President Dale Carnegie Tokyo, Japan, Master Trainer, best-selling author, his latest book is "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training."
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Content marketing has been around for many years now and is an accepted way of appealing to clients. Thought leadership and intellectual property are given away for free to establish our credentials with buyers. If we show how knowledgeable we are, prospective clients will choose us over our rivals.
So for many years now, blogs, books, podcasts, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, online articles, social media posts, white papers, surveys and numerous other tools have been at the vanguard to prove we are experts in our fields. This has required a lot of hard-earned experience and an ability to communicate that experience to others.
Then generative AI tools like ChatGPT turned up and opened up a floodgate of content for people who are vying with us for the client’s attention.
AI generators are vast curators of knowledge from the entire world, and they are unbelievably fast at churning it out. How can one person compete with that? Our rivals can go to generative AI tools, then tweak the content and pass it off as their own efforts. Our clients probably cannot tell the difference. In a lot of cases, perception is everything. If the buyer sees you are pumping out vast quantities of content, they will conclude that you are an expert in this area, even though the chances are strong that they will never even read the content or not very much of it. Generative AI could become the great equalizer between competing firms in the content marketing department.
This is real for me. I have published six books and over 3,000 articles on LinkedIn and released 1,779 podcasts and 652 video show episodes. I am sure others also have substantial resources released out into the wild to prove expertise in certain areas. What can we do about all of this?
The answer is differentiation. ChatGPT and other similar engines are good at collecting and synthesizing information. At this point, it is often generated in a quite recognizable style and tends toward the generic. So far, these tools are not great in distinguishing the quality of the content. Some also make things up and even "lie," which the industry has cleverly marketed as “hallucinations.” I quite like “bald-faced lies” as the preferred descriptor. How can you trust a machine that cannot differentiate between fake and real content and can only collect and collate it?
Because it is synthesizing vast amounts of content, the style tends to be a bit utilitarian and dull. This is where we have an advantage still. We have examples, stories and happenings we have witnessed firsthand from our specific component of the industry, and we can include these in our content. The specificity means it is hard for tools like ChatGPT to collect the information, as this is personal to us and we have never published it anywhere as yet, to be swept up and homogenized by the machine. There is also a gap between when we publish it and when generative AI tools can get their hands on it.
There is also our style. A competitor telling a generative AI tool to write something in the style of Dr. Greg Story is certainly possible, but all they are doing is reinforcing my content and my expertise. As Dr. Greg Story, I also have 100% control over my style, and I can vary it as well with no qualms or permissions. I try to write my content such that someone reading it will recognize the style as mine. I write in a very informal style, often using slang, and I quite like idioms and alliteration. These are not complete moats that will deny people from copying me, but how many people in my industry are going to try to reproduce me? You have to be interested in Japan, leadership, sales, communication, presentations and diversity, equity and inclusion. That is an incredibly small circle of rivals. For most of us in business, this will be the case—we will have relatively few rivals in the content marketing world in our specific area of expertise.
Even for famous authors and influencers, there have always been copycats and people trying to rip their stuff off, and yet they are still going. For all of us, we see so many attempts to fool us with social media spewing out constant phishing attacks, deep fakes, etc., but we want the real McCoy. We get upset when we are fooled into buying something that is not what it is supposed to be. If we get a generated fake version of a favorite writer or thought leader’s content, are we going to be happy? Are we going to be satisfied with an avatar or a deep fake trying to pass itself off as someone we admire in an attempt to fool us?
If you cannot write original thought leadership and have a limited intellect or parsimonious business experience, then generative AI will certainly be of help. The problem is after people meet you, they find you cannot write thought leadership and that you have limited intellect or parsimonious business experience. You get the meeting through a subterfuge of clever repackaging, but the reality is still the reality. Either you have the real goods or you don’t. If you have them, then you don’t bother with generative AI fakery and trying to pass yourself off as something you are not.
Will ChapGPT and all of the other machines out there get much better? Of course they will. But for most of us in business, this won’t detract from the hope I have offered in this article. We can be more confident about what we are doing in content marketing because what we are doing is the real thing, in real time.
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