On today's episode, I'm excited to share the conversation I had with Manexa Stewart from Heymanexa.com. Manexa is an expert in generative AI and its application in business operations, with nearly two decades of experience in the digital marketing space. She's a self-described professional nerd who's passionate about SEO and evergreen marketing funds. From humble beginnings rewriting medical articles to now developing tools that make your AI output sound more human, Manexa has dedicated herself to specifically helping small business owners and creatives leverage AI for maximum impact. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Word. I'm your host, Chris Dagle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Okay, everybody. Today we're very privileged to have Maneksha from Heymaneksha.com here to join us to talk about how we're applying generative AI in the operations of our businesses. So Maneksha, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what you think they need to know about you before we get started?
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Yeah, so um first of all, I've got a little bit of a cold, so I apologize if I sound extra croaky today. Um but yeah, I'm based in London. Um I've worked on the internet since 2005. So to anyone who doesn't know what SEO or AI is, I typically will describe myself as a professional nerd just for shorthand. Um I really love um uh working on the internet. So search engine optimization has been um a real focus for me. And from that, I've really um worked a lot on evergreen funnels and um doing sort of freelance head of marketing projects that look at how we can build out messaging for our businesses that meet your customers at the point of their expressed need. So you are not having to work as hard or spend as much money on things like advertising, um, but you're able to show up and provide value in a way that naturally leads you into the sale and allows you to present what it is that you have sort of have to offer to people who actually want to find it. So um, yeah, that's kind of my um
professional uh journey in a nutshell. And in uh late 2022, I started to take some of the knowledge that I'd gained about AI from the sort of SEO and how machine learning has uh impacted search since about 2017. And I built out a tool that helped me to repurpose transcripts from summit recordings and different things, and then I was like, okay, another thing that takes me a really long time in my business is sales pages because you know you can think about a sales page for like 40 hours or more. Um, and so I ended up building out the framework for creating a good quality sales page, and then from there, I've spent the last 18 months just figuring out how to get AI to sound a lot more human. So, how do we have it sound like us as um individual business owners, not corporations, not enterprise level, but as solo business owners, small teams, people whose voice needs to come through in the content a lot more than um speaking in the sort of um generic uh plural um uh or third person, you know, copy. So that's really been the last year and a half or so.
SPEAKER_00So a bunch of stuff there I want to address. And that the last topic that you brought up, that for me has been that's the white whale that I've been chasing. How can I get authentic output from the models? Um and that anyway, so we're gonna jump into that. But I want to address something. So you've got 20 years online and in direct response digital marketing environment. Okay. So you're a pro.
SPEAKER_01I was very young when I started.
SPEAKER_00You're a pro.
SPEAKER_01So yeah. I was um I I actually started, I was 15 and my family were just going through some financial hardship. And I found a freelance project online that paid me $3 per article to rewrite medical articles with keyword optimization. And so I was writing between 30 and 100 articles a week from that point. Um, they were really poor quality. But thanks to Google's algorithm updates over the years, they no longer exist. So nobody needs to worry about getting dodgy medical advice from a 15-year-old.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's very um entrepreneurial of you. That's fantastic to hear. So that was kind of like that was your exposure to SEO, I guess. Understanding how to optimize those articles.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. And that's changed obviously a huge amount over the years because as we have seen search algorithms get more and more advanced, um, as machine learning has been implemented in uh search, we you know, we've moved away from exact match keywords. So you no longer have to put in exactly the phrase that you want to search for in order to find relevant articles. Um, and Google started that process back in around 2016-2017. So really from a you know keyword research perspective, as AI is rolled out, which is this next evolution of the technology that has informed such, we are starting to see changes in the kinds of things that we need to do as business owners and as marketing leaders for such visibility and organic visibility as well. So it's been a really interesting thing to watch unfold over the years in terms of how technology has changed and how big data has been used to try to simplify in some cases, but also also to like amass power and influence and control over like who gets visibility and um you know this latest Google algorithm update has really um caused a lot of people to realize that maybe you know the future of using Google is gonna be a little bit more pay-to-play than it has been previously because of the way that AI is changing such as well.
SPEAKER_00We're gonna talk about that for sure. Now, in in your introduction, you mentioned you've been using AI prior to the release of Chat GPT in November of 2022.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so OpenAI's um uh API became available in uh I think it was early 2021, late 2020, around that time. Um, and so um the sort of release of generative AI tools and starting to kind of look into all of that side of things and how that is applied across marketing content was something that I had looked into quite a bit before the release of Chat GPT. And then um, there were still a lot of issues with consumer adoption of it before Chat GPT came onto the scene because of how um suspicious a lot of people are for you know good reason. Um, so ChatGPT really has um opened a lot of people up
to being open to using it in their workflows and their systems and kind of thinking about a new way of working that doesn't require us to manually be doing every single thing on our to-do list.
SPEAKER_00So um obviously it was a lot harder to leverage the models back before Chat GPT 3.5 was released in November. So uh that's commendable that you got in the weeds with that stuff and got results from it. So you know, here here's a question that I definitely want to talk about the mechanics of SEO, but I also want to talk about in in our um world, we I have a business called chiefaiofficer.com where we educate individuals on how to be that that uh AI expert in their business, right? Um and we advise a tool stack that we use because there's millions of tools out there. And one of the tools that that uh we get a lot of value from and that we encourage those in our community to at least try is perplexity.ai, which when people say, Well, what is that? I tell them it's I mean a Google killer, right? Because it's kind of like a a combination of search plus uh LLM. How so it's well established how to work with the algorithms for standard indexing in Google or any search engine. But now that we've got this combination, this hybrid environment, are there specific SEO strategies to make sure that you're getting uh you're showing up in the results when somebody uses something like Perplexity?
SPEAKER_01I have not personally used um perplexity um yet in terms of looking at it from a search visibility perspective. Um I've been watching it unfold um with Google's stats in terms of the amount of market share they're losing and just watching some of that unfold has been super fascinating. Um I think that um the thing that I come back to with the people that I am educating and talking to on a week-to-week basis is that as business owners, the core thing that we need to feel really confident in is who we're serving and what we're providing them with. So when we can very clearly communicate what we do and who we're doing it for, that is going to allow us to get maximum visibility regardless of the platforms that come out. So obviously, there's a lot of chatter about perplexity at the moment in terms of that side of things. Um, historically, with Google, you have to, you know, you still do need to really set up your Google search console for Bing, that would be Bing Web Webmaster Tools. And you're really having to do quite a lot of technical optimization and understand exactly what you are um uh providing for users when they arrive on your site. There's all of these different metrics that are looked at for technical on-page, off-page SEO. Now, um, I do think that with the LLM approach, um we are going to see a lot more um sort of um it evens out the playing field quite significantly as far as um your abilities to get in front of your ideal customers because ultimately people are coming to AI and generative AI models to ask for contextual input. So they want, they know what they want, they're asking for something very specific. And the AI model is working at its best when it provides the most specific results for that particular person. That's why it really is important for us to know what we do and who we do it for. Because as we start to see, even you know, with ChatGPT and they reference Bing now as well, um, when we are seeing any kind of integration between large language models and search and sort of the relevancy factors, um, specifically positioning ourselves for the people who are going to be looking for what we have to offer is the thing that needs to be the top of our mind and it needs to come across really clearly in our positioning
as well. So for your business, for instance, you know, chiefaiofficer.com, like that's a really obvious thing that people who have listened to a couple of podcasts where people have introduced themselves as a chief AI officer, they might be like, oh, what is that? How do I hire one or become one? And they search for that. Um, when we um uh look at your business, if you instead were to call your business like, you know, future of um futureofbusiness.com or similar, um, your positioning immediately is more vague. And so um calling a spade a spade when it comes to your business name is a really great shout. Um but even within that, when you're looking at your web content, et cetera, just being super clear about what it is that you help people do, um, you know, what is it you're helping them um to achieve, what are the deliverables, what are the features, the benefits, like the explicit things that we've talked about in marketing for years and years and years. But ultimately, those are the things that your customer is thinking, okay, so um, how can I do this, or what do I need to do this, or um, who can help me to achieve this particular goal? So um I think we're gonna see a lot of transition in terms of tools. Um, perplexity is something that is getting a lot of traction. It's gonna be really interesting to watch that unfold. Um, and the the tension between LLMs and such is something um, again, that is still very early days, just in terms of, you know, factual um accuracy. I think there are some tensions on the other side of things, which is that how do we feel about being in search engines and have you know having LLMs summarize our content rather than having people visit our own websites, um, especially what if we're investing in content and assets that are designed to educate our audiences. Um I think there's like bigger questions around some of that from a cultural perspective, especially if you're making decisions about investing in content assets for your brand. Um but I think that we um uh ultimately, when we know what our message is, we know who our customers is, regardless of whether it's a new social platform, a new search engine, a new large language model, we can um go and um check out their guidelines or whatever and just really easily then submit, submit our businesses to whatever perplexities version of Google Search Console ends up looking like, um, and those things. So I think it's just being super comfortable with the fact that the internet is changing. We are possibly going to be looking at a situation where we're having to be, you know, present on five, six, seven channels instead of two to get traffic. And as long as we keep our vision focused on the impact that we're having in our businesses, that is the sort of key thing that allows us ease and um to feel like it's a a straightforward thing to engage with some of the things that are going to emerge over the next couple of years.
SPEAKER_00You know, this is interesting because uh I I knew that AI could support SEO efforts. However, I'm not an SEO expert. And for those of you who are not that familiar with SEO, my perception is that it's always been a more technical than a creative skill. That you needed to understand how the search algorithms uh rated or valued certain content over others, and then you I'm not gonna say manipulated, but you played by the rules of the algorithm. You weren't able to um it was it was very predictable, right? And now so my perception was oh, AI is just making it easier to do SEO, but it's it's actually it's changing the entire game with this. So before I knew if I knew what the rules were, I could create content that that satisfied the rules for the queries, and my uh search term would, I mean, my results would show up towards the top of that term. But now with LLMs being involved in
this, and and you mentioned it used to be exact match, and now like the models are smart, they know what I'm looking for. So even if I didn't use that exact word, it might still uh give me a result that satisfied my query, but as far as traditional SEO would have been uh an unlikely result or an unlikely match. So I hadn't considered that.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say um what we are seeing is like search engines allow you to find content right. So they are giving you um all of the possible pages that could uh fall under the query that you've asked. But what we're seeing is people have been incredibly overwhelmed by that because they have a query, they know that they need help in some area, and then they're responsible for filtering through all of the results to figure out, okay, is this right or is this not right? And historically, Google has actually been really good at presenting people with the things that are the closest to what they're looking for. But intent has always been this art rather than a science. So the SEO um, you know, it has the science and the art factor. The science is, you know, you need to make sure that your site meets these technical requirements and make sure that your content is as optimized as possible when it comes to load time and all of that kind of thing. But the art of it has always been understanding what the intent of your ideal audience is. And that's why, you know, SEO, when you're doing it culturally, is of really important because keyword research is one of those things where a nuance take, you can look at a keyword phrase and you can optimize it based on like, oh, this got 10,000 uh views, but actually 10,000 searches per month. But actually, if you look at it, it's not quite relevant to what it is that is on your page. So even if you're getting a lot of traffic to that page, you're not necessarily going to get conversions from that traffic. So the quality of traffic has been something that has been a struggle for a lot of the businesses that I've worked with over the years. They've gotten the quantity of traffic from outsourcing, especially to places like Fiverr. You know, you can get impressions on Google, you can get traffic, but getting traffic that actually converts and that is quality and is relevant to your business, that is the missing piece. And so that's where the like art of understanding who your ideal customer is and what their intent is, and also what kind of language they're using on their journey to purchasing whatever it is that you have to offer. And so the reason that we've moved away from exact match search terms is because Google has built out this, you know, machine learning algorithm that picked up context clues from the way that we were engaging with search engines and was able to present you with, you know, the classic example is um, how do you know if someone's searching for an Apple laptop or an Apple that is a fruit? So it's some of those things where it's like, okay, there's like context clues that are going on. And um that is really, you know, where Google had gotten to. And then what people have realized with Chat GPT and these and Claude and these models that you can interact with directly is that you don't need to filter through 16 million search results to get a contextual answer. You can just ask a question. And then AI is going to give you a generative result that is that meets exactly what you're looking for. So one of the things that a lot of people are talking about on social media is like, yeah, Google, I can be, you know, on Google for two hours trying to find an answer and I can get an answer in three seconds on Chat GPT. And it's because people are overwhelmed by content and they're looking for context. And that is something that we as business owners need to be really cognizant of because when you go to Chat GPT, you can get a contextual answer that might be completely hallucinated and not at all factual because Chat GPT has just like made something up. But people care less about that factual truthfulness of the answer and more about okay, well, I'm not overwhelmed by the amount of information here, so it gives me a starting point. And so what we're really seeing is yes, a change in the way that people um are using search engines, but also just fundamentally the internet is changing because people have realized that there are other ways of getting to the answer that they want that don't necessarily involve having to go through a search engine like Google. So that's why the focus on the um content piece, which for Google, search has always been about like how can you be the most relevant high-quality answer for your customer? Like that needs to be the focus with SEO. A lot of the hacks that we've seen over the years, and especially for things like keyword stuffing or you know, just being able to identify keyword and then rank for it. Um, there are things that you need to do, like that
are related to building your brand and it's effectively brand-based marketing. You know, going on podcasts is a really classic example, not to be too meta for where we are now. Um, but when you are um building out your brand online, that is building out the authority, the relevancy, the trust for your industry that ultimately has a really positive impact on your SEO. And so if we're creating web pages that have got content that is high quality, that is designed for our ideal customers, that answers niche problems in a really well thought out and structured and quality way, that will do well with organic search because it's ultimately ticking all of those things off. And Google and these other search algorithms are moving, you know, every time there's an algorithm update, effectively they're closing a loophole that previously people have used to try and get traffic that they shouldn't really have had in the first place. So that's kind of just understanding some of the changes at play when it comes to search in particular.
SPEAKER_00SEO to me has always been, it seemed like that you weren't able to build something and then leverage that, that it was almost like a constant race to keep up with the changes and that sort of thing. So as a as a business owner, to me, it just seemed like, wow, that's a lot of work. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do it myself. I'll find an outsourced uh resource to help with that. So for the business owners or the team leaders or employees who are listening to this um who haven't explored SEO in the past, now that that there's been this introduction of more intelligent search results and there's tools that we didn't have before, like perplexity, and I imagine Google will probably have their version of perplexity pretty soon. Um what would be a great starting off point for an individual who said, Let's explore this?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so my um advice for that is always going to be starting with a customer journey map. So start from what your business does and work your way backwards and understand what does a customer journey look like for your ideal customer. And I don't mean like, you know, create an ideal customer avatar and you know, do do all of the things that have sort of, you know, maybe come across as a little bit of like corporate marketing or something, but just fundamentally understanding what kinds of questions your customers have and what they're doing at each stage of the customer journey. Great advanced. And then that allows you to do an audit of your existing content to be like, okay, well, where are we talking to people here? What content addresses these questions? How are people getting from A to B? Have we helped them to reach um like a measure of success in this particular stage before we then present them with the next piece? And do we have an asset in our business that addresses that? And so when you um kind of reverse engineer it from that point, it feels a bit counterintuitive because it's like, what, I've already got a load of content. Can I not just optimize what's already there for keywords? Like, yes, you can. But if you want to make sure that there is longevity in your assets and your marketing journey, having a really clear understanding of the way that people get to the problem that you solve and that kind of wider contextual picture is going to make sure that you plug any holes within your own business at the moment and also position yourself as an expert or you know, your Organization as an expert for that entire process. So you understand where people are coming from and where they want to go. And you show up with a message that is relevant and understandable to them in that moment.
SPEAKER_00It seems like documenting a custom customer journey would be a pretty smart activity for a business owner to do. So they could get more higher conversions, better affinity with their brand from the people looking for them. But I that's not something that I hear a lot of SMB small to medium businesses investing in the creative energy to identify that customer journey. Maybe they have unintentionally picked a couple of things that would fall under that customer journey, but it wasn't an intentional effort. Are you using AI to support the creation of those customer journeys?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I have done a lot of work in the past with like agencies and people who are in tech startups and more corporate spaces, but my absolute joy in life is working with creatives and small business owners who are doing something that they really love and want to make the world a more beautiful place. And so one of my like passion projects is helping small, small and medium business owners like actually use this tool that previously has been incredibly inaccessible. Like over the years, I have spent hundreds of hours creating just customer journey maps. You like to do it from scratch with no access to AI, you're looking at like a hundred hours of interviews, of market research, of keyword research, of content audits, of competitor analysis. Like it's a really involved process and it takes, you know, um a lot more effort in the short term than is feasible for the average small business owner.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because the return and investment that you get for that is years rather than months, right? So what one of the um so the first thing that I did was this sort of transcript repurpassing, then I built out the sales page, and then the next thing that I did was like, hmm, how can we automate the idea of a customer journey map? So um the first time I ever did it, it took five minutes to generate a whole customer journey map, and it literally made me cry because I was like, this has taken me so many hours and to like see this, you know, generate in like five minutes is incredible, but also just like such a, you know, such a wild difference in terms of what work looks like. And so um, it's actually one of my favorite tools in marketing magic because you get um, you know, what is your customer doing? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What does success look
like for them? What's some of the keyword phrases that they use and what's some of the FAQs that they might be asking for each stage of the customer journey? And um using AI to help with that, like even though AI is giving you the most probable answer, so you're not always, you know, you're not gonna get the nuance that you would get if you spent 30 hours interviewing people, but you get 90% of the way there in a way that allows you to step outside of your own perspective of your business and understand and remember what it was like to not know anything about your industry or your niche, and then look at your marketing and your messaging through that. Because even the language that we use the further that we get in our businesses, like the language that you use about AI now compared to three years ago, is going to be very different. The people who listen to your podcast, um, you know, when they first started listening to it, their knowledge, their jargon, their understanding of the space was very different to where it is now. And so um, being able to use AI to help us to get some of those customer insights that previously would have taken, you know, a hundred or more hours means that as small business owners, we can much more effectively create impactful marketing materials that hit the nail on the head for our customers. And the great thing is that when bigger businesses do this, when corporate companies do it, the amount of money that is spent on positioning is absolutely immense. Like you're talking, you know, minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, if not millions, millions, because they understand that if a brand is not relatable to its customers, that brand is not going to be successful. If a brand can't communicate with its customers, it's not going to be able to create action in the way that it can once there's relevancy there. And so brands spend a huge amount of money trying to create that personal connection that naturally exists when you're a small business owner. If you're a small business owner, you already have a relationship with your customers, you already understand who you're talking to. You can use AI and have a filter of like, oh, that won't land with my audience because you are personally interacting and a lot more involved in that in your business. So when we're using AI, what we, the analogy I like to use is that you've got a jug of like dirty seawater and you want to give your customers a clean glass of drinking water, and you're the British filter that takes it from dirty seawater to like a nice clean glass of water. And so when you're interacting with AI, like you're gonna get a lot of dirty seawater coming out in the results because the nature of generative AI is that it's probably gonna give you the most amount. But the beauty of using it and ending up with usable assets and things that are going to really support and help your customers is that you can filter out the things that are the most relevant, the most important, the most impactful based on what you know to be true about your industry, about your niche, and about your customers. Um, we don't necessarily realize how much we know about our customers until we're faced with a set of information and we have to pick out the things that are the most relevant. And so that's an exercise that I would encourage anyone to do is you know, look at something AI generated about your audience and then pick out the things that you know would resonate and land most with them.
SPEAKER_00This is huge. I I um I haven't invested a lot in the formal concept of a customer journey. And I'm exactly the avatar you've just described. I know my customer really well. And if if prompted, if if asked the right questions, I would be able to, you know, give a very nuanced description of what their issues are, what they're looking for. But I've never sat down and done that 100-hour slash five minute exercise before. And a couple of things that that you mentioned are very important. For those of you who are small business owners or working in small businesses, you now have the ability to do something that was out of reach financially and like ultimately all resources uh they just you didn't have the ability to do this, especially at the level of an Adidas or you know, Coca-Cola or something like that. And now with a little bit of understanding and the right AI-powered tool, any small business owner can have that that six-figure customer journey output, at least 90% of it, like you said, um, where they can just go in and and work on the the final little bit. So were you saying that you you prompted this or you have a tool that allows you to get these results so much faster now?
SPEAKER_01Yes. So um I built them into Marketing Magic because I
knew that it was kind of part of the framework that I always recommend for marketing anyway. Um and there's also another one called the Jobs to be done framework, which is actually a product management tool. And it gives you, again, contextual scenarios where your ideal audience and your ideal customers are trying to achieve a specific outcome. And we can focus really heavily on the outcome, but we don't necessarily focus on the trigger or the impact. And so the customer jobs to be done framework helps to really situate the outcome with the trigger and the impact that people are looking for. And so um the idea behind building out marketing magic is that the tools are um as streamlined as possible. People aren't having to spend hours and hours prompting and trying to find exactly the right, you know, nobody wants to become a full-time prompt engineer as much as we can all enjoy like interacting with AI. And so um it's it's it's really the framework for how do you do really great quality brand-based marketing? So you're positioning as your brand, your business, how do you tell your business story in a way that resonates with your customers? How do you position yourself for your ideal customers in terms of the things that you're focusing on in your content? But then, you know, a level below that, how do you make sure that your product marketing is done in a way that attracts the right people into your specific products and services and the offers that you have in your business? Um, and then adjacent to that, you've got things like your, you know, uh regular campaign or content calendar where you've got things that are going out all the time, but your brand marketing and your product marketing are things that are happening regardless of what's happening on your content calendar often. Um, you know, they're things that are positioning, they're things that people can search for and find you. Um and then just um uh making sure that that is as streamlined as possible and allows as much cohesion as possible. So that instead of having to like learn how to do marketing, instead of having to learn how to prompt, because that's the other thing, is like AI is only as good as the framework that you give it. So if you don't know the kinds of questions that you need to ask, the customer journey map that you get out is not going to be as nuanced as it could be. It's not necessarily going to be as helpful as it could be. And so that's really been the joy for me, it's been okay, how how is this something that's actually usable for the average business owner without having to um, you know, filter through results that aren't aren't relevant or aren't quite quite as nuanced. Um, but it's you know, customer journey map is a is a concept that has been on the internet for a long time. So in terms of actually looking for outcomes, it's one of those things that you can use depending on whether you're interacting directly with something like Claude or GPT or whether you are using a tool that has kind of um streamlined the process and just gives you the access to the outcome.
SPEAKER_00Super. You know, um as we're gonna kind of switch gears a little bit. As a business owner, um how about this? If I was a prospective client, I might have some hesitation if I knew that you were using AI in this process. If I wasn't familiar with AI, if I was like, well, I'd rather, I'd rather have the creative mind do this, right? Uh let me ask you, do you do you advertise to your clients that it's a a feature and not a bug that AI is involved?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I don't do as much one-to-one work with people now. And a lot of the people that I'm doing work with have um already uh been in my audience enough to know that I have an AI tool so that it's their kind of expectation. So I'm not not ever, um I think we need to be ultimately extremely transparent about the way that we use AI. So, but if you um, you know, if if if I was saying to you, like, let's let's work together, um, I would explain to you very clearly how AI supports the process and how we can use it as a tool within the project that ultimately allows you to get much better quality results than we would otherwise have time for. Because using AI allows you to collapse time and um get a much broader scope of understanding than you otherwise would be able to, which when um, you know, for my specific services, being focused around marketing and messaging, understanding who my clients' customers are is a really core part of making sure that their marketing lands really well. And if I can spend a hundred hours helping them with content repurposing and structuring all of their content into what we know to be true about their audience, it's a much better use of my time as far as they're concerned than if I was to spend that 100 hours researching that audience and then only have like, you know, 10 hours available to give them the sort of finished strategy. So when it comes to how we use it within our businesses as service providers, um, transparency is incredibly important for numerous reasons. But the top one that I always point out to people is that if you are putting things into something like ChatGPT, you are typically putting it into the public domain unless you have actively excluded your data. If you have signed a confidentiality agreement or any kind of non-disclosure agreement and you put client information into Chat GPT, and your client ultimately then sues Chat GPT, they chat GPT, if an AI, will absolutely scapegoat
you as the person who did that. You know, there's there's gonna be there's gonna be situations that we see there's already um lawsuits around the use of AI and how AI has used data. So you need to be ironclad in the way you get consent from your clients to use their data with AI. But I also would recommend using uh private API. So with Marketing Magic, we use a um the private API. Um but we always encourage people to use platform.openai.com rather than chat GPT because when you go to platform.openai.com, you can access GPT for, etc., but through a um uh like a private connection effectively where they automatically exclude your data from future learning. So when it comes to your intellectual property, things like your podcast interviews, um, you know, if you've got a book coming out, you don't want to be putting chapters of your book into Chat GPT and being able to sort of uh you use it in any kind of um create creative capacity with your assets. Um we know that the data that we've put on the internet has been misused, even though, you know, 20 years ago, if we had known how our data was going to be used when it went onto the internet, a lot of us would have made very different decisions around what we chose to put into the public domain. And so we want to move forward with a clear understanding that we now know how that data is used, and we do want to be cognizant of our intellectual property. Um, if you if you write a book with AI and you publish it, and somebody else publishes a book written by AI and it has the exact same content in it, you don't have a legal case at the moment because the law doesn't um uh work as quickly as technology. And so um, you can't copyright things that have been AI generated and protect yourself legally. So there's a whole lot of stuff there where you just want to be really careful because if you were to put your chapters of your book into ChatGPT and then it was in the public domain and it's spat it out for somebody else, like you're effectively giving away your intellectual property if you're not super cautious about how you're using it, and particularly with clients, um, you could be looking at lawsuits down the line because of how litigious um people are in the face of AI. So when we're using it, we can absolutely use it, but we want to be informed about what um data we're giving permission for those la language models to use. And we also want to be really transparent and get explicit consent from our clients, um, signed consent for us to use AI in our projects with them.
SPEAKER_00That's very good advice. I hadn't considered that either, but that's uh and that platform.openai.com is a pretty good tip there. Um, one of the things we're gonna circle back to one of the things that you mentioned earlier in the conversation was about how you are leveraging AI to create authentic human-like output. And as I mentioned, I've been looking to crack that code for uh it at least all of this year and probably some of last year also. What what's your secret? What's your advice on that?
SPEAKER_01So it's very definitely looking at what makes our way of using language unique to us. How does our personality come across? Um, and what are some of the um characteristics of language that are unique to the way that we express things in writing? So I've ended up building out a framework that kind of does a really deep um assessment of uh copy um for users of marketing magic. But it comes back down to the fact that when we use artificial intelligence, ultimately it's maths and probability happening at really high level, it's predictive text, right? So if we don't give it a really solid contextual framework, it's always going to default to the most generic possible answer or response. And that is often written in um, you know, corporate internet speak as a business owner. And so instead of um uh just accepting the sort of sentence structure, punctuation, etc., that Chat GPT or these language models will give to you if you ask them for, you know, write me a podcast uh show notes for this episode about this thing. Um instead, we want to understand, okay, how do we use um anecdotes in our writing? How do we use different literary devices? Um, what are some of the things that make our content unique to us? So the most common thing that many people will do is actually provide a sample piece of copy when they're prompting the language model to say, you know, replicate this, the the tone and style of writing. Um but we um always want to expect that we have to edit content that is given to us from AI because if it gives us a 100% accurate result, it knows too much about us. It knows too many of our personal stories and our anecdotes and the different things that make us unique and our experience unique. So um there's you know two sides to it. The first one is to understand like how you enjoy expressing yourself in your business, you know, what are some of the things that make a piece of writing um contain your personality? Um for me, I use um like pop culture references and I um have a bit of a like goofy sense of humor, but not too goofy. So
sometimes Chat GPT is like um, you know, it'll go really ham on if you tell it to be sarcastic. So trying to get a little bit more nuanced with how you describe your um language. Um so that's the first side. And then the second side is our expectations. So our expectation should be that we do need to do an edit and we need to do a pass. Um and it could be that you're putting that piece of copy through and saying, you know, rewrite this in the first person singular. Um, but we want to have an expectation of editing as part of our workflow, and we should absolutely never ever be putting something that we've generated with AI straight onto our websites and hitting publish without doing a check because we are responsible for the outputs. Um, and if it gets detected by Google's spam brain filter as being generative AI content and we lose rankings, we're gonna be super upset about it. So, in the same way as we would, you know, cover, um, you know, make sure that um a copywriter hadn't provided us with anything that was plagiarized or duplicate content from elsewhere on the web, we want to make sure that anything that we use AI for, we have double-checked that it is coming across as being human generated. Um, and so my proudest achievement of 2024 today, because it is an ongoing process as well. Um that again, it's the art and science piece. But um I was able to generate a sales page and I put it into like writer's AI detector, and it came out as 100% human generated, even though I hadn't edited it or anything. And I was like, this is the pinnacle of my career right now.
SPEAKER_00That's what I want. So that's that is that framework or that um process outlined in your course.
SPEAKER_01So it's not, it's not, no, it's not public domain um at the moment. Um I think like darn, yeah, the closest I can say is to use sample copy and uh and to think about the nuance of how you communicate. Like, and that is something that is um, you know, as far as podcast uh content, um, you know, that's a starting point for you for anyone to be able to kind of uh figure out how they can um prompt more effectively. Um it is built into marketing magic so that when people upload their sample copy, there's you know a really involved process behind the scenes that makes sure that all of those things are analyzed. Um but as far as it being, you know, course content at the moment, I haven't gotten to that point. So um yeah, those are those are things that are gonna help you get a good quality result um uh if you're listening to this and you have been struggling with how generic your content is sounding.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So what what my efforts have been is I've created a custom GPT and I fed it. Um but prior to me launching this business, I was more of a behind the scenes. I was business development, I did the deals, I was at the parties, but nobody knew who I was. Um so I don't have that body of work, and I would imagine that a lot of small business owners that are out there or team leads or whatever, they would like to be able to get that to pass the the writer's AI, you know, uh screening, but they don't have that body of work that they could that they authentically created that they can use as training material for a custom GPT or something like that. So what would you suggest in that case?
SPEAKER_01With the uh use of things like custom GPTs, etc., depending on you what you're building them out to do, um it doesn't necessarily matter if the content is a piece of your existing business's assets if you feel that it's something that effectively captures your tone of voice and way of speaking. So what I would say is, you know, find some content that sounds like you and use that. And that the most um effective thing is actually to pick the content from your about page. Your about page is normally the thing that most business owners will overthink until the cows come home. But the way that you explain who you are and what you do is most easily captured in your tone of voice with your about page. So that is a really good place to start if you don't have an existing body of work. Um, I am actually working on something at the moment that is a um it's like a quiz and it basically uh creates um it creates like an AI quiz specific to your business and gives you some different examples and you can kind of pick what your preference is, and then it will build you out a set of guidelines, even though um you know you might not. Have anything that specifically outlines your way of writing at the moment. And I think, you know, we're going to see more and more of that kind of thing built into these generative tools in particular, where we can like unpick the nuance a little bit more. But the interesting trend with a lot of AI tools is that there is a move towards enterprise and this focus on corporate, because that's where a lot of the money is, especially for SaaS and software. And so it's been quite a fun one to work on because for me, the goal is always to support small business owners. So it's looking at, okay, how do we make this process as easily as possible for small business owners? How do we make sure that the specific needs of a small business owner, of a family-owned business, of a local business are um still provided for within emerging technology and aren't overlooked just because they don't have the budget to spend, you know, $10,000 a year on a solution. So when it comes to using AI, um especially at the very start, if you don't have tone of voice sort of defined and you're not 100% sure what it looks like, um you can take a piece of copy that you don't like, upload it to GPT, ask it to break down some of the key elements of that piece of text, and then kind of do a little bit of a test for, okay, well, if I exclude um sarcasm or wit from the results, does that change it in a way that makes it sound um and feel more like me? So I would give yourself, you know, a block of time and it is worth the investment. Um but I would give yourself a block of time where you can test out and understand what you like and what you don't like about certain types of coffee because once you've nailed that, obviously it makes AI a lot easier to engage with in general. Um, I will say that I think that the more, and we can see it even again, we've talked a lot about Chat GPT, but just with the custom GPTs and things that you can build um out in their interface now, it's changed so much in the last 18 months. And I think there is an awareness within AI and tech that it's not a usable thing to expect people to become prompt engineers. It's giving people another thing to do. And so we are going to start to see, I think, a simplification of how we interact with these models that make it much more straightforward to get the results that we want to get out of them. Um and I think it's going to be a bit of a transitory time while some of these tech companies figure that out. Um, but I would just encourage you to um set aside a block of time each week to kind of play with AI and figure out what it can look like for you and your business.
SPEAKER_00And the good news about that is folks, you can't fail. You're just playing around. You're getting used to the tools. It's not a, it's not a, oh, I did it wrong. It's oh, I didn't know it did that, right?
SPEAKER_01Like your to-do list might be as long as your arm, but putting it off is only gonna mean that your to-do list stays long for longer. Um, I had 130 summit interviews that needed to be repurposed into blog posts and social media posts. And I ended up building out um, you know, a tool. It took me so it took me so long to like build out. Yeah. But ultimately what it means now, now that I'm like comfortable with AI, like I can repurpose an hour-long episode of something in 10 minutes maximum into like multiple different platforms. And that's kind of what, you know, to circle back to the start of this conversation where we were talking about um what the future of the internet looks like and making sure that you understand and know who your ideal customer is. If you know what your message is, reformatting your message for the variety of platforms that exist on the internet is a really simple thing that AI can help you with. And so understanding the core of what your message is and who it's for and who your customers are really allows you to then be able to repurpose whatever that message is for any of the platforms that get invented this year, next year, into the future, or any of the ways that the existing platforms might change.
SPEAKER_00You know, every time I do one of these episodes, I'm I'm thinking, okay, well, we've, you know, we've done a good job by leveraging AI and AI-powered automations and stuff like that. And every time by the end of it, I'm like, damn, my my there's more to do. We're not done yet. I want to thank you for sharing that stuff with us, Manekha. So if if people want to find out more about what you're doing, I'd like you to do two things. First, talk about how they can get access to the marketing magic, but also where are you putting out content that is where you feel is your best work?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um, marketing magic, you can get a seven-day free trial, no credit card details required. You just literally sign up, add your website URL, and your brand is set up and good to go within 60 seconds, and you can kind of try it out for yourself. It's really straightforward to get set up. So um uh you also get access to our support calls and different things that are happening in our community um as part of that trial. So if you have questions about AI, you can come along to those and um they're always really good fun. Very cool. Um, and then in terms of like where I'm putting content out, um, you can find me anywhere online um by searching Maneksha Stewart. I'm there's not very many Maneksha Stuart's, so I tend to be the um first Manexha that comes up. Um, but I'm over on Facebook. Um, I do different live streams on YouTube as well. Um, and I have a mailing list where I talk about different um ways that marketing is going to be impacted. So I do talk about AI, obviously, um, but I do talk about marketing as well because the intersection of those two things is where my like top-level nerd really comes out. So um yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm looking forward to signing up for that. So um any closing remarks or any closing advice for the listeners?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's easy with anything um to feel really overwhelmed by it the first time that you look at it. And I come from a space that is very jargon heavy. You know, we covered, you know, SEO is one of those things that people just don't necessarily want to engage with because they don't feel like they know enough about it yet. Um, the most impactful thing that you can do for your business moving forward is just become comfortable not knowing stuff. So um be comfortable faced with things that are unknown to you or that feel confusing. Um, language and and the jargon surrounding AI language models is more of the same of the jargon that we've seen through SEO as well. Um, but ultimately you've grown your business to this point and um not engaging with it just because it's a little bit confusing is not going to make it go anywhere. So um just lean into your strengths as you're faced with something that might feel like a weakness at the moment and get stuck in and challenge yourself to save it. You know, how can you take your next idea from in your head to being fully implemented and out into the world in 10 minutes? Um and that challenge will um sort of help you to focus your energy as you start to play around with AI and look at what it can do for you.
SPEAKER_00That's fantastic advice. I hope everybody else got as much out of this episode as I did. That was a lot of fun. Thank you, Maneksha. We'll be getting um all the links and everything that we talked about will be in the show notes for anybody. And I would encourage you, I'm getting off this. I'm gonna go follow Maneksha on LinkedIn, YouTube, um, everywhere because the stuff that you talked about is very accessible for SMBs, small business owners. They don't have to be the SEO expert, they don't have to be the customer journey expert when they have you in their corner. So thank you so much, everybody. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01I had a great time, so thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Special thanks to our producer, Evan Desalnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at Work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.