How AI is Transforming Marketing Forever: Latest Trends and Tools Explained

Your presenter is Michael Stelzner, founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner. Mike, the floor is now yours. Thank you, Jason. Whether you are a total skeptic when it comes to artificial intelligence or you are ridiculously optimistic, the most optimistic amongst all of your friends, about what AI could mean for your future, I hope that you pay really close attention to what we have to talk about today. I want you to ask yourself this question. What if you could go back to an earlier version of yourself and advise yourself back in time? Would you do anything

differently given what you now know? Would you get early on YouTube? Would you start a podcast or start a newsletter, or would you be early on Instagram or TikTok knowing how big these things are today for you as a marketer? That's what I wanna ask yourself because if you would go back in time and you would tell yourself to get started a little bit early on some of these things, then you're gonna wanna pay attention to what we're talking about today because the truth is that when we are in the middle of something that is

a trend, we often don't see it until it's been going on for quite a while. And I'm here to tell you that we are in the very early days of something that's going to be quite monumental, and I'd love to explore that a little bit more with you. Many of you might remember November 30, 2022 is a very important day. This was the day that the company OpenAI launched the tool we know as ChatGPT. And if you're like me, you probably saw it in the days or weeks or even months after its release, and your

jaw dropped. And you said to yourself, what is this? Is this magic? And a lot of people I knew, like, quite literally had a crazy experience. Like, I've never seen anything like this before. Ethan Mullick, a Wharton professor who specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that ChatGPT is a tipping point for artificial intelligence. And Forbes, shortly thereafter, or right around the same period of time, said that OpenAI's Chat GPT may have been the most important news event of 2022. I'm here to tell you that it may have been the most

important news event of the decade, And we may even look back at this event as the most important news event of the century, yes, of the century. And I know that might sound like an exaggerated claim, but perhaps in the future, you'll realize maybe that it's not. So I wanna ask you this question because I'm sure you're thinking about this. Is this AI thing just another fad? Is it Clubhouse? Is it like one of these things that everybody's talking about and then all of a sudden everyone has forgotten about it? Or is it possibly a

shift, a tectonic shift, a movement, a change in the way that we operate that's dramatic, that is groundbreaking? Which is it, a fad or is it a shift? To explore this a little bit, I wanna talk about something that Sam Altman, who is the founder cofounder of OpenAI and the leading person at OpenAI that everyone listens to. He said, quote, back in March of 2024 that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will be easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost handled by AI. Let that sink in for a

second. He said that 95% of what we do as marketers will likely be handled by AI. Now what did Sam Altman know? What did Sam Altman see? See, here's the thing that you need to understand. A lot of the technology that is rolling out now has been in development for a long time, and it's very possible that Sam saw things that quite literally are at the early stages of development inside of his company. And maybe he knows things that the rest of us do not know. So let's take a look at what marketers feel today

about OpenAI. Our most recent research, which I'm gonna talk about a little bit later, shows that 59% of the marketers we surveyed, and we surveyed 1250 of them from all sorts of different industries all over the world, they do not see AI as a threat to their job security. And we've been surveying marketers about AI for a year and a half, and these numbers keep going up. Said another way, marketers, generally, as time goes on, do not see AI as a threat to their job security. So but here's the thing. Us marketers, we have no

idea what Sam Altman knows. He knows something that we do not know. Now here's something else that I think is really fascinating. The majority of marketers, by a long shot, believe that AI will change how work is done in their industry, not the marketing industry, but the industry in which they operate, whatever industry you operate in. The majority of marketers we surveyed feel that AI is going to change how work is done. Now that might seem fantastical, but take a look at what I'm about to share with you next. Recently, Nobel Prize winners for chemistry

and for physics were awarded to AI scientists. Start to think about this for a second. So if you read this first quote on the left, Nobel Committee recognized the scientists for foundation research in neural networks. So neural networks, which are kind of the brains behind all the stuff that we use today, are quite literally changing the worlds of physics, according to the scientists that give out Nobel Prizes. CNN said scientists who used AI to crack the code of almost all proteins win the Nobel Prize in chemistry. So the scientific world is literally acknowledging that their

industry is being transformed right now. These announcements were about a week ago. This is brand new news. Science is already changing. So I wanna ask you, how will AI open up new opportunities for you as a marketer? And I also wanna ask you, has something happened like this before? Those of you that pay attention to the world of social marketing know indeed it has happened. Many of us might work in an industry because of the innovation of Facebook. Take a look at this chart here on the screen. You can see that in December 2004 was

their inflection point where they started. They hit a 1000000 users, and I I believe that was shortly after they started, and those were all college students. But then you can see here around 2008, they popped to a 100,000,000. And then in, 2,000, 9 or 10 or whatever year that was, they, they they hit to 400,000,000 and then to 500,000,000 literally within a matter of months. Okay? And take a look at this 14 year old article from The Guardian. 2009 was Facebook's year. Facebook and all the other social platforms that now exist that did not exist

back then, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, dot dot dot. They literally revolutionized the world of marketing. They opened up entirely new forms of marketing that never existed before. So if this has happened before, it can happen again. So where am I getting some of this research from? Well, we are launching tomorrow, if you're watching this live, Wednesday, October 16th, our brand new first ever 2024 generative AI marketing industry report. And if you take a look at the cover of this report, it's a marketer on the stage doing what appears to be magic, and a crowd of other

employees or clients or prospects are marveling as she seems to pull off magic because she's taking advantage of these brand new generative AI tools. And we studied exactly how marketers are using these tools today in their marketing and what they plan to do in the future. And I'm going to reveal a lot of that data with you today. And if this is, something of interest, please pay attention. So my mission today is to provide you a road map for not just surviving this coming change, but thriving as an AI enhanced marketer. So I probably should

have introduced myself. Who am I? Well, I founded Social Media Examiner back in 2009. I'm the sole owner of this company. And back when I started this, I thought I was late. It was 2009. Facebook had been out for years. LinkedIn had been out for years. Twitter had been out for years. And I'm like, clearly, in my mind, I am late to the game. You and I both know that that was still very, very early. And my company has been intentionally employing AI since ChatGPT rolled out. In early 2023, we began talking about AI on

the social media marketing podcast. And in July of this year, we launched the AI Explored podcast where I bring marketers and entrepreneurs on and creatives to talk about how they're putting AI to work. Back in 2020, at our social media marketing world conference, we were teaching on artificial intelligence, and then we have been ever since. So that's who I am. And now I want to give you an important couple of messages, and I really want you to pay attention to these next two slides. We're not even 2 years into this generative AI revolution, as other

people call it. In exactly about 45 days, ChatGPT is turning 2. So if you look at this AI generated image right here, ChatGPT is just a little baby with 2 candles, and it's early, early, early days. As a lot of much smarter marketers than me have said, AI is as stupid as it's ever going to be. It's only going to get better, and it's gonna have a really big impact on your career. It's undoubtedly going to. And I don't want to be the one to just say that. I want to share Sam Altman, founder cofounder

of OpenAI, the company behind Chet GPT. I want to explain what he said just a few weeks ago. Just a few weeks ago, he said this. It won't happen all at once, but we'll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI. And then he goes on to say, eventually, we can each have a personal AI team full of virtual experts in different areas working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Imagine having a virtual team of AI assistants allowing you to create almost anything

that you could imagine. What could that make possible? Well, here's a couple of thoughts. First of all, we could have a team of AI assistants that help us execute an entire launch. Imagine having AI create and execute an entire launch for your next product. Or we could have a team of AI experts that will look at our advertisements, automatically increase our bids, automatically turn off underperforming ads, create new media for the ads, new creative for the ads, and make sure that we're maximizing our ads across multiple social platforms, completely done by AI better than we

could ever imagine. Or imagine having AI go out there and research a topic that you're interested in and find all the latest and greatest information and bring you new research as new information emerges. Or imagine having AI on your behalf go out there and find you customers. Imagine it placing phone calls, prequalifying prospects for you, and arranging meetings for you so that you can close the deal. Imagine having AI automatically handle all of your inbound inquiries, respond to the inquiries that it can, route the ones that it can't, and automate all of this for you.

And, yes, we know there are already such tools exist. But imagine having AI go out there and find you your next hire and do prequalifications and and pre interviews with the person and collect all the information so that all you've gotta do is meet with them. How amazing would that be even if they're not looking for work? These are all for sure use cases that are coming very, very soon as a result of AI. Now here is the really good news. If you are like, oh my gosh, I'm barely into this thing. I've only been

doing this for a couple of months. Well, guess what? Welcome to the club. Take a look at this chart. More than half of marketers, 62% of marketers, 2 out of 3 of you, have been utilizing generative AI tools like ChatGPT for less than a year. So if you feel like, you know, overwhelmed, don't feel overwhelmed because everyone is a beginner. Okay? This technology is brand new. It's very, very early days. You are not too late. Now this next statistic might blow your mind. 65% of marketers or 2 out of 3 marketers are using these AI

tools every day or multiple times a week. So if you're not using these tools daily or multiple times in a week, you're in the minority of the marketers that we studied. So it is changing really, really fast, and marketers are utilizing these tools almost every day because they provide so much value. And we're gonna talk about that value in a little bit. But here's the other thing. The majority of marketers plan to increase their use of generative AI over the next year. So if you don't have any plans to do more with AI, you're definitely

in the minority because there's a good chance all of your peers are gonna be jumping in here very, very, very soon. So here are the findings, the benefits that those marketers that are utilizing generative AI are receiving today. Now let me kind of explain what we did here with this question. We asked them to respond to these statements on what's called the Likert scale. And that gives us the benefit of knowing how strongly they agree or how strongly they disagree with these statements. And we ask marketers, 1st and foremost, what is their view on whether

these tools save time? And you can see here 50% of marketers say they strongly agree that AI saves them time. I wanna ask you, Do you feel overwhelmed? Do you wish you had more time to think? Do you wish you had more time to be creative? Do you wish you had more time to do all the things that you have to do? Well, this is one of the biggest benefits that marketers are receiving today by utilizing these AI tools. The number 2 benefit with 79% of marketers is increasing their productivity. The demands on our marketers

today is ridiculous. I mean, you and I both know you probably have a list a mile long of things you want to get to that you do not have time to get to because you do not have time to get to it. But if only you could save time so you could get more stuff done. Well, not only does AI help you save time, it also helps you get more stuff done more quickly. And the one I'm most excited about is the creativity angle here. How many of you have this creative side to you, but

you just haven't had time to let it out? How you desire to actually explore new things, to open up your imagination to new possibilities, but you just don't have time. Well, look at this. 76% of marketers that are utilizing AI find that it gives them that creative spark. It gives them that opportunity to actually reignite that creativity that is latent inside of them. These are 3 really, really huge advantages. And if you're not taking advantage of AI, this is what is waiting for you because this is what the majority of marketers are experiencing today. Now

we also ask marketers, what are your biggest concerns? And the biggest concerns that marketers have right now is the accuracy of the content that comes from these generative AI systems. 80% of marketers are concerned that they're not getting answers from these AI systems that are accurate, and that's a big concern. But despite this concern, they're still having huge benefits. And I'm gonna address each of these concerns in just a minute. The second biggest concern that marketers have has to do with copyright. Can they use the information from the AI system? Is the AI system built

on top of someone else's copyright? Who really owns that kind of content? And then the 3rd big concern of marketers faced by 67% of marketers when you add strongly agree and agree is privacy. A lot of marketers are really concerned that they are feeding the beast, quote, unquote. They're giving the AI all of their insights and knowledge, and that knowledge and insight will be utilized by others against them. And it's a legit concern. So let's go ahead and talk about each of these. The first thing I wanna say on the accuracy side of things is

you definitely need to take your time because you're gonna have more time. You need to take your time, and you need to really critically analyze what comes out of these systems. You need to ask yourself, is this accurate? It might sound great, but is it accurate based on my experience as a marketer? Are we making claims that are correct, or did AI quite literally make something up? Like, today, AI made up a fake quote from a fake customer, and I said, where'd you get that? And I said, oh, yeah. I'm sorry. I made that up.

So you have to, like because, you know, I I I wanna make sure I'm using quotes in my messages that are accurate. So that's really important that you cross check everything and you critically analyze it. On the copyright side of things, I'm no copyright attorney. But if you use AI to improve your own work, how is that any different than using grammar checkers or spell checkers to enhance your work? I don't feel like that's gonna be a problem. But, again, here is how I would use it. Like, take a look at this graphic. Improve this

copy for a graphical ad. And I gave it a headline, I gave it a subtitle, and I gave it the copy. So this is copy that was created by somebody, and then we simply enhanced it. So if you look at this through the lens of I'm going to just use AI to enhance the stuff that I'm already creating, I really don't think that you're gonna have any issues because I like I said, I don't see that any different than any other tools that you use to enhance stuff that you're already creating. On the privacy side

of things, it's really important, especially because there are laws all over the world and in different states in the United States that protect consumer data, do not upload to these systems personally identifiable information like email addresses, IP addresses, names, phone numbers, addresses, any of that kind of information. You definitely wanna strip all that out or anonymize all that information. And I would also caution you to take anything that is confidential intellectual property, things like that are not published out on the World Wide Web. Right? Things that are not that you don't plan to release to

the public. Be careful about putting that kind of information into any particular AI platform. So I'm here to tell you that I don't think it's a question of if you should use AI to help with your marketing, but instead it's a question of how how do I use AI? How are other marketers leveraging AI to improve their marketing? Let's take a look. If you take a look at this chart, this is sorted by and by the way, this is one of many questions we asked in our study. This particular one has to do with content.

And we asked how marketers were utilizing AI when it comes to the creation and editing of their content. So this is sorted by the most popular to the least popular. And the way a lot of marketers are do doing this right now, 1st and foremost, is they are getting ideas. So they're using AI to help them come up with, for example, a podcast episode or a blog topic. They're they're asking AI for ideas of things that they think might be interesting. So they're using it to just kinda ideate content. The second most popular is to

actually creating initial first drafts of their content. So a lot of marketers are utilizing AI to come up with something, and then they are doing their own editing on the content and modifying it a lot to make sure it matches their voice, matches their style, removing things that they think are too hypey because it does tend to be pretty hypey. In addition, the 3rd most popular thing is utilizing AI to simply edit something that already exists or refine it, and we already talked about that on a prior slide. Big use also is coming up with

headlines, titles, hashtags, taglines. You can give it something, and you can ask it to come up with, like, 10 titles. It will read the content and try to try to discern what it thinks the essence of it is. It's very good for summarizing. So if you have really, rich pieces of content and you need to create summaries of it for the social platforms or for YouTube, and then, of course, customizing content for different audiences. This one is used the least by marketers, but let's say you're in the business of helping realtors automate their marketing funnels.

So what if you took that very same content and decided to target it to a new audience like car dealerships who are selling expensive products just like realtors are, but not as expensive. The EAI could help you quite literally create a brand new market or brand new niche that you could go after, And it could maintain the essence of what it is you're trying to communicate, but do it in a way that's relevant for a brand new audience. So let me share an example with you, and this example is very meta. But here we go.

I dropped the PDF of our industry report into this cool tool called NotebookLM by Google. And by the way, if you wanna make a note, it's notebooklm.google. That's where you can find it. And what's really cool is that this tool allowed me to query the report and get text responses. But they have this really cool little feature that's kinda hidden over here called audio overview. And you just click a button, and about 3 minutes later, I got an audio of 2 human sounding people talking about my study. And I listened to what they found was

interesting, and I went ahead and actually, kind of outlined what the AI voices found really intriguing, and I made a note of it. Now here's a quick little side note. If you listen to any of our podcasts, we are dropping on Wednesday, October 16th, the actual, audio from the Notebook LM, and you can listen to it. And I think it's gonna blow your mind because it sounds exactly like humans. And I talk a little bit about some creative ways that I created multiple variations of it and stuff like that. So I think you're gonna find

it really intriguing. Watch for that tomorrow to be dropping. Now in addition to what I just shared with you, I also took the PDF of this report that's dropping tomorrow. I dropped it into chat gpt, and I dropped it into Claude. And I asked both of these systems to create an outline for this particular training. And if you take a look at the outline that it came up with, you can see that it made a few recommendations to share a couple of quotes. And you might remember that those quotes I shared at the very beginning

of today's presentation. So this whole thing really allowed me to rapidly create the content for today's presentation. That's just a great example of how you can use AI to speed the creation of content. Now beyond the obvious written word content, I also asked marketers, hey. What are some other kinds of content that you're utilizing AI for? Now it shouldn't come as a surprise that the written word is the predominant way people are utilizing generative AI because in the beginning, that's all they could do was written word content. Most marketers are not utilizing AI for images

or video content or audio content. Now for some of you that are savvy, this is a competitive advantage for you. If you can leverage AI to create images and video and audio, and I'm here to tell you there are tools that allow you to do all of these things, you're gonna have a little bit of a leg up on those that are only using AI on the written word. Okay. Here's another example of how we use AI inside of Social Media Examiner. Whenever I'm done with an episode of my podcast, we use AI to automatically

generate a transcript, and then we also use AI to actually help us write the show description, which goes on Apple Podcasts and YouTube. We also have trained up an AI on how to write articles from our actual podcast so they do not look like a podcast. We also use AI to create thumbnails for our YouTube video of all of our podcast episodes and the articles, and we use it to help us create social content. This entire process easily, historically, has taken more than 20 hours. But because we started doing this for the social media marketing

podcast and we've been able to to scale it down to about 3 or 4 hours, it made it very easy for us to go ahead and launch another show called the AI Explored Podcast without a lot of incremental costs or labor costs to our, company, Social Media Examiner. So that's just another example. Now I've shared content examples with you. Now what I'd like to do is kind of open your mind to other ways you can utilize IA outside of the obvious ways. And I really wanted to understand how marketers are leveraging AI for some of

these bigger lifts. The main thing that they're doing is using it to expand their ideas. So a lot of marketers who maybe have the kernel of an idea because maybe they heard it on a podcast or they read it in a newsletter are going to generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT and asking it a lot of information to kind of expand on its ideas. In addition, a lot of marketers are coming up with brand new ideas that they've never considered before as a result of utilizing AI. So the first one is to expand on

an idea you already have. The second one is come up with something brand new. A lot of marketers are leveraging AI to assist them with research. AI is really good with summarizing complex information. So marketers are utilizing AI to summarize long articles, reports, YouTube videos so they can get to the essence of it and decide whether or not it makes sense for them to get on the trail of consuming those themselves. Fewer marketers are analyzing data. That's an opportunity. Fewer marketers are analyzing repetitive tasks. That's another big opportunity. And very few marketers are leveraging AI

on, decision making. So, these are areas where marketers today are leveraging AI, now outside of, outside of the obvious content side of things. So I wanna show you an example of how I could leverage AI to expand an idea. So what I did was I took a PDF of this presentation that was not complete, maybe the first 20 slides, definitely different than what I originally have today. And I plopped it into Chat GPT, and I said, I'm doing a webinar based on the attached PDF. It's not complete yet. But what else could I do with

this content? Because I wanted to see what it would recommend. And it came up with some obvious things like blog posts and articles and infographics and email series. But I I I wanna let you understand the depth of which it is suggesting things. Take a look at number 2, podcast episodes. It said, since you already have the AI explored podcast let's pause for a second. How in the world did it know I had the AI explored podcast? Because it read one of my slides that said I have an AI explored podcast. So this recommendation is

a contextual recommendation, which is really exciting. It goes on to say, why not consider dedicating an episode to each of the topics you talk about in the webinar? For example, one episode could be how AI is reducing time spent on content creation. That's pretty cool. Then I said, alright. Help me outline the podcast episode based on the attached PDF. And it went on to come up with an introduction, and it went on to recommend the various sections and all the content that it felt I should have in this podcast episode. It even gave me a

podcast title. Now, I don't have to follow it, but this has done a lot of the heavy lifting for me in a matter of minutes just because I decided to drop in a PDF, ask it for a question, and then dig a little deeper. So now the next thing I want to explore is what are the tools that marketers are predominantly using? And I focused on the the the platforms, the large language models, the big ones that everyone is using. And I asked them, you know, what are your plans in the future? And no surprise,

ChatGPT is the one that most marketers plan to do a lot more with in the coming year. 2 out of 3 marketers are gonna do more with ChatGPT. Google Gemini is number 2. Now Google Gemini is completely different than ChatGPT. And I have not personally messed with Gemini very much, but there's a lot of small business marketers that leverage the Google ecosystem, and it makes a lot of sense that they'll take advantage of Google's, AI tool called Gemini. Copilot by Microsoft. Microsoft is the platform that big brands use. Copilot is actually powered predominantly by ChatGPT.

Why? Because Microsoft made a massive financial investment in OpenAI. As of a few months ago, they owned 49% of OpenAI. So a lot of what OpenAI does for small business, Copilot does for big business. And then these 2 players are definitely off the radar of a lot of marketers. I wanna focus for a second on these 2. Clawed by Anthropic, most marketers have no plans to use. And I'm here to tell you that I think this is an opportunity. Just so you know, the founders of Anthropic formerly worked for OpenAI, and these folks are doing

some amazing things. Amazon is one of their major backers. If you start to think about the Amazon ecosystem and all the content Amazon has access to, it's pretty huge. You start to think about Whole Foods. You start to think about their video stuff. You start to think about all the stuff. Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, is also in a strategic relationship where they're training on all that content from the Washington Post. And anthropic, I personally believe, is much easier to use than a lot of the other tools, and it's superior, it has

a superior use of the English language. It's really good with writing, really good with open ended analysis. And then Facebook slash Meta, they have their very own solution called Meta AI. Many of you have seen it if you work within Instagram or Facebook. They've also got an open source model called Wama. So I think anthropic is a big opportunity a lot of marketers are overlooking. So, how can you and by the way, I just wanna remind you that if you have questions, get them into the chat because we're gonna be getting the questions here in

a little bit. How can you thrive as a marketer in this new opportunity? Well, the good news is most marketers are in the learning phase. 90% of the marketers that we studied want said they need to improve their generative AI school skills. Not want to, need to because I asked need. So there is a real need for us all to learn these tools. The interest is there. It's very, very strong, and I'm gonna share some resources with you in just a minute. But first, I wanna address this really big question that I know a lot

of you have on your minds. Isn't AI gonna take jobs? It's a really, really good question. And the best way for me to address that question is to go back in time. I want you to think about what it was like before the Internet, and I want you to think about what happened once the Internet came about. Did the Internet take jobs or did the Internet make jobs? Because the truth is, if you look at this list, none of these jobs existed before the Internet. As a matter of fact, I would venture to guess that

the jobs that many of you are doing right now and the ways that you're doing these jobs right now are contingent upon the Internet and could not have possibly existed today if it were not for the Internet. And IAB, which is a big organization that studies media, did this study a couple of years back in 2021, and they found that the Internet economy is growing 7 times faster than the US economy. And over the last 4 years, when they did this study, created 7,000,000 new jobs. So I want you to imagine a possibility where artificial

intelligence is gonna create new jobs that we can't even imagine because we couldn't imagine what these jobs were before the Internet. It was impossible for us to imagine these kinds of jobs. I'm here to hypothesize that the world is going to need people maybe like us to teach and train them on AI. Because us marketers, we're early, but the rest of the world is not. There's gonna be a need for people to consult and strategize on applications for AI inside of business. I already know that some of you are focused on that. There's gonna be

brand new applications, software products, and companies, and ideas are gonna be built on the infrastructure that AI is building right now. And as a result of that, there's gonna quite literally be brand new businesses born that did not exist before. And some of these businesses may turn out to be so much bigger than all the businesses that are the big businesses we think about today. And guess what? These small businesses in the beginning, they're all gonna need marketers, and they're all gonna need salespeople to help sell, position, and figure out how to get these products

to market. And they're gonna need support. And the truth of the matter is that you're gonna wanna be ahead of these trends because there's gonna be more demand than there was supply. And I'm here to tell you, I remember what it was like when social media was popular. People could not hire social community managers fast enough. There just was not enough demand. The supply was simply insatiable. And I'm here to tell you that's already starting to happen right now. Now here's the other side of the equation. Marketing has always existed. Marketing always will exist. The

concept of marketing is not going to go away. It never will. But there's gonna be a lot more expected of us marketers. And those of us that embrace marketers, embrace AI are gonna be like this AI photograph, and that's yes. This is a AI generated image. These are not real people. The boss on the left is gonna be hugging you on the right because you are bringing value to the company that they'd never had before because you're gonna understand how to unlock these things for your clients or for your business. And as a result, you're

gonna become exceptionally valuable because you get your work faster done faster than anyone else, because you've got creative ideas coming out of your ears left and right. There's gonna be nothing nothing but sunshine and rainbows for you because you are super valued by these businesses that are hiring you. Now if you want to future proof your career, I'm here to tell you that step 1 is really to come up with some goals. Like, how are you gonna learn to put AI to work, and what are you gonna do with that knowledge? Once you learn how

to do certain things, what are you actually gonna do about it? You need a plan. You need some very basic goals. And, ideally, you build a little network of other marketers who are excited about AI and looking towards the future. And you start sharing your ideas and learnings with each other, and you go to events together, and you you kinda hang together, and you get to be part of this exciting new frontier that is evolving and developing quite literally in front of our eyes. And here are the areas marketers wanna learn about. We ask marketers

over the next 12 months, what are the areas you most wanna learn more about? Number 1 on the list is automating repetitive tasks. Number 2 is analyzing data. Number 3 is assisting with research. These are areas where marketers are not utilizing AI today, and these are areas where marketers absolutely want to learn to take advantage of AI to help them. Okay. I told you I was gonna mention, where you could learn, more. And the first resource I wanna mention to you is our study that's dropping tomorrow. And all you gotta do is visit socialmediaexaminer.com on

or after October 16th. If you're watching the playback, just go to go there and start scrolling down, and you'll see an article with the PDF in it, ungated. And, you know, why not share the link with someone who hasn't seen this presentation? Maybe share it with someone who's skeptical, and maybe share it as motivation that your boss ought to let you kinda go down this rabbit trail. It's a 38 page report chock full of charts, and it's completely free. So I really encourage you to go out there and get it and wrap your head around

some of the data that's inside there because I've never seen a study that's as comprehensive as this. Another way to learn, which is completely free, is the AI Explored podcast. And we publish original interviews every week. I work really hard to prepare my guests to make sure that these are actionable, practical, how to put to work AI. And if you are a visual learner, youtube.com/ai examiner. Got a little YouTube channel we put together there. So definitely explore that. And here's what some people are saying about this. Upper left, Jay Jaykin Burke said, every show is

loaded with actionable content and task. Cannot believe what I learned in just a few days. Binge listening to Michael and his guests. Thank you. And then strange nickname, upper right said, Michael Stelzner did it again. He's providing the 1 on 1 and beyond of AI for me and others to get on board to write history. Thank you for making this podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As a one woman marketing team, this information is invaluable, and I'm using it every day in my professional life. So check it out, AI Explored. If you want to

bring a bunch of your friends and go to social media marketing world, which isn't until March, if you can afford to wait till then, we have a brand new track we've recently announced, which is our AI and marketing track. There's a lot of great content in there. You can go spend almost every session learning about AI, hang out with other marketers and, you know, talk about how they're leveraging AI. But if you can't wait, there is one other option, which is available now. We literally just launched yesterday the AI Business Society. And this is our

new membership where every month, we bring experts in to do live and recorded training on practical tactical applications for AI and marketing. We have live monthly meetups. We just had one last week. It was amazing, where we talk about what's happening and answer people's questions live. And we've got a great community of forward thinking marketers. Now I'm not a sales guy. I'm a marketer, so I'm not gonna pitch this, but you can check it out right there. And with that, we're gonna go ahead and open it up to q and a. Jason, come on up

and, talk to me. Wow. Can you feel the energy with the creativity? The chat is buzzing right now with ideas and questions. Gina asks, Mike, in regards to copyright concerns Yes. What do you think about asking AI to create copy ideas? Copy ideas? Oh. Yeah. Like By the way, I'm gonna put this up because some of you might not have grabbed this. I don't think there's any challenge with asking AI to come up with an idea at all. How's that any different than goo doing a Google search and looking for ideas? I I don't see

that as a copyrighted thing at all. But was there more to the question? Well, as a follow-up from me, what about saying in the style of x y z company? Is that I don't think so because how is that any different than than you getting inspired by Seth Godin? Right? Like, let's just say that I really love what Seth Godin's work is, and I wanna create something, and I'm gonna look at Seth Godin's style. A style isn't something that I believe is copyrightable. You know what I mean? Like, anybody can create something that's a style.

Obviously, if you're talking about a trademark style, you know, and you wanna make something that looks exactly like the Coca Cola logo, well, then you're gonna be in trouble. Right. Another great question. Suzanne asks, do you pay for chat gpt? She says that she hasn't noticed a big difference between free and paid. And then I have a twist on that too. What, Mike, do you see as Alright. Okay. This is gonna differentiate. I'm gonna be so everybody can see my face right now. You have to pay for chat GPT. It's only $20 a month. I

want you to understand what it can do. First of all, you can talk to it. So you can quite literally talk to it while you're driving in your car or while you're walking, and it will talk back to you. So if you're more of a verbal processor, you cannot do that with the free version. In addition, they have new models that are not available in the free version that are more advanced models that can do things. For example, they've got this thing called 0 one preview that has reasoning that can do really, really advanced stuff.

So trust me, it's worth the $20 a month even if you have to pay for it out of your own pocket. I just wanted to go big screen on that one. Jason, did I answer that question? Or You did. You did. But what so with other AI services Yes. What what brings Mike Stelzner over the hump of, okay. I will pay for this other than ChatGPT or even, say, Claude? I mean, honestly, you just have to ask yourself you just have to ask yourself, how much is my time worth, and is this unlocking something for

me? Because most of these things cost $20 a month and maybe a little bit more depending on the tool, but most of them are $20 a month. Why would you not consider it if your time is worth more than $20 a month an hour and you end up saving yourself many, many hours? I don't see a reason not to pay for it because here's what I will tell you. All of the advanced capabilities are not free. They're all part of the paid models. Good answer. Solid Gold Media asks, can you go over chats versus GPTs?

Is that just a semantic, or is there a difference? Okay. The easiest way to think about this is that GPT is just an acronym for something that I don't even remember what it stands for, but it's the technology stack that powers, I think, something transformers or something or not. So GPT is the technology that was originally developed by Google that allows, this conversational, interface to happen. The word chat in front of it just is basically what OpenAI calls it chat GPT. But everybody else just calls it, like, GPT. If you just wanna simplify it, just

call it generative AI because anything that you use artificial intelligence to create is called generative AI, and that's the phrase that I think most marketers are starting to kinda latch onto. And Maddie asks, what are the best practices for writing AI prompts? That is a great question, and I would encourage you, Maddie, to listen to the AI Explored podcast. We've got a whole slew of episodes that we've specifically have done on this, but I will tell you a very basic tip. Step number 1 is to say act like a blank. Okay? So you give it

a context window in which to narrow its focus. Act like a copywriter. Act like an email copywriter. Act like an email copywriter who specializes in real estate. The more you can narrow its focus, the better it's going to be. Then the next step is to tell it, what it is you wanted to do. And, eventually, there's a lot more to it. You can tell it who your target audience, but the most basic step is to tell it to act like a blank and then to tell it what you want it to do. And then really

important, if it misses the mark, tell it, hey. You missed the mark. Can you focus more on this? Act as if you're quite literally talking to an intern who's really, really smart. And the more you talk to it, the more it'll really dial it in. And you can be totally open when AI returns. Oh, it's it's not acceptable. It'll never criticize you, buddy. It's always gonna say, I'm super pleased and happy to assist you. It's never ever, ever, gonna get mad at you like an intern might. You know? Christina asks, is AI a better tool

to create social media graphic posts rather than creating yours on tools like Canva? I would look into Ideogram, I think it's called. And I think I think as a matter of fact, I, I had it on one of my slides. Ideogram is really good for creating graphics and also for I I probably have to go back to the beginning. It's really good for creating graphics. There's a whole here it is. Ideogram. Yeah. Ideogram 2.0. Believe it or not, it can create really great visuals, but it can also create really good graphics. So what I would

say is experiment with it. You could use it to create a background, and then you could plop it into Photoshop or Canva and create the rest of it. But one thing I want you to understand is that Canva is utilizing the back end technology of, you know, all these other systems anyways. So, but opening up the whole Pandora's box of graphics, I will just tell you that, Chat GPT can create graphics, but they're not nearly as good as some of the other tools. Ayo asks, what role and I love this question. What role can marketers

play when helping companies build out their internal LLMs? My gosh. Every role? Let's let's brainstorm for a second. Step 1 could be just a very basic audit where you help a business figure out, early opportunities to apply AI within their work. So you could set up surveys and basic audits. You could set up, test runs for a company where you start with a particular person inside of a company, and then you scale it across the entire department. You can also help create custom GPTs, they're called, which are basically customized applications where you can employ AI

tools to basically do really cool things. You can also set up AI automations utilizing make.com or Zapier or API integrations. I mean, like, it's kind of whatever your imagination could come up with. Several people, are asking, about certifications going with AI. You know, this is such a new thing. What do you recommend? How do you answer the question? How do you become certified in this? Don't trust anybody that certifies you. That's my honest response because, no one's qualified to certify anybody right now unless it's actually the companies that make these tools, which they don't do

that right now. So I know that you all want certifications because you want to be able to kinda, like, make a claim. You could join the AI Business Society and say you're a member of the society, which might be something you could add. I know that with our other societies, people have done that in the past. They've used that as, like, a social proof mechanism, but I don't think that this is changing too quickly for anyone to be able to certify anyone in my professional opinion right now. And Anna asks a really thoughtful question about,

providing tools like the chat gpt persona information. How comfortable should marketers and business owners feel about uploading some of this confidential info into into these? Yeah. It's a really good question, and here's what you have to ask yourself. Is your persona something that you're concerned about your competition getting? My guess is probably not. But here's a little tip. With chat GPT, if you go into settings, there's a little option that says turn off do not use this data to train the large language model. And you you turn that off, and hopefully, you'll have a greater

level of confidence that giving that kind of information isn't going to hurt you. But this is where it gets really intriguing. On my AI Explored podcast, Brian Piper came on and talked about how the university that he works for actually created an custom GPT of college students, and they trained it to act like a college student, which was their ideal persona. And then every piece of marketing that they came up with, they asked this virtual college student to criticize it and to enhance it and to change it so that it's more relevant. So there's really

cool stuff you could do by creating if virtual personas, for lack of better words, that that entities can use to kind of, cross check to see whether what they're about to release is going to resonate with that particular persona. It's really mind blowing, isn't it? It's so mind blowing. Oh, you can just tell the chat right now is is humming along with all these questions. We're not gonna be able to get to all of them, but, 2 more. First one dealing with, we have a lot of marketers, social media marketers Okay. Asking about developing a

strategy, a plan. Where where do you go for something like that? Okay. I don't personally do this, but well, I I've done this before. Here's what you can do. You can quite literally ask AI anything. K? You just have to, like, you have to cross check it. But so you could say, hey. We're about to launch a, brand new study, for example. Hypothetically, how should we talk about it on Instagram versus Facebook? Right? And and and then you can say, come up with some with a plan. You you can give it the data. It can

quite literally write you prompts. I mean, Jason, is that how we did what we did for the marketing for the the report, for this webinar? Absolutely. And fuck that. Absolutely. And it's it's so much fun because, you know, it's never gonna come back to you with the right information. It's not gonna match. You're not gonna hit a home run when you step up to the plate the first time. But that conversation that you have back and forth with the AI, it will tell you if you ask it, What questions do I need to ask you?

There you go. Delve deep into this Yeah. Or what is it that you're missing to better advise me? That's another thing to really ask. Exactly. It's it's fantastic for that. You can even, you know, expand it to other areas of even your personal life, but all aspects of business. You know, what questions do I need to ask you in order to get a better response? And, Mike, finally, about video Yes. What are your favorite video creation, video editing? And Okay. Adobe quite literally just had their Adobe Max conference a few days ago, and they've just

rolled out all sorts of new video features. And most people that use video are using Adobe products, but there's a bazillion products out there. I have not studied the video AI frontier, but I know that Adobe is definitely the biggest player in the space. So I strongly recommend everybody check out what Adobe's got going on. Fantastic. Well, thanks, Mike, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As a reminder, you're gonna wanna check out the AI Explored podcast by Mike Stilsner. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts or on the YouTube channel, youtube.com/ai

examiner, and consider joining the AI Business Society. Go visit socialmedia examiner.com/joinai society. Thanks again, everyone, for your time. I hope you have an amazing day, and this just sparks even more of your creativity. And just a couple of quick things that I wanna say to everybody. If you're overwhelmed, that's normal. Okay? Don't let your overwhelm stop you from engaging into this world, whether you do it with us or without us. Just remember, you now have information the rest of the world does not have. So go forth and put it to work, and I can't wait

to hear from you. Everybody have a great day.