. So I don’t see a lot of usage where it’s comes in, where it’s coming reflective, where it’s coming back to help you. You expect it to be your personal assistant, but the thought of it interviewing you that that starts thinking, okay, that’s that sounds like a really, good nugget, if you will, something to consider. But I think it also point you’re you led on into something else. The reason people, it seems maybe, having trouble with you, with trusting AI, is because they don’t give it enough information. They’re there. It’s the rush to analysis and the. Yeah, wow. Thank you for the light bulb moment, because that’s what that was. It’s before you start, let’s get together what we know.

 

Brian: And I think you see that all the time from people who are like surface users, and they’ll say, Oh, I tried it. It got horrible output, horrible responses. It’s because you’re not giving it enough information. You’re not using your expertise and filling it with all the knowledge that you have before you’re asking it to spit out what it knows and what has been trained from, from, you know, all the generic content out online.

 

Stu: I to me, it feels like there’s a bridge that hasn’t been crossed between how you operate a search engine and how you operate with AI, absolutely, people are still used to, you know, three word requests into a search engine, and they’re not thinking deep and long about this is a junior member of my team that needs training. Let’s get to work now, when you what type of resistance do you find when you start recommending AI for such things as content? Mariah observed that, you know, over the last year, it’s been, it’s been a hard push, because there’s, there’s a there’s a trust issue involved. How do you work around such a thing?

 

Brian: Yeah, and that’s really one of the most difficult problems to face and encounter it all the time. And the one thing that really seems to work the best for me is if I talk with that person who’s very resistant to it. And I ran into this with SEO as well. When I would tell people that they could go back and change the words in their original content and it would perform better. They’re like, Oh, well, I don’t need to change those words. Those words were written perfectly. I was like, Well, yeah, your audience may not think so. The search engines may not think so. And you know, it’s really the same with AI. If you can find a way to help a person solve a problem, so if they have something that they keep running into, something that they don’t like doing that takes their time that isn’t, you know, intellectually stimulating, that’s just repetitive and monotonous. And I can create a tool in 15 minutes that saves them hours of time every week. That’s a win.

 

And that’s when they start to realize, oh, this is not just, you know, a new tool that you’re trying to add to my stack to force me to learn this. This is, this is a collaborator. This is an opportunity to create a digital twin of myself that can do all those things that I don’t like to do, so that I can focus more of my time on doing the things that not only that I enjoy, but that make me more human, that create more opportunities for human interaction, that make me, you know, they give me the opportunities to go out and do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do because I just didn’t have time to.

 

Mariah: Yeah, I have an observation You’ve mentioned a couple of times. Brian, making content more human, making these applications of AI tools more human. I was scrolling through Facebook last night, and because I’m in my 40s, I get lots of cute little baby animal videos, and it makes my whole day with all the other, you know, cesspool of information that’s out there right now. So I turned my phone around to my kids, who are 18 and 16, and I said, Look, baby gorillas. And I was all excited. And they go, Mom, that’s totally AI. And went back to their stuff, and I was like, Are you kidding me? And then I looked closer, and it definitely was. So I think that, you know, not just adults our age, but young adults and teenagers are really keen on poking holes in things that are clearly inauthentic. So you know, what are some of the the trends that you’ve seen, maybe in that vein of making content more human, making your applications of AI more human.

 

Brian: Yeah, and I think that’s going to become even more and more critical as our world is going to be continually inundated with greater amounts of AI generated content that are primarily going to be, you know, pretty generic and uninteresting and just trained on the medium of information out there. So I think it’s going to be even more critical that we start leaning into things like storytelling and human connections and our own opinions and our own thoughts on things. I think we have a limited window right now, I think the next, you know, three to five years are really when we need to start working on establishing our brands, our personal brands, our business brands, and connecting with audiences so that they see that we are a trusted resource, that they can come to us, that we are an organization filled with humans who are looking to connect with other humans.

 

I think in the you know, in three or five years, I think a lot of the content that we’re going to be receiving is just going to be dynamically generated on the fly by our own personal AI assistants that are going to be delivering what it thinks we want. Because, you know, based on the algorithm that it’s trained on us, and I think it’s going to be super helpful. I think it’s going to be very useful, but I think it’s going to make those human that human content, much more valuable. I think it’s going to make those opportunities for human connection much more important. I think we’re going to see a rise in more in person events. I think we’re going to see, you know, human content is going to become like the vinyl of the future, where people are going to go out and look for that specifically, and they’re going to find sources that they can go to, who they trust. They’re going to be looking for communities to go into.

 

So I think now is the time to really start focusing on that and really start leaning into what makes us human and what makes us different. And even you know, if you look at institutions, it’s really hard to see differentiation from one university to the other, until you start looking at the stories that they tell and the people that they have on their campus, the people that they have in their faculty, their staff, their students. And once you start seeing those stories, then you can say, oh, I want to put myself there. I want to be among those people. Not as much, you know, I want to go learn the I want to go take those classes, or I want to go learn that information. So I think it’s a it’s an opportunity here.

 

Mariah: Yeah, we have been banging the drum the last couple of years to get more higher ed institutions, you know, community colleges up through grad school, working on blog stories, working on long form and short form video. And it seems like kind of a lift, but they’re already out there talking to these folks anyway, getting their testimonials, getting things, you know, for flyers and and postcards and magazine articles. So give those stories life, put them out on your websites, put them out on YouTube, on social media. It’s only going to benefit. And like you said, differentiate going forward, we’ve got just a couple of minutes here left, Brian, so want to maybe wrap up with just a couple of highlights. So we always like to ask this question of our experts that join us, what are three to five things that you would share with a digital marketer or a person entering SEO or content right now and kind of this fluctuating time, what are some things that they have to know to be successful?

 

Brian: Yeah, I would say like First and most importantly, make sure that the content that you’re creating is aligned with your goals and focused on your audience. No more random acts of content. Our time is too valuable to be out there creating content that isn’t working for us. If you’re creating content and you don’t know specifically what’s the goal, what’s the purpose of this content, and who is this content written for? Who am I trying to help with this content? Then you’re wasting your time.

 

And then also, I think, you know, if you want to be discovered, it’s getting more and more difficult for us to be discovered, because people aren’t just searching on Google anymore, they’re searching in social and communities and AI and voice and so you have to have the best content on all the channels where your audiences are searching. And you know, really the only way to do that with limited budgets and limited resources is to learn how to integrate AI responsibly and ethically into your systems to help you scale up all different aspects of your business.

 

Stu: Good. All right, I’m going to go back several minutes in time, and I made a note to myself that I need to send Mariah more pictures of baby sea otters the I’ll try to make sure they’re not AI. I think I heard you say some things that I’ve been thinking for a little while, and again, thank you for little bit of affirmation on that. Very often when people start talking about promoting brand, they’re stuck on their logo, their colors, their tagline, and that’s it. But I think what I’m hearing you say is that the brand is all of this. You we need to open up to think about our brand is everything we put out into the world and how we can marshal it to be found using brand or by associating our brand with concept and thought and thought leadership and so on. Do you run into any barriers where you know we’ve always thought of our brand as these assets, as opposed to the encompassing. Is that a conversation is difficult to have sometimes?

 

Brian: No, because I think that is part of the brand. I wouldn’t exclude those and say these are not the brand, but I would not, I would say that these are not the heart of the brand. The heart of the brand is what people are saying about you, right? You know what? Experiences they’re taking away from interacting with you. And I think a lot of that goes back to storytelling. What stories are you putting out there? What are you sharing out there? Who are you empowering to be your advocates and your influencers, for your brand to represent you so that that is you? What people are hearing about you, not from you, because no one wants to hear us talking about us. They want to hear other people talking about us. That’s where their trust. Trust is built.

 

Stu: It kind of it kind of sounds like brand is the confluence of what, what the entity puts out there and what the consumer or the audience thinks of it. All right. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Mariah?

 

Mariah: This is awesome. Is there anything else, Brian, that you want to put out there? Maybe something cool you’re working on that we can plug for you?

 

Brian: Yeah. I mean, my book Epic Content Marketing for higher ed I think there’s a lot of great advice in there about storytelling and about making sure that you’re focusing on your content and, you know, sign up for my newsletter. Every week I put out a newsletter talking about, you know, different ways to integrate AI and different ways to connect your world, your life, to content marketing. Great.

 

Mariah: We’ll put those links in our show notes. Thanks again for joining, us. Brian.

 

Brian: Thanks so much. Great talk.

 

Mariah: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.