In an interview for an Agorapulse event, Agency Summit '23, I sat down with Katie Richman to talk about the impact of Generative AI in Marketing and how marketers, and agencies specifically, should be approaching AI, both for themselves internally and for their clients.
At the time, Katie was consulting on AI and developing her own AI startup. Since then, she's joined the team at Nvidia as their Technical Program Manager.
In this engaging interview, we talk about:
- Driving more revenue from marketing and from clients using AI.
- The ethics of using AI in marketing and as an agency.
- Best practices for prompting AI for marketing tasks.
- How marketing leaders and executives can position AI.
And most importantly, where marketers should focus their attention - what do they really need to know about AI today?
Watch the full interview with Katie on AI here:
About Katie Richman
Katie Richman is a web3 writer, thought leader, and hands-on coach, conducting emerging tech workshops and 1:1 coaching series with industry leaders, executives, and public figures outside of Silicon Valley and the tech industry. Her current passion is generative AI (like ChatGPT) and how it is going to fundamentally change humanity and life as we know it.
Katie taps into her 22 year career across media (Nickelodeon, Oxygen Media, ESPN, X Games) and tech (Facebook Reality Labs, Media Partnerships, and Meta's New Product Experimentation team) to discuss, write and teach others how to use new technologies to meet their business and life goals.
Katie's passion is the intersection of human behavior, sociology, and technology. She believes that if cavemen (cavepeople?) had access to social media, they would have posted selfies, too. Her vision of web3 is a world where we reconnect with each other IRL, living our lives in a world augmented by layers of personalized technology.
Subscribe to Katie's Technormal newsletter and connect with her on LinkedIn to talk more about the intersection of data, AI, augmented reality, geolocation, and the real-world.
If you ever need a web3 coach or a ChatGPT prompt-whisperer, she does that too: https://technormal.xyz.
Full Transcript: The Game Is Changing: Generative AI in Marketing
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to our gosh. This is the fourth chat today. No, the fifth chat today. We've got, yeah, this is number five. We've got one more after this, but this is one of my favorites, folks. I have been looking forward to this one for weeks because Katie, you're going to love Katie.
Let me tell you about her real quick. And I'll remind you all, Put your questions over here. There's a questions tab. There's a comments tab. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. We're watching both. But Katie's a web three writer, a thought leader and a hands on coach. Nothing emerging tech workshops. Read AI and one to one coaching series with industry leaders, executives, and public figures inside and outside of Silicon Valley in the tech industry.
And her current passion is generative AI like chat GPT. We will talk about that. I am sure. And how it's going to fundamentally change. You, your agency, marketing Humanity. Life as we know it, everything's changing. This lady's been with Nickelodeon Oxygen Media, Espen X Games, Facebook Reality Labs, meta and their product experimentation team.
And she writes, discusses and teaches others how to use these new technologies to meet their business and their life goals, which is what I personally wanna get out of this is, you know, yeah, how are my life goals personal gonna be impacted by ai? So how you doing?
[00:01:24] Katie Richman: Great. And thanks for that intro. I like to say, you know, there's so many people that are, I'm a coach, I'm a consultant.
This is the first time I've been in this. I've been two decades working at big media and then big tech, if you want to put big in front of everything. And what I'm doing now with coaching is basically what I did internally. When it came to, we need to up our game with mobile applications. I mean, I'm old, so like, I've been around since we had to convince people that mobile was a thing, and we were versioning platforms.
And then social, that was like my big sort of thing internally with ESPN and Disney was Pushing the use case, which seems silly now that we had to push the use case, but we did. Yeah. And then working with third parties. When I came, when I came to Metta, which was Facebook, then working with developers outside the company, I got a real empathy for what it's like.
And I'm assuming it's the exact same in the marketing program to be one of a hundred that relies on a platform yet sitting outside of that platform with a lack of control, right? You don't control the product development cycles and all of that. So I tried to bridge. that gap. And that's sort of what I'm still doing is I want to be, I want to help people get the most from generative AI and push the rest aside.
If you're interested in just sort of watching what's going on in the industry, that's fine, but we don't need to make, you know, like animated figures for gaming and stuff, like focusing on how to get through the day. It's sort of where I'm at with this stuff.
[00:02:49] Mike Allton: Awesome. I got to pull up this quote from Darryl, he says, I'm old, says Katie, hold my beer, says Darryl.
[00:02:57] Katie Richman: It was, this is reminding me of if you think this is busy, when we had our weekly all hands, Mark Zuckerberg did like weekly all hands with the whole company for the first five years I was there. So that was like a really golden time. And he would sit there with thousands of people and he'd be live in front of the room and just take questions.
And then he'd be in the chat. Like he jumps into all the internal chats when people think he's not and they're sort of busting on him or whatever and he's there. So I'm always like, if I don't think I can handle this, I don't know how he did that.
[00:03:28] Mike Allton: Right, right. So let's start off by talking about yesterday's panel discussion.
And so just a reminder to everybody watching, you've got full access. For 30 days and counting to all of yesterday's sessions, including Katie's incredible panel, this fantastic discussion that they had on AI. It was such a good group. You guys did well, let's see, two of you knew each other prior to that.
Yeah,
[00:03:56] Katie Richman: I knew Mark and that's it.
[00:03:57] Mike Allton: That's it, right? It's not like y'all knew each other. Yeah, such a good conversation. So it was how to drive more revenue with AI. So it wasn't necessarily in the weeds, how to be a prompt engineer, something like that. It was more high level for agencies, right? How do we actually use this technology to help grow and scale our agency?
So while we're waiting for you folks to come up with questions that you want to know about AI or anything like that, can you tell us about yesterday's session? What, what did you guys talk about? How'd that go? Let us know.
[00:04:26] Katie Richman: Yeah, sure. So I think we had a really interesting mix of kind of old school marketing, digital marketing.
And then I come from the other side. I'm used to having the agency relationships, right? So whether that's with creator agencies, marketing agencies and that type of thing. We also had a mix of people looking at the big picture, right? Like how to set your annual goals and how to, you know, Generate revenue on a large scale.
And I'd say I'm kind of the opposite. I'm looking at, you know, how do we make an agenda for next week that prioritizes the right things you need to do as if you are the world's best executive assistant? I mean, I was just, that's a prompt. I'm going to blog about soon, but pretend I'm the world's busiest executive and you're the world's best executive assistant.
Write me an old school day by day itinerary for next week. What do you need to know? To make this the best in the world or whatever. And then you let it guide you through just as you would. I really treat LGBT like an assistant, a really informed, smart assistant or an intern. You know and I'm using it to try and I'm really, really ruthlessly prioritizing practicality and making this usable.
And I'm assuming a lot of people listening right now are on the higher end of your organization, meaning you get further and further away from touching the platforms. You know, you're probably not writing tweets. And I'm sure you're like super dialed into the messaging and you're reading them all.
But this is a really cool opportunity to just play. With this platform, you can't break it. You don't have to do it on behalf of your agency. You can even make a new Gmail and just Just get your hands dirty and try things. If you mess it up, you can't mess it up. It's like having a conversation. You can't mess it up.
So I'm really big on let's get step by step. And like, what is the exact prompt? If you read my blog, you know, it's supposed to be cut, pasteable prompts and that type of thing. So as far as like generating revenue, I am focused on that, but it would be more like, help me craft the outline of our budget for H2 using.
H one's budget, knowing I want to grow, right? Our ad click through is by 10%. I mean, it's something really, really heavy. And then using that as my partner, like you would someone who worked for you to ask you the smart questions, push back on bad ideas. It's not the best at pushing back, but I really imagine it's a human.
[00:06:53] Mike Allton: The only time it pushes back is when it says I can't do that.
[00:06:57] Katie Richman: That's the only pushback. Yeah, that's right. Show the show,
[00:07:03] Mike Allton: show everybody your, your fingers. Cause then that's how we'll know you're AI.
[00:07:07] Katie Richman: I don't have the extra AI fingers. But yeah, I mean, the other piece of this is, is this is the moment to be, if you want to be known for working with generative AI as an agency, there are no experts yet.
It's all garbage. If people are saying that you do not have to know how to code, it's going to come back to us that we're liberal arts majors or like marketing majors and how much time and energy we spend on copywriting and writing scripts. Like we are back on top again, English
[00:07:38] Mike Allton: majors. This is your time.
[00:07:42] Katie Richman: I was so frustrated by not being able to code for the past two decades,
[00:07:47] Mike Allton: because I have
[00:07:47] Katie Richman: a lot of, a lot of us with creative ideas. Can't operate the tools and some of the people with the tools can't. They're not creative first. And so this just puts us, we can't do it all, but it puts us in a unique position again, to really play out our visions and think big.
[00:08:04] Mike Allton: Well, I love that. There's this dichotomy to the question of how can an agency use AI? Cause on the one hand you can use it as the owner, like you've been talking about, or the CMO different ways to. expedite the things that you're doing on and brainstorm and so on. But there's also this idea that as an agency, I can be using AI on behalf of my clients.
And one of the questions today is, is that ethical? Should I talk about that? How should I frame that as agency owner or the CMO of the agency, right? Who's trying to market and promote the agency to prospects. How do I. Talk to them and educate them about how we're using AI on their behalf and frame it in a way that they don't think that it's just cheating.
[00:08:46] Katie Richman: Absolutely. And I preface this all by saying, you're going to get my opinions, right? If I worked for you, that's sort of. This is how I would approach that question. Ethics are up to you. These lines, it really depends on your personality, how conservative versus, you know, risk taking that you are. I tend to be a little bit more on the safe, but taking chances side, almost like I worked at Disney, so how risky could it be, but I pushed them a lot on, on moving forward and trying new things.
What I would say with generative AI is it's this tool that's sitting here. You would never feed it any proprietary client information, never. But if that is a public client, if they have a public facing brand, say that I'm working with Lululemon, okay? I'm not telling the internet Lululemon exists. It already exists.
Before you worked or pitched to that client, you would do research, right? So you'd Google them. Make sure that you're not missing any press releases. Make sure that you know their latest lines. What did they come out with? Does the brand voice sound the same? Are they talking about new strategies? That's where this can come in handy as well.
So chat GPT, I think a lot of people know this. The knowledge base goes up to 2021. I personally believe they could go further, but that was enough freaking out for this cycle for people. So that's just something really important to keep in mind. You never want to go to chat GPT and say, what's the latest news right about Lulu Lemon.
You might want to say I literally tell it the truth. I am pitching a really large client. Right their goals or just give it what the pitch document was like when they asked for proposals or you had that conversation and they gave you the three things that are important. I feed those back in again, nothing proprietary or insidery, but they want to push into a younger demographic.
They want here is my pitch. Here is the presentation and I'll literally take a PowerPoint or a Google Slides PDF it. And cut and paste it back in, you know, act as if you are the world's best marketer and optimize this before my pitch. It loves, I'm acting like this is a human, but that is how you work best with it.
It seems to love goals. It seems to love deadlines. The more specific you can get, the better. And it likes to have a job. So hiring it to win the pitch, telling it, you will promote it. I'm not kidding. Like you seriously, it is very reward driven. Think what you want about that. I don't know what that means, but it's definitely a response to treating it as you would an intern, even more blatant, like I'll give you a staff position if you get us this, you know, you can really like dangle these things.
And it's like great. And that'll sometimes help you with some of the guardrails they put in place just to make sure you're not getting. The really generic stuff that will spit out at you.
[00:11:47] Mike Allton: That's fascinating. Yeah. And that's definitely less of the tool mindset because a lot of the folks who are talking about AI and promoting the use of AI right now that they say, use it like a tool, use it like a tool, use it like a tool.
[00:11:59] Katie Richman: Well, I don't think my advice is a little different.
[00:12:02] Mike Allton: This, it's very different, right? I don't, I'm not talking to my shovel when I take it out front.
[00:12:07] Katie Richman: No,
[00:12:07] Mike Allton: you're not. And this is
[00:12:09] Katie Richman: just, I'm really fascinated with psychology and sociology and how we act in groups and all of these things. And I was listening, there's a book that I'm listening to an audio book and it's all about human psychology and how we interact with machines.
Why we put faces on robots that don't need faces. And it's, this woman tells a story about she got from Japan this little AI dog. And she lives alone and has no pets or whatever and never cared about dogs and in two weeks, she was like, What are you trying to do? What are you, you know, you would not talk to your computer like that.
She felt bad turning it off when she left the house. I'd say that look, and this is where everyone has to have their own comfort level and opinion. I don't see what is harmed by me acting and pretending in my mind like this is serious. Someone on my staff, my staff tends to be just me. So it's really helpful even for my own psyche to say, you know, now I'm a team of two and pretend I have this person working with me and that is optimizing.
Everything is using it to brainstorm with me, not in my place, not do the work for me, maybe do the grunt work for me. But
[00:13:21] Mike Allton: generating
[00:13:22] Katie Richman: new ideas, if you just say to it, come up with 10 blog posts, you're going to get garbage. If you take the time to show it two or three of your past blog posts, say when in doubt, speak like the Atlantic.
That's what I, that's for my own blog. It still doesn't get tone, right? What it does really well is generate some blog topics. It'll give me. Ten ways to optimize your day and some garbage like that and I'm like, hey, no, no, and I'll tell it. It's basic. That was cheesy This crowd is much too intelligent.
This is an extremely educated group of people. They're very tech savvy You need to give us hacks that no one has talked about before it doesn't know exactly but that gives it a much better Idea that it needs to skip levels one two and three and just give us something real
[00:14:09] Mike Allton: Yeah, I totally agree. That's been my experience.
These are all just examples
[00:14:11] Katie Richman: of like how to talk to it, right?
[00:14:14] Mike Allton: Yeah, when I'm trying to come up with ideas for, you know, newsletter topics or blog post topics, you know, I might say, Hey, I'm talking to B2B influencers.
[00:14:22] Katie Richman: That's what I'm asking. How do you use it, Mike? Like, what is your process like? I'm curious.
[00:14:26] Mike Allton: Right now, that's the most common usage. I'm exploring other things. Like, what else can I do with it? Like any other tool that's just massive. There's so much that I can do that until you come up with the question in your mind, can I do this? It's really hard to even know. But yeah, right now the, the thing that I'm doing the most is blog post ideas, news or topic ideas.
I'll brainstorm
questions for podcasting. Yeah.
[00:14:49] Katie Richman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like, let's say it's blog post ideas. Everyone in their mother's probably one of the top five things that is getting asked to tell So I assume it has like a lot of train data and it's the more People asking the same question, the more generalized, right?
Because you're asking for blog topics. But so is a guy who owns like a paint interior painting store, right? Those are very different. I would almost say, give it a fresh take and say something like I'm speaking at Harvard next week, right? At this fantastical thing, I'm speaking at MIT to a room full of marketing science, graduate students.
They are already users of chat GPT. What don't they know what, you know, getting to like another level for you, you know, this is a digital marketing savvy crowd, giving it a different venue and saying it's a speaker might be interesting giving it an assignment to write, you know, it's some package or special things.
I don't get the best results when I'm just like, can you blog topic? Yeah. More like writing a book. I don't know. It's strange how, and that's why I'm doing this coaching because it's really hard to give just prompts that work for everybody. You really have to like know who you are, what your style is, what your risk tolerance is, and then what you're trying to do.
And then people can create templates right to work moving forward on their own with this stuff.
[00:16:13] Mike Allton: I love this idea that not only are you giving them a prompt with a target audience, but you've taken that a step further and said, let's go beyond what I would normally be doing. And let's put myself in a situation that is even more, as you said, fantastical or more professional or, you know, maybe years away from where I'm at today.
I'm, I'm not in a position to speak to MIT marketers. Right. But if I'm creating content, you want it to be target audience. Right.
[00:16:44] Katie Richman: Wait, wait, wait. So, you know, I mean, you know, I'm sure you're speaking to exactly each time you do same thing with my blog. I know who I'm trying to reach and that's safe.
College educated English speakers that do not work in tech, right? But they're, but they work on computers every day. You know, and I sometimes make sure my parents, they're tech savvy. But just a lot of this news blows past them and they're like this, weren't we just talking about the metaverse? What the hell is this now?
Right? So I try to keep that in mind because we get so deep in the weeds. Right in the marketing, just industry in general, or out in Silicon Valley that we're only seeing each other. And so then you end up talking to other people and skipping a whole bunch of steps. I'm also just thinking about like, if you're an executive that does not work in AI, right, or does not work in social media, how do we make these just tools that make your day easier, faster, get hacks off your calendar instead of just like always.
Giving people another thing to do, which is always a theme, right? And the talks is another platform. And I have a lot of empathy for that cause I was a social media marketing, the director of social media for awhile. And just doing posts by hand. That was like before we had Agorapulse or any platforms.
So I'd be in a bar, like, on Twitter, making sure I was checked in as the brand, and I'd had a couple drinks, and I was like, Oh my god, this is terrible! Terrible! Things have come really far. And we will let this stuff go.
[00:18:15] Mike Allton: Yeah, I'm reminded of the motto, Don't dress for the job you have, dress for the job you want.
Right. So I just really love this mindset of changing who you're talking to and who you're telling the generative API, AI tool, whichever one you're using to talk to is, you know, you're, you're thinking beyond the audience that you're normally creating content for, you're thinking bigger, better, like at Agorapulse, you're thinking bigger, better.
And also the story before, for years, we were talking to social media managers because those are the ones who were using our tool, which is great. But then Daryl came in last year and he's like, yeah, but they're not the ones with the budget. They're not the ones with the buying power. You need to talk to executives, you know, talk to CMOs, which has been an entire mind shift change, which our content team, Obviously should have been using chat GPT a year ago.
They might've gotten some help. Okay. Chat GPT. I want to talk to the CMO of Disney. I want to talk to the CMO of SeaWorld who has a huge team. They've got all these kinds of tools and budgetary issues that they're trying to sort through, but I want to get on their radar. What are some?
[00:19:16] Katie Richman: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I love this.
I think that would change that shift that you guys made. And thanks for sharing. Cause I think that is, yeah. Really intelligent. And now you're speaking boom to a whole new group of people. The things that I would say to a CMO or a leader, as opposed to social media manager would be just because you're not writing posts every day.
Don't leave that platform to your people. Like. You can be using this every single day for fun on the side, just like you would check out Twitter, even though you're not managing your handles, you know, Twitter account the more you do it, the better you're going to get in it, and you can then teach your organization.
So you're going to be learning at the same time as the people that you hired. In a social media experts Dylan anyone for you. Everyone's at ground zero if they're ahead a little bit they're ahead a little bit But this is where I will say your this audience's experience Is is vastly needed. I think the explosion of all of these digital tools Has made the workforce very young and people who were very new Took on a lot of responsibility during the past 10 years of growth.
I don't think there have been a lot of mentors. I don't think there's a lot of understanding of how to solve business level problems. Things that, that you all have learned through your career. I think there's a time now to marry that back with technology and kind of get back to mentoring people because you're going to know the platforms as well as they do.
And I do make the argument that liberal arts majors. We're back on top, baby, because it is all about having the crispest understanding of your tone, your voice, and your audience, and you all know that better than anyone else in your organization. So, you know, if you know you want to speak to aquariums in the United States, Such as SeaWorld, you know, I would literally go do my Google homework first, just like I always would.
I would probably look for any recent press releases of the past year. I would tell it the job, the literal job in this case that it is to do. We want to pitch and win. An account to break into aquariums. Okay, whatever it is. We're talking to the CEO and they are publicly you can put the link to their Google results, right?
You're not digging up anything new. You're just teaching chat GPT in this moment to become an expert in what you're trying to do. You have to remind it. Each session is almost like a new world. And so the whole act as you are my assistant to win this bid, you have to tell it that every, every chat, but you can save chats and continue that conversation.
So I would probably say, you know, what are the top five things, top three things maybe that I that I should focus on to win this account. Stand by, I will share three recent Right news or press stories or something like that with you and you could just go. Here's number one paste standby for two or it'll go off.
It'll start working. And then you course correct it right it might start telling you things you already know I stop it. I will go stop generating and say, we already know this. I did that homework. Sometimes you have to remind it and generally if you're not getting the results you want. You're not asking.
And targeted enough question. And that's where pretending this is an intern, but an intern that has no idea about, you know, they know about marketing say, but they don't know how to market to this audience specifically. They will know what you teach them and then become an expert in it. Imagination is a lot of imagination.
[00:23:03] Mike Allton: Love it. So I've got a question. If I'm a CMO, there are countless technologies that are out there today. There's new social platforms. There's new industries, new areas of interest and excitement. And clearly as a CMO. We're talking like
[00:23:19] Katie Richman: outside of AI, right? Like the metaverse, NFTs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Outside of, right.
Metaverse,
[00:23:23] Mike Allton: right? Or, or blue sky, or mastodon. Yeah. But if I'm going to be an effective CMO, I definitely need to be able to speak intelligently about some of those technologies. And there comes a point in the adoption, the evolution of every technology where it's mainstream enough. It needs to be on my radar, like blue sky, I would argue is an easy example that doesn't need to be on your radar.
If you're a CMO, you don't need to be in there learning how to use it. You
[00:23:51] Katie Richman: should just know. Of it. So if you're on a stage and someone says blue sky, you're not like, what's blue sky? And that's just really like, what's the top five of the week? Kind of anything new? Yeah, just like a quick scan of news. But if we, if we strip away, if
[00:24:04] Mike Allton: we strip away all the hype with AI, because
[00:24:07] Katie Richman: there's
[00:24:08] Mike Allton: arguably a lot of hype.
But if we strip that away, we just think, try to think objectively about AI today and where it's going. Has it reached that saturation point yet where every CMO should be, like you said, spending a little bit of time with Inside of chat GPT or one of the other platforms so that they have a baseline understanding.
Are we there yet?
[00:24:26] Katie Richman: Yes, but I would reframe the question. So the answer is if we're gonna run away out of the building right now Yes, this is where you need to focus your energy. And I would even be more specific Use chat GPT. It has the best front end. Google results are not as good with Bard right now, in my opinion.
If you're not doing visuals and video right now, and I think most of us aren't in the weeds on that stuff, chat GPT. So that clears away some stuff, but here's why just like social media. When Twitter first came out that we thought it was about the platform, right? There's a new platform where I have to say things on that platform, but it's really like kind of a new way of sharing right so Tweets Were where the media industry ended up, right?
That's where you go if You feel an earthquake out here and you're not sure that's Twitter's my earthquake bot. I'm like, was that an earthquake to find out like the most recent but so we know what to go for those things. So social is this big sort of growth. Then with COVID, I think we plateaued a little bit.
This is my interpretation of what's happened here. Cryptocurrency and blockchain created this sort of misnomer that the metaverse was going to be where all, a year ago, that's where all these conversations were going. And one of the reasons I started my blog is because if I were outside of this, I'd be like, now they're talking about AI the way they were talking about the metaverse, right?
I just think it's all going to blow over just like that. My argument is, That was a very techie futuristic look right at where things are probably going. So it was not wasted time. You know, if we got super in the weeds, I think we still learned about blockchain. Right? NFTs, you're still learning about these things.
If you just think of the sheer front end hardware that you would need to really make it a metaverse verse verse world, that doesn't make sense right now. The big difference between everything with blockchain, NFTs, and metaverse, which I still think is important stuff, is that, do you remember how many times it had to be explained to you, right?
The metaverse is VR, but it's not VR and it's MRXR, but it's not, it's about plugging in, but being with the world and like, I, I had this metaverse blog for a long time because I was so frustrating. What are you even saying? And we ended up telling people cartoon avatars were flying around a VR world.
Versus if you go to chat GPT and create your account and if you haven't, that'd be the one thing I would say to do. And this weekend you can play with it. It's as easy as Google. If you go on there and ask it, go to my blog and just pick a prompt, right? You don't even have to come up with it and copy and paste it in there.
10 things. I don't know. I'm going to send you pictures, but you know, you can't send a picture yet, but I'm going to send you descriptions of my style. What do you think? I should be buying for fall. It can be personal. It can be related to business that itinerary thing. I told you I'm going to post about like, it's as if you had a, 200, 000 a year executive assistant doing your travel like back in like the madman days.
It's like that. So when I back to our audience, this becomes instantly understandable by everyone that tries it. I mean, anyone that I've met can at least go, I get it. Even if they don't. A lot of it are scared about the direction a little overwhelmed, very few people don't understand it because if you can read and write, you can, you can use the tool.
So think about that, then think about as we input more data, right? So it's basically taking the corpus of the internet and data since the beginning, since we started like large computing models and going back. And generating all of those pieces into new ways to teach you brand new things, just like brains do.
So, as we use these tools, we're making the models bigger. It's like Google, it's like Facebook, the Facebook graph, right? Every time you post, you're adding those words, data, information, hashtags, images, and collection to that world and that corpus of data. This is the same sort of thing as just, like, the Facebook graph, except Instead of just getting our Google the results we asked.
It's smashing those together like brains do and generating completely unique facts. And if you don't think that's cool, like, I don't know. I mean, that's just wild to me. You know, I get so excited about this. Yeah,
[00:29:12] Mike Allton: of course. Which is why you're here because it's fascinating how it all works. And it does take some education for those who feel like they want to, or they need to understand why AI is different from say Google search.
They need to understand how it's going to impact their business. It will and that takes some conversation, which is, which is why you are doing what you're doing. And I see, you know, really fun folks like, you know, Rand Fishkin on Twitter sharing like the perspective of how AI is going to shift SEO and how, you know, people are using, you know,
[00:29:50] Katie Richman: where, where, as caught up as surgery, like all, where I was caught up as the C suites of all of these big technical companies, they don't know.
What this means for Google. So say Google bar does get as useful utility based as statute and it will. It's just, they took a different approach. They're more cautious. I think that makes sense, but it'll get improved. Now, when you go in and query AI, what will be the adjacent ads that'll be delivered?
Cause I'm sure they, I mean, that's the model, unless we come up with a new paid version for Google barred. But, you know, It will be an ad model. And as we buy ads against content that doesn't exist yet, right? So you're not like, I want to Buy everything about athleisure wear from fall, you know, whatever. You're saying I want to buy against New things being discussed in the lululemon category next quarter or something and that's scary Right.
That's just scary. So I don't know how they're going to solve that problem because it would be like sponsoring me and you don't know exactly what I'm going to say and you kind of trust that you've given me the right message, but then you have to sit back and buy an ad against whatever I'm going to say right now.
Right. That's a loss of control and it's neither good nor bad. It just is different. The changes are happening as we speak. As far as ads go and as far as SEO goes, there are, I mean, if you want to talk about what we can do with SEO, I'm betting you guys have heard before about how you can generate SEO driven headlines.
I mean, I can talk about some of that, but. That's a lot of stuff that you can find online too.
[00:31:40] Mike Allton: But yeah, I think the point here is that if you are an agency where SEO is one of your services, where paid ads, Google ad placement or one of your services, this is a conversation you have to be paying attention to because the game is literally changing daily.
You've got people who are using chat GPT right now to inform themselves about whatever topics they're interested in. And there are no links whatsoever. In that context,
[00:32:04] Katie Richman: right. And I mean, there's also the. Are people able to do this themselves? And so the value proposition may be a little bit different. So for example, my tech normal blog, what I'll usually do when it comes to titling, I do that sometimes first, cause it's a good way of getting the tariff topic narrow down and then I'll go back to it again at the end and say.
Give me 10 versions of this headline optimized for Google and social or Google and Twitter, right? Heavily focused on keywords or something like that. And I usually also say in a sentence, tell me why you chose that. Because the biggest thing here is you can't, on Google, you can click through to find the source, right?
Of whatever inane thing is being told to you. You're like, what? That doesn't sound right. And then when you get to the bottom, there's like a garbage news site and you're like, okay, well, that's what, you know, these are misinformed people passing this along. With this, with AI, you don't know why you're getting the result that you're getting.
It may be the best blog post title in the world, but it's a black box as far as what it did. So the least we can get is. Why? And it'll tell you things like based, it's basically saying based on the girls that you told me, this is a good fit, but by explaining it step by step, it's a little bit of a hack.
It tends to slow down and optimize its thought process. It seems like, I can't tell you why some of this stuff happens. Honestly, and I thought at first I was missing something there. You can learn about large language models, but they don't know that moment of like combustion between concepts that generates a new idea.
Just like we don't understand the brain. We don't quite understand the why. And if you ask the same question 10 times in a row, you will get 10 slightly different answers, just like a human would get.
[00:34:05] Mike Allton: Wow. That I haven't tried. And
[00:34:08] Katie Richman: yeah, yeah. And it's kind of a good thing to do. Give it a basic question, like optimize these 10 blog titles.
Put it in three times or three different separate chats because it does remember it like caches memories so did three and you can call it like A, B and C. I name all my chats, right? Test A, B and C and then just go back and see like, how wide is that range of what it's giving you? Because if it's giving you a wildly big range.
Right? The first set of headlines are completely non related to the other set. That sounds like we need to narrow down what we're asking you to do more. Because it's just way, you wouldn't be like, search the internet for cats. It's just too broad, right?
[00:34:51] Mike Allton: Yeah.
[00:34:52] Katie Richman: You know I love my like little analogies. Butt sting!
I am looking to adopt a tabby cat, search the internet for tabby cat adoption in the San Carlos, California area, blah, blah, blah. And that's where ChachiBT is still, you gotta remember that 2021 rule. I don't know the exact month of cutoff, I don't know, May maybe? But in any case, that will catch up very soon.
This is just a good time to get started, but no, you're going into the front lines. This is like alpha testing a new platform or product.
[00:35:28] Mike Allton: And that, that's a great segue to my last question, which is that if you were able to go back in time and give, you know, young marketer Katie advice, or if you want to reframe it, you could, you could, yeah.
I still like to give her some advice. Or, or just somebody who's just starting in the industry today. They're fresh out of college. What advice would you give them?
[00:35:48] Katie Richman: Okay, and this is coming out of almost 10 years out you're working in Silicon Valley as well and like a big tech company that used to say break things, right?
You're not going to break these platforms by trying them out. I would have pushed you to commit to yourself that in the next week, you at least if you, if you don't have an account yet, you will have an account, right? The prompt empty box. I want to have respect because when we first saw Google, I mean, a lot of us that are older, like can remember this, right?
That was intimidating. I don't want to enter the wrong thing. Would you ever now worry about entering the wrong thing? No, you just adjust your search terms, advanced search, filter it down. This is just like Google. You're not messing anything up. Don't put your client's data in there. Don't stick your socials.
This is simple stuff you wouldn't do on the internet. But ask it questions and get specific about your life. If you're a writer. Have it help you with that. You know, if you're full time caregiver of children for the weekend, have it come up with 10 things to do outside with the 10 year old and a 12 year old, or it's raining, give me a 10 new ideas.
I do the kids stuff a lot. There's an amazing thing where you sit with your kids and tell a story and say, we're going to tell a story together for a 10 year old. She likes ponies and princesses. Don't mention anything scary. She will start telling it and then say, go and you will pick up, keep this G rated.
Let's go. And the kid can go once upon a time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then say, go. And it'll pick up and tell, and you can read back to your, your child, like the story, so choose your own adventure. Yeah. Live. That's so that's like endlessly entertaining. If you want to start with something easy, like that is fun and you can do it instead of the kid, pretend you are the kid and tell the story
[00:37:43] Mike Allton: that I might do.
Yeah. That's great advice. Yeah. Just start using it. You can't break it. Fantastic. Yeah.
[00:37:49] Katie Richman: And then for young people, I would say. There has never been a better opportunity to own your expertise, right? And just own an online voice. So for 10, you can have a domain name for free. You can be on TikTok. And I know like I Being on camera this way is fine, but me hosting my own thing, it feels so strange.
And I, everyone who's got a big voice on TikTok says you just have, you get used to it the more that you do it. And so that's what I would say to someone young starting out is, you can still be focusing on getting a corporate, job while you're becoming a really niche expert in something. And it can be like using Chachi PT as a recent graduate to find jobs and black blog, your journey, because then the people that are going to come hire you are going to find that stuff cached in like your Google.
[00:38:39] Mike Allton: That is amazing advice. Amazing. Thank you so much.
[00:38:45] Katie Richman: If you do have young people getting out of school, I like to do mentoring. I usually have one or two students I'm working with. So, you know, if there's anyone with a college student, It's interested in this stuff. I'm happy to do a call up.
[00:38:57] Mike Allton: Fantastic.
We've got Katie's things in the chat. You can click on her messenger because if you're watching this replay, it's still available for 30 days. And at the top of the hour, we'll be back with our last fireside chat with miss millview Peters to talk about organic social media. See the last thing Mike is
[00:39:15] Katie Richman: just reach out.
If you want to talk more about your specific stuff, that's what I'm here for.
[00:39:21] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you. We'll see you a little bit.
[00:39:24] Katie Richman: Bye everybody.
