Show Notes

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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.

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining Stu and myself. As you may notice, we have a fabulous guest in our quote, unquote studio today. This is Erika Heald. She is a B2B content strategy expert and marketing consultant. She’s been a consultant since 2003.

And in her business, she helps organizations and executives define and execute their content marketing strategies. She is also so many awesome things. The leader of the weekly Content Chat on LinkedIn. That live stream is for content marketing professionals. We’ll put a link in our show notes.

Our topic for the day, she is recently an author. So like I said, we’re going to talk about that today, why Erika chose to write a book in today’s market, all the digital age and so forth, and her expert tips to do it. So, Erika, thanks for joining us.

Erika Heald: Thanks so much for having me.

Mariah: Yes, yes. I’m so tickled that you were able to jump on here. And the fact that you wrote a book is so cool. I have, this is a little humble brag and then we’ll get to the good stuff. I have helped a number of marketing executives write books in the past, and I have never done my own. So I would love

To hog the hog the mic here for a second. Stu, just hang out for a minute. What, Erika? What made you decide now was the time to write a book?

Erika: I’ve got to tell you, it was one of those things that I’ve always, you know, I’ve always been a writer person. I always wanted to, you know, write books. That was always on my to-do list. But it’s always the thing that, you know, you’re inevitably doing client work and you’re helping them create their thought leadership and doing all these things.

But it was kind of, it was two-fold. One, I had, you know, I do a lot of public speaking and when I’d be at events, people would say, I wish you had a book. So that way when I went back to the office, I could show my boss, it’s not just me saying these things. So the, you know, people saying they wanted that.

Validation of being able to say, look, it’s not just my opinion, it’s a book. So there was that. And I also had, I actually had had somebody say, you know, we really want you to speak at our event, but we only have published authors. When are you going to write a book? So that was kind of the final kick in the pants that I needed in order to actually finally buckle down and do it.

And I’m not gonna lie, having attended Joe Pulizzi’s CEX conference for a couple of years, you know, I was there in session and I committed to the amazing Ruth Carter to be my accountability partner. And I said I’m writing a book before the next CEX. And I did get the draft done before CEX last year because I could not possibly go there and look Joe Pulizzi and Marc Maxhimer in the eye and say, yeah, I haven’t written that book that I said I was going to do. I just couldn’t do it, so.

Mariah: Ruth would be the ultimate accountability buddy. They would not let you not get it done.

Erika: I had to have a deadline. Exactly.

Stu Eddins: Man, that sounds like publish or perish in action right there. It would definitely keep. Yeah, I mean, we only take published authors that that’s that that’s quite the bar to hit, I’ll tell you that.

Erika: I understand because they want, you know, they have, you know, a really varied audience that they’re catering to as a professional association and you know, they want to show that they’re bringing the highest caliber people in or the keynote. So it’s important to them that it’s an author because that is that kind of third-party objective validation that this person, you know, at least had the gumption to finish a book, although that bar, you know, gets lower and lower as far as what constitutes a book thanks to print on demand.

Mariah: Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna get into that too. So your book is Content Foundations. Would you give us just like the elevator speech about what your book’s about?

Erika: Yeah, you know, I’ve worked for the past. I think my first A I client was maybe five years ago, so an actual A I platform. And so I spent a lot of time talking to early adopters and seeing how they were using the tools. And then of course, you know, once everybody started using GPTs, I just kept hearing, you know, people, they’re, you know, they’re the people on the side of, oh, it can do everything. It’s so great. And then of course on the side of the content, people saying it’s terrible, it’s, you know, doesn’t sound like us. I can’t believe anybody would publish this dreck.

And I was just, you know, for me, I was like, but I understand fundamentally how much I can take off of your plate that you don’t want to do and how it can, you know, really allow you to do more than what you as one single person can possibly review and approve. So you can actually then allow more people across the organization to confidently publish without having to chase them down and say, I can’t believe you sent that out. You’re using wrong branding. You’re using, you know, the old logo or whatever.

And I was like, you know, that to me is really where I wanted to come from because you can’t use a I effectively if you haven’t spent that time to define who your brand is. If you don’t have any of the guidelines in place, if you hadn’t made any of the workflow decisions and really document all that stuff and thought it through, how on earth can you expect to bring in an AI tool and have it do anything other than cause you more work? So that’s the 100% what the book is all about.

Mariah: I love that. It’s so actionable and I think the title is really great too, because when we look at, you know, what constitutes a good story, what constitutes a good outline or a content strategy across the entire industry, it’s going to come down to what’s the quality of the content that you’re putting in, what’s the quality of the facts, the stats, the the step by step, whatever that might be. And that’s something that you’re not just going to pull out of thin air. It’s something that comes from expertise and time and trial and error and you know the wisdom of subject matter experts. And so I think tying those things together, it’s a very timely topic, for sure.

Erika: I hope so, but it definitely felt like it was the right time for this because, you know, I was getting some of those same questions every time that I was speaking and and started to feel like, well, I really do need to turn this into something that people can have in their hand and take, you know, take into, take into those meetings and say, hey, here’s a here’s a completely objective, not coming from me perspective on this because you know, too often people need to have that outside perspective before they’re willing to listen.

Mariah: Yeah. And the the old book in hand, you know, feeling paper, the smell of paper, it’s that it’s something I think that hopefully will never be a lost art, but it feels like it’s getting more and more minimal or, you know, discounted like you were saying not to knock on, you know, personal publishing or self-publishing because I’ve read some self-published books that were really great. I have read some that were really the opposite of great. And so when you are looking at your prospects and your possibilities, you know, obviously self-publishing is faster. Sometimes self-publishing can be easier, or it can be a lot less stressful. So what made you decide to say I’d like to get this professionally published?

Erika: It was one of those situations where I knew I didn’t want to go and try and pitch any of the major publishers because their process from the time that they accept a book, you’re talking about, you know, a year to 18 months for that book getting out the door. And because so much of what I’m talking about is stuff that you need to get in place now, so that way you can be using AI. I didn’t feel like I had that amount of time. So instead I had been talking with the folks at Tilt Publishing because again, it was Joe Pulizzi, Marc Maxhimer.

These are folks that I’ve known for years, and I knew that I would be able to expedite that process, but still have all the support of working with people who had done this before, because frankly, you don’t know what you don’t know about the publishing process until you actually really get in there and having folks who did know all the steps, who could walk me through all the considerations, and who could hook me up with, you know, a great editor and, you know, cover designer, all that stuff. You know, I didn’t want to do that myself. And, you know, I didn’t want to use some, you know, I love Canva for many things. I didn’t want to use a Canva template to design my book cover, you know, because it means a lot to have that professional.

Only designed book that really, you know, is readable, it’s accessible and all those things. So for me it’s really I wanted something that was kind of in between because if I just published it on my own, I’m sure I would mess things up. There would be, you know, things I’d want to do over.

I wanted to put my best foot forward, but I didn’t want to have those constraints of, you know, trying to pitch the book to find that right publisher and then to, you know, wait in that queue because that did not seem like, you know, that didn’t seem like the right route. Plus this way I’ll actually, you know, primarily know who’s purchasing the book. Because it’ll go through my website, unless they’re Kindle readers, and then I can of course go to Amazon, but I’ll know who’s purchasing the book and then I can actually have that ongoing conversation with them where if I need to update things in the book, I can send out updates. If I have a revision to a template that I mentioned, I can send that out to them too.

So I really like the idea of, you know, having the support of the publishing company and of, you know, having other people doing the printing fulfillment, all that kind of operational stuff, but still being able to retain some of that one-to-one relationship aspect of things because that’s important.

Mariah: Yeah, I think in that is a great tie back to Stu’s world. I mean, there’s so much less visibility in some ways to the end user because of, you know, some of the digital protections which are, you know, important in some of the ways that. Digital marketing in general has changed. Stu, I know you’re an avid reader and you’re always finding tidbits to share with the team. What kind of, you know, questions would you have for Erika as far as like following up with people and really closing the gap from you’ve got this book in your hand. Now let’s translate to that to something.

Stu: Yeah, well, first off, Erika, thank you. I’m going to play back a particular part of this to my wife who’s a print designer. And when you start talking about cover art and everything else, that would warm her heart. The the the thing that I found and and and you’ve actually hit on a very keen subject where content can be very helpful is the personal.

And there’s nothing more personal than sending out an out an update to the person who purchased your book and said you know you you’re addressing a I which is at best a moving target today and you’ve mentioned GPTS in particular. Six months from now we may have some revision that comes along. It’s necessary that keeps your information current. And and and that’s something that that we haven’t really experienced before. So I’m kind of anxious to hear from you later on how that’s worked out for you because I kind of operate under a theory that personalization isn’t about getting inside somebody’s mind, it’s being the most helpful to them.

And it sounds like the model you’ve set up is, is, is truly that. So maybe it’s maybe six months or so when you do have a, if you do have a revision, you can fill us in and let us know what happened with it.

Erika: 100% agree. I will. I definitely will. See if people appreciate that e-mail or if they’re like, lady, why are you emailing me?

Mariah: Yeah. Who are you? And how’d you get my name?

Stu: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Everybody likes meeting me until they find out my ads travel or follow them around the Internet. But the.

Mariah: A plague of digital marketers!

Stu: The fact is, it sounds like the approach that you’ve settled on is very workable for what you’re doing, and I think it’s particularly fits into the concept of the subject matter, the AI generated content. The content itself is changeable from one AI user to the next, and apparently as we’re going to find out.

From one era to the next through development of the tool itself. So I find it fascinating on that part. I do want to go back a couple of minutes further into the conversation where you were talking about the extremes, the people who are asking ChatGPT what they should invest in in Wall Street to the ones you were skeptical about it in the extreme. It seems to me that you you’ve tried to unify more toward the middle of that spectrum, trying to get people to accept it. Do you find, even when you have a reasoned approach such as you have in your book, that there’s still a good deal of resistance to your idea about how to use AI in content development?

Erika: Oh yeah, I want to say maybe two days after my most recent marketing profs workshop where I walked through, you know, kind of a number of things, but including how you should create a brand voice, GPT or gem that actually has your documents, kind of brand voice has your style guidelines and that you can then share with everyone in your organization. So that way people can be sure that they’re that they’re using the right language, the right tone. It sounds like your brand and somebody what we used to call subtweeting. I’m not sure what we would call it on LinkedIn. So they couldn’t believe that they were seeing a writer saying that you should create a a brand voice GPT cause they could just keep all of those things in their head and that’s what you pay them for. And why on earth you know that they don’t need a GPT?

And I thought that was fascinating because I’m like, if your only value that you are providing to your client is your ability to remember whether or not they want to use the Oxford comma. And if they’re the ones who has the CMO who hates the word enable, I don’t feel like you’re adding very much value.

I think it’s way more value for you every time you get that kind of like high-level feedback that you’re putting it into a GPT, that you’re sharing that GPT with the client, and so you’re actually giving them a tool that they can use for themselves too.

That to me is so much more valuable than me being able to memorize all the brand guidelines and particulars for multiple clients that I have at one time. I don’t see that as being, you know, yeah, I can internalize it quite a bit, but you know, I’ve worked for start-ups that were very particular that had pages of “use this, not that.” There’s no way you can remember pages and pages of that kind of stuff for each client before you’re writing for them each time.

That’s just not that’s not reasonable and it’s not scalable. And frankly, no company has a big enough budget to hire a freelance writer to write or review every single communication. That’s unrealistic. So I think it’s so much more valuable to, you know, become that partner and creating the GPT in that way, I think can really do it. So yeah, there definitely are some people who are like, you’re a crazy person. How can you call yourself a writer if you’re telling people to use AI?

Mariah: Well, it’s like a smarter thing to do than pulling up five different style guides and examples of past work and spending 1/2 hour of the client’s billable time to go through all of that. You know, if you’re a lot of freelancers do a per project basis. But if you are hourly, you’re wasting time, you’re wasting that relationship, and you’re wasting, you know, frankly, a work you could be doing for other groups by just piling through all those things. It’s kind of silly.

Erika: 100% That’s my perspective.

Stu: Do you think that if the if the GPT you correct you create or the gem in Gemini, do you think that’s serving the purpose of letting the rules get out of the way of creativity? Do you do you think it frees you up a little more?

Erika: Oh, heck yeah. And then you have a coach. Yes. And then you have a coach for people who aren’t sure about how to write in the brand’s voice. You know, you take it for granted that everyone can just figure out how to write like it’s coming from the brand. But even a lot of experienced writers have a difficulty getting out of their own voice and writing in the brand’s voice. So, you know, it really to me, it helps you not have to worry about that so much because you can take what you’ve written and then ask the GPT, you know, is this on brand enough for the audience we’re trying to reach and for how we’re using this content?

You know, is there anything you would change? Do you have any feedback for me that I should keep in mind? And that’s something that I’ve also found. People are so much more willing to take feedback from the GPT than they are from another human being. It doesn’t feel like a personal attack when you get a feedback or a vision from the GPT, because it feels objective. You feel confident that, hey, it knows what my brand guidelines are. It’s been written to reflect all those things. People seem to take it and in a way that they just don’t when it’s from another human being where they might feel judged.

Mariah: Is it because ChatGPT doesn’t have RBF?

Erika: Yes, yes, it actually wants to be your friend.

Mariah: This could work for us, Stu. This could work for us.

Stu: That’s good, that’s good. Yeah, it sounds like what you’re describing is more of a partnership. I mean, I listen to the two of you and Erika, you’ve done the book. Mariah, you want to do the book. I do too. And by the time I get to page 2, I’ve said everything I want to. ChatGPT is not going to make that better. It’s not going to extend that for me. And I think that may be a little bit of the fear that gets involved with it’s going to create something that didn’t really exist in the in the author’s mind in the 1st place.

But it sounds like what you’re doing is you’re harnessing it for putting the bumpers and rails in place to make sure that that what you want to convey is done so in a way that matches what the client’s hoping to what they’re not hoping to say, but how they want to say it. I can’t help but draw some parallels. I don’t think that’s a lot different in my mind and I’m certainly not a content person, so to take that grain of salt, the large one. I don’t see this as being any different than taking the same content and generating a blog article versus a a post someplace else on social. It’s just another way of taking the thought process and making it fit into a format that’s specified by the platform.

And I think within that, within that regard, you still have to be the person who has the idea and can convey it. That’s not being challenged or taken away. So this sounds kind of cool. I think that the other things that you’ve brought up about how it’s more of an assistant than a than a well, in some cases it’s not even it’s a style guide, but it’s not guiding you through your writing process. It’s just simply saying shape it this way.

Erika: Or say this is really good, you’re almost there, but this word feels wrong and that’s so important. You learn from that and that’s that to me is so much better than just like hitting spell check and you know, saying yes.

Stu: Yeah, and it maybe it’s not the content writers that should be worried, but the editors. But yeah, I kept several editors in boxes of red Bic pens for years. No I think you are on a path to breaking down that resistance some.

Erika: I hope so.

Stu: If they’re holding the book up as validation of the idea, I mean that that that right there is going a long way, but no, it it it seems very interesting. How complex was it for you to create a gem or a GPT? Is that a process that takes you multiple days and hours of work or is it something that is? Is something formulaic that you can layout for yourself once and modify per client.

Erika: You know, it’s gotten so much faster and easier for me over time because now I kind of, I know what elements I want to have in place, what’s important, and really the most time goes into customizing for the use case. So for putting together a brand voice gem or GPT, that just takes me very, very little time. It takes more time to get the client to send over all of the documentation that I want to upload than it does for me at this point to customize that GPT.

That said, what’s cool is once you have that GPT in place, you can start asking it, OK, we want to, you know, create a GPT for our e-mail nurture sequence. What are all the things to make sure that we include in our instructions? Or what would be the most beneficial types of files to upload?

So you can actually, after you have your first brand GPT, you can start using it to help you to create those other GPTS that are going to work in concert with it. So that to me is, you know, it’s really interesting and fun and it’s so much faster when you let the AI help you tell it what to do because you know, especially if you find that on your first pass that some of the output that you’re getting isn’t exactly what you want. When you finally get things to where you want, you share it back with the GPT and say, well, this is what I wanted and it’s, you know, not quite in line with what you gave me. So how can I change your instructions so that way we get something closer to what I did and it will tell you how to change things, it will tell you what to add in. So as long as you have that kind of iterative approach and you’re asking AI questions and then asking it to ask you questions so that you know if it has any anything that it needs to know before it can respond.

Always giving it that opportunity. You’re going to be able to set that stuff up so quickly and then it’s so useful because that way you have that trusted advisor who’s been seeing all of your content, who’s giving you that recurring feedback, who can remember all of it.

Mariah: Yeah, I love the excitement of AI and the excitement of making jobs easier paired with getting to hold a book in your hands. It just makes me so happy. Love that. I would love to hear, if you’re if you’re willing to go back into the danger zone, what were some of the highest points that you had while writing this book and what were some of the lowest points and how did you kind of navigate that creative process?

Erika: Well, the highest point was when I put together my outline of the book with, you know, like what chapters, what I was going to talk about, who I wanted to reach, sharing that and having people be excited. OK, that was the highest point when you just are, you know, getting started and people are like, yeah, I need that book. And you’re the perfect person to write that book. When you get that kind of feedback, it is amazing. And you know, I so I jumped in and I used a tool called Scrivener, which is really good for doing early-stage book stuff because you can move things around.

So like you can say, oh, I think I’m going to have these eight chapters, and then you start slotting in things that you know you want to have in the chapter, maybe without the connective tissue. But you can start putting in your references, you can start putting in things you want to quote. So it’s kind of like a really nice organization system where you can see everything.

But what I learned from the process is you really need to. Once you figure out where everything’s going to go, you need to export it out of there and start working in whatever format your editor is going to need. And that was on me. I did not ask that at the beginning of the process, and it turns out the editor uses Microsoft Word. Let me assure you, I do not use Microsoft Word for doing anything like that. So it was a little painful when I had gotten so far along in the book and then exported and saw what did and did not export properly.

It was painful going back in and reviewing my Scrivener version to the Microsoft Word version and figuring out OK, you know what? What are the missing subheads and stuff? That was a painful multiple hour process time I can never get back in my life.

That was pretty, that was pretty that in the three months, three weeks out from CEX going, oh gosh, am I going to get this done? Like how much am I going to have to write every day to get this done?

Mariah: Ruth’s going to kill me.

Erika: But you know, I even actually had printed out the book. And I did my final proofread on the plane to Cleveland at CEX. So that was actually, that was adrenaline. That was great. I’m just sitting there and I could and I’m sure that people were like, what is she doing? Cause I’m like, OK, I’m scribbling and Xing things and it was hilarious, but it worked having that deadline because you know, I was journalism major. I need to have that real deadline and I always worked right up to that deadline.

Mariah: Yes. Yes, see, Stu, it’s not just me. It’s not just me. Gotta have that deadline or diddly squad is getting done. That’s just how it goes, man. Well, I know we we’re getting close to time here, Erika, but before we leave our listeners, there are several of our clients and of our vendor partners and all of the, you know, people, amazing people like you that we meet out there who have awesome ideas for a book that they are just something’s holding them back, something’s holding them back. They don’t know how to get started or they don’t know where to go with their first draft. So if you had maybe three to five high level tips for people to get started, what would those be?

Erika: I’d say look at any kind of speaking engagements or presentations that you’ve given, because chances are that a really solid presentation that has resonated with people can be expanded into a book, or at least be a chapter of a book. So take a look at the content you’ve already created. I personally had done a two-hour AMA workshop on content governance. I’d done numerous sessions for Content Marketing World and Marketing Profs on a bunch of the topics that are in the book. So I had all of this source material to go back in mine and.

Find and expand upon and that once you realize how much content you already have, I think that that’s one of the biggest and easiest ways of getting over that stumbling block and if you are regularly using AI.

Ask it what you’re you know, what book should you write? What is it if they were you that they would be working on? And I know that sounds nuts, but you know, one of the other things is one time I had had I’d asked ChatGPT to write. This was one of the earlier versions to write my bio, and it was pretty accurate, except that it said I was the author of two books and it named those books. And I was like, I did not write those two books. What? But it had the expectation that because of the kind of work I do, etcetera, that I must have obviously written those books. So it was one of those things where it was a hallucination. But those kinds of hallucinations can actually be helpful for helping you realize, you know what? This is an opportunity. So, you know, realizing that it’s not that hard.

And what was it? It was at MarketingProfs this year. There was a luncheon speaker and the topic was stupider people than you have done this.

Mariah: Oh my gosh, I say that all the time.

Erika: And that is, you know, that needs to be your right. That has to be your mantra. It’s like you are a smart person, you know things, you have unique experiences that you know robots can never have. So share them, you know, how can you be helpful? So going back to what you said, Stu, it’s like, how can you be incredibly helpful and, you know, be giving of yourself through your content? That is how you can start writing a book and you just start from there. You just start with the brainstorming from there and ask a lot of people, how can you help?

And they’ll tell you, people will tell you what you need. There are, you know, there’s chapters and specific templates and you know, sections that are 100% because people ask like the how do you sell this into an organization? I have a whole section on based upon what kind of leadership style you have in your organization, how to actually make the case, because that’s one of the things that I heard from folks is really hard to do. But once you have a here’s, you know, here are the ways to decide what how to make that case. And here’s some great examples. It makes it so much easier.

You know, people are really kind of reluctant to have guidelines in place or feel like having too much documentation or templates that’s going to really stifle them. But what I found is it’s actually, it’s what cuts out those random acts of content.

Because you always, you know, if you spend the time to put together that content strategy, it doesn’t become real without processes and systems in place that support it, that actually make it happen on the day-to-day basis. You have people coming in with requests.

And no way to kind of say, hey, wait a minute, that doesn’t actually work with our workflow or that doesn’t, you know, line up to our content strategy. But once you actually do have all those foundational elements in place, it means that, you know, you’re giving them an intake form that is causing them to stop and think about what is that business objective they’re trying.

Trying to address with their content, who are they trying to reach? And once you have that kind of rigor in place, people are not going to be able to just ask you to do something because your competitor wrote an e-book or a blog post on such and such topic.

They’re going to have to make the actual business case to you for why you need that new piece of content. So it really completely changes the dynamic and helps people understand the strategic imperatives that need to be in place.

Mariah: Yeah, wise, wise words. Go ahead, Stu.

Stu: Oh no, just, I like the term “random acts of content”; that just tickled me there.

Erika: It is my mantra to stamp out those, you know, no more random acts of content. It’s on my website. It’s on my LinkedIn because…

Mariah: Quoted by many people, including Brian Piper.

Erika: People quote it and it makes me so happy because The thing is, is if you’ve ever had to create something that was that random act of content, you don’t feel good about it. It frequently doesn’t perform, it doesn’t engage people and it makes you feel like you’re not being valued as a content creator, so if we can have less of that in our lives, I think that’s a good thing.

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.