Is Content Dead? Content Strategy in the Age of AI
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Liz Moorehead:Good morning, everyone.
Max Cohen:Good morning. You
Liz Moorehead:know what I love? Let me hop on, and I just see Max with his head and his hands look like king looking like he's pondering the inevitable heat death of the universe. Yeah. How you doing, buddy?
Max Cohen:My eyes are being burned alive from all these screens that I'm looking at right now. That's what's happening.
Chad Hohn:Dark mode, brother. Come on.
Max Cohen:Dark mode. Everything is in dark mode. Trust me.
George B. Thomas:Don't you have
Max Cohen:those glasses? Dark mode, and I'm just kidding. Oh, I do.
George B. Thomas:Old BLGs. Glasses. You could be looking all cool
Liz Moorehead:with those glasses. Oh, boy. He's gonna look so smart. Hold on. Let's see what we got.
Liz Moorehead:Let's see what we got.
Chad Hohn:Everything will be normal. Speaking of which Yeah. I'm supposed to wear glasses, apparently. I didn't realize that. I, like, haven't had, like, a vision insurance in a hundred years, so I finally went to go get, like, my eyeballs checked.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. And I got, like, astigmatism.
George B. Thomas:Oh, I have that too, which is crazy. Yeah. Strobing with lights.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Well, it's like the halo around it, like, at night. Yeah. You get the, you know, little stringers and all that good stuff. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:Did you know that wasn't normal?
George B. Thomas:That's not normal. Yeah. So did they give you the yellow stuff? Like, it's in your eye? Maybe that's glaucoma.
George B. Thomas:Maybe that's something different.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. I don't have that.
Liz Moorehead:That's called coma tester. Yeah. I have glasses too that I wear. I only wear them when I'm driving. They're pink.
George B. Thomas:Nice. Nice.
Liz Moorehead:It's a lot
Max Cohen:of emotion.
Liz Moorehead:Wow. Max.
Chad Hohn:Max is great.
Liz Moorehead:Go to the shooting range.
George B. Thomas:Holy
Max Cohen:No. He's my gunman. You go. My gunman.
Chad Hohn:Well, gunners, yeah, they're they're great computer glasses. I actually kinda want some.
Max Cohen:Oh,
George B. Thomas:boy. Very nice.
Liz Moorehead:I know. I don't want this. Well, gentlemen, we have gathered here today
Chad Hohn:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:To talk about Yes. Kind of my favorite Life, but also content. But content
George B. Thomas:That was prince. That by the way, that was prince lyric.
Liz Moorehead:Content is life. Oh, yeah. Let's go crazy.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Let's go nuts. Okay. Let's go nuts with content. Go ahead, Liz.
George B. Thomas:Sorry.
Liz Moorehead:We are. We nerded out with Chad last week, and this week we're nerding out with Liz. So I've brought to the table a very specific, easy topic for us to talk about, and that's content in the age of AI. We have talked around yeah. I know, Max.
Liz Moorehead:Calm down.
Max Cohen:You're saying it's getting rough out there. It's getting rough out there.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. And
Liz Moorehead:for this audience in particular, I think it is critical that we talked about it. Like, so we've talked about content in the context of the new HubSpot content hub, some of the tools, but it has been a very long time, years even since we've circled back to content just as a strategic mechanism for inbound practitioners. Because back in the day, content was the engine, right? We had blog posts, and pillar pages, and lead magnets, and SEO, and it all used to work if you were creating helpful human content. If you knew the questions your buyers were asking and you were creating helpful human content, you would see that cute little hockey stick growth.
Liz Moorehead:Now One is panicking and not necessarily for unfounded reasons. We're all seeing organic traffic starting to train tank. Everybody has conflicting opinions about how and when you use AI. I am literally bleeding from my eyeballs the way Max is this morning every time I read, quote unquote, human content that looks like it was written by a robot learning to love. So we're talking about, g, and what it should look like today.
Liz Moorehead:Because we are in an industry where one shift in the wind and people are like, blogging is dead. SEO is dead. The Internet is dead. Like, every we are so quick to call things dead.
George B. Thomas:Can you imagine? I
Liz Moorehead:know.
George B. Thomas:If the internet was dead.
Liz Moorehead:Oh my. Go with something less dramatic. Every year there's a hit piece about how SEO is dead. I'm like, okay, so you're telling me that we all collectively woke up and decided we don't wanna search for things on our little computer boxes and our phones anymore. No.
Liz Moorehead:Just changed how we do it.
George B. Thomas:Yep.
Liz Moorehead:So that's what we're talking about today. Yes. AI is forcing a lot of changes. AI is creating a lot of downward trending in a lot of our metrics. And so is content dead?
Liz Moorehead:I don't know. George, I want to start with you. I know. Spoiler alert. But I'm curious, George.
Liz Moorehead:I wanna start with you and obviously Max and Chad chime in afterward. In your opinion, does content still matter? With AI dominating search and traffic across the board, is content still worth investing in?
George B. Thomas:Well, yeah, I think content is definitely worth investing in. Content is still the fuel. It just so happens that it's the fuel for humans, or Oh, hang on, hang on. Four. Thank you.
George B. Thomas:We go. Right out the gate, by the way. It's also the fuel for AI, because that's the thing. Need to figure out, yeah, this number's going down, but are you paying attention to these numbers that never existed or actually going up? Meaning, you looking at your HubSpot sources for Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, all of these things.
George B. Thomas:Because when I say it's the fuel, content is the fuel for AI, large language models, they're going to quote, they're going to cite, they're going to learn from these authoritative pages, these authoritative websites, hopefully your website. And at the end of the day, if your brand is not publishing, it's invisible to any of those possible answers that could be happening. Here's the other thing. I want people to realize, I believe we're going into a world where it's less about traffic and more about impact with the content. And what I mean by that is, we've always had this kind of, or many, not we, but many, have had this singularity mindset of like, I'm creating content for SEO.
George B. Thomas:And for a long time, I've had this thing where I've talked about this narrative like SEO and sales and social, and it was like the three pronged approach. However, I just got done finishing creating a piece. It's not live to the world yet, but I created a piece of content that it's literally the five S content framework where I talk about sales, I talk about SEO, I talk about surfaced by the way, surfaced as AI, social, and then supporters. Because here's the other thing is while your traffic might be down, look at your referrals. Is your referrals up from the trust?
George B. Thomas:Is your AI up from the actual sites in the quotes? And so like, it's not as if it's gone, but is it just raced? It's through the math of the replaced combined with the traffic to see where you're at. Anyway, at the end of the day, Liz, does content still matter in 2025? Yes, you have to have your own assets.
George B. Thomas:You have to be your own thought leader. You have to be able to get content to go to your email list, to your communities, to put into your gated resources. All of this is still strong when you're trying to attract, when you're trying to retain, when you're trying to build trust and reciprocity, content is still the engine and still important.
Liz Moorehead:You know, the other thing I have to chime in here with is that when we have the conversation about content, we have this habit of only focusing on one part of the flywheel or the funnel, Right. We are obsessed because it's I think it's the vast majority of the content that people create. It's also where we see the uptick in organic search traffic. But some of the most impactful to your point, impactful content that we create is closer to the bottom of the funnel.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:Now, George, I wanna take you and I back to a conversation we had at the very end of last week with one of our clients.
George B. Thomas:Yep.
Liz Moorehead:Where we showed them sales emails that were going to be going to prospects
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:That included videos that were about content topics like what is the ROI of x? What is the benefits of y? How do you solve this particular problem? And then it also links to content we have published. Then there are case studies.
Liz Moorehead:Then there are any of those decision making and sales enablement pieces are equitable revenue driving parts of your content strategy.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:And the idea that just because we have to rethink how we're getting found, that we have to rethink how we measure success of content, we are forgetting an entire part of the funnel or the flywheel that is not dependent on search. Yeah. In order for people to get to it.
George B. Thomas:It's funny, Liz, I'll shut up here in a minute so Chad and Max can throw in their But when you said the words so focused on getting found, something in the back of my cranium jumped up and was like, but they should be focused on staying relevant. And there's content that keeps you relevant. Like, you're at least in the conversation. But, anyway Max, it's that.
Max Cohen:I think, you know, it's not like is it's like when we say does content matter anymore, I I think that was the original question or something along those lines.
Liz Moorehead:Mhmm. Does content matter?
Max Cohen:Is like content is the only thing that matters on the Internet. Content's the only thing that's on the Internet. Right? Like, we go to the Internet to consume content through the Internet. Like, that is a it's it's a fundamental fact.
Max Cohen:Just like lungs breathe air, humans breathe content on the Internet. Right? Like, there's no there's no way around that. I think it's more of a question of how do we how do we trust the content? How do we appreciate the content?
Max Cohen:How are their jobs formed around creating the content? How is the of, like, are we rocketing towards dead Internet theory? Like we said, the Internet was dead, but, like, dead Internet theory, I think, is quickly becoming a thing where it's just a bunch of bots talking to each other. And then soon enough, we're gonna be in a world where it's also bots just creating the content. We're just kinda sitting on the sides like, what's the human's, like Yeah.
Max Cohen:Point in all of this?
Chad Hohn:Which ones are the real ones?
Max Cohen:Yeah. Exactly. Like, it's getting really, really freaky. You know, I just it's just like the other night, you know, I heard, like, Stephen Colbert show got canceled. Right?
Max Cohen:And this morning, I I open up TikTok, and the first thing I hear is just like some audio that sounds just like Stephen Colbert kind of like doing this whole, you know, confirming what a lot of conspiracy theorists might be thinking of or like whatever side you're on. And you could just tell it was AI, but it was just good enough where someone who's not so internet brained wouldn't understand it. And it's like, this is really scary. Right? And again, it's just like the content's just getting created by itself, by the bots out there talking to other bots.
Max Cohen:And it's like, we're just kind of like starting to just watch it. And it's really, really, really freaky. I don't know.
Chad Hohn:It's like the A. I. Is prompting the A. I. Right?
Chad Hohn:Yeah. At this point. Right. They're like all in their own cyclical A. I.
Chad Hohn:Brain box.
Max Cohen:Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it is. But like and I think And I wonder, I had thought for a while, was like, there's gonna be a premium placed on human created content, right? But I don't even know if that's gonna happen. You'll get I think AI content is gonna get so good that like, you know, people are gonna be like, oh, this content is good because it's actually just created by humans.
Max Cohen:It's like, no, it's not. Well And so I think you're gonna find this weird battle between human created content, AI assisted, thoughtful human created content, and then just AI slop. Right? And I think there's just so much AI slop today that it's like, I I would hope people can see it and and and be able to recognize it, but it is rapidly becoming completely unrecognizable, you know, which is freaks me out.
Liz Moorehead:I think the thing we also need to keep in mind though is that there there is the kind of b to c content that's out there Yeah. Stuff on TikTok, things like that where and to be fair, the AI slop issue is it it's universal. It does you know, it's it's everywhere. But when I think about what I see working with some of my clients right now is actually people are starting to come to them more because they are human. Like I have a particular client
Chad Hohn:of distinguishable.
Liz Moorehead:Yep. Well, it's still distinguishable, but the other thing too is that it reminds me of an old friend of mine named Natalie Frank who is a I think she's the chief evangelist at Flodesk, which is an incredible email platform. But she talked about what she started out as a photographer. And when iPhones came out, it was horrible. It was a bloodbath.
Liz Moorehead:Every premium photographer out there was absolutely petrified that now everybody had a camera in their pocket, it would dilute the market. And it did. A lot of people turned off. A lot of people ended up pursuing other opportunities. But she said what we saw is the reality is the people who ended up leaving the industry as a result of iPhones in their pockets weren't actually craftsmen with photography to begin with.
Liz Moorehead:And the people who actually were still dedicated to the craft, who adapted to new digital strategies, ended up being able to charge more of a premium. And I'm seeing that with myself now. I'm I'm definitely yet. Do I have some AI assistants poking around at some of my parts of my process? Absolutely.
Liz Moorehead:Of course. That's still a human
Max Cohen:versus Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:We started to dig into this a little bit but I'm going to throw this question out to the group. So what has actually changed about content strategy, right? Because I wanna pull us back to something that is native to our audience, right? Like our B2B marketers just trying to make it out there, man. We're just, we're trying like we're not the Coca Colas, we're
George B. Thomas:not
Liz Moorehead:the Duolingos. Although I guess we're not really trying to be Duolingo anymore. What has actually changed in content strategy?
George B. Thomas:I don't know if I wanna go first. Chad or Chad or Max, what are what are your thought? I mean, I have thoughts, but I don't know if I wanna go first.
Max Cohen:I think the way you evaluate how your competitors are leveraging it is a new thing that you need to do that wasn't in the inbound handbook when I got into all of this. Right? Because you might have some direct competitors that are absolutely shredding it with, you know, maybe some good AI content. Maybe they are going full bore on, like, some AI slop and it's working, like, depending on how how well your audience reacts to that kind of stuff. Right?
Max Cohen:But, like, it may be a situation where you're kind of like forced into that arena. Right? Or, you know, you take a much more careful approach to get your content to stand out from whatever it is that they're doing. Right? But it's like, it's a new thing you have to kind of build into the calculation, right?
Max Cohen:Like, it's no longer like, oh, none of my competitors are making content about this stuff. So I'm the first one to the show, right? It's gonna be like no longer is your competitor isn't doing nothing. The baseline is your competitor is doing AI slop and you need to do better than that, right? But like sometimes the AI slop gets, you know, it gets motion, it gets traffic.
Max Cohen:Love think you're starting at a different baseline that
Liz Moorehead:you have Yeah. To The only thing I wanna say before you go on is because you brought up something there where you're talking about watching competitors. I agree with that, but I think that's not necessarily new. I think we can all agree. We kind of always had a keeping up with the Joneses peeking over the side of the fence.
Max Cohen:I'm not gonna watch your competitors. No. I'm just saying you're looking for them to do a different thing that you have to contend with.
Liz Moorehead:Yeah. But there's always gonna be that weird thing that we need to remember. Right? We can only see from the outside in. And how many times have we either looked at companies and thought, man, they had this all figured out.
Liz Moorehead:And the minute you get inside, you're like, oh god. Everything's on fire. Yeah. It's you always have to be really careful about the surface level optics of, you see them doing this thing and everybody's even more scared than ever about falling behind. But that is reactive nonstrategic motion.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Mhmm.
Chad Hohn:I think kinda like where one of those places that my brain starts to go is is actually in like the it's almost like a chicken and the egg scenario, because we're talking about how, like, what's changed. Right? And well, if, you know, you got Gemini at the top of your Google search results, that's given you AI summaries to just answer questions. Like if it's phrased in the form of a question, typically that's all you need. But that Gemini is looking for pages with like authority, with search engine authority.
Chad Hohn:Right? And does it include its own traffic in that search engine authority? For example, like, you know, like, I guess where I'm getting at is, like, if you make content, but you're, like, new to the game, curious if you have to actually get some humans to, you know, tread over your page or if the fact that it's relevant and and useful compared to other preexisting sources will bump up your search engine authority even though it's like Gemini's scooting all over that thing, or if it's, you know, ChatGPT scooting over that thing or whatever with some of their tools these days. So I I'm just I don't know. I'm kinda like thinking about that chicken and the egg scenario and wondering what because, like, you know, content isn't my first, skill set here on the old Hub Heroes podcast.
Chad Hohn:I'm here more as like an audience member in this particular topic.
George B. Thomas:So, yeah. So I can give you a chicken or the egg scenario, which totally blew my mind. So let me dive into that real quick, then I'll talk about where my brain goes as far as changed and unchanged to get back to Liz's original question. But Chad, when I launched the superhuman framework onto the planet, right? The four cornerstones, purpose, passion, persistence, love, the 10 H pillars.
George B. Thomas:I'm not going to list them all. When I started creating content around that, and then all of a sudden it started showing up in AI results when doing deep research and asking people to actually, Hey, can you ask about this? And then all of a sudden it started showing up on their chatty PT, their perplexity, their places. I was like, Wait, there's something to this. You can create something of value and it can be surfaced potentially quicker than it can be searched or found in search.
George B. Thomas:Because by the way, Google is trying to take care of the entire internet. So we all know, like going into your Google search console and asking for a page to be re indexed and the amount of time that that might take and like all of the things that you manually have to do to pay attention or get them to pay attention to your ever evolving and changing SEO efforts versus to create something that's dope at a different angle and all of a sudden it's being surfaced in AI. Hence why I used the term surfaced when I actually did the 5S content framework. So here's the thing, I think you can create the chicken without the egg, which is a really weird thing to think about because now it's there, it exists, it's in the world, right? You had to birth it as the human, but it's there.
George B. Thomas:When I think about what's changed, Liz, to get back to your original question, I think AI answer engines and zero click have absolutely shrunk the top of the funnel. We kind of talked about that at the beginning. The top of the funnel is just shrinking. The mindset of blog every day, this idea of quantity over quality, I think has gone away. This high volume blogging.
George B. Thomas:Now I think it's about depth and originality. By the way, superhuman framework, super original. It was a thing that was And you can do this, by the way. The other thing, when I did a Tron Legacy, marketing Tron Legacy or Tron Legacy article, the thing was all of sudden there because, again, it was in-depth. It was a pillar page piece of content and it was original from the mindset of like where it was coming from.
George B. Thomas:And here's what I think also has changed. Generative AI helps us draft real quick. It helps us be able to build strategies for clusters of content. But if you think about HubSpot again for a hot second, because this is literally for HubSpot users, something like content remix allows you to repurpose or what I like to call content confetti real easy. Right?
George B. Thomas:So, you have this thing where you should be spending more time creating something of more depth than originality, but you have the tools to get you to that depth than originality faster and remix the content after you've actually built the thing. So that's some things that have changed. What hasn't changed? The word trust, as much as we overuse it, is still important. Humans gaining insight from the thing that they're reading or watching is still important.
George B. Thomas:Google's eat is still important for, you know, like, it's just important. Understanding the buyer and what drives the buyer is still important. Intent, structure, links, like semantic markup, it all still matters. I would even throw the word out here. If you're not paying attention historically to schema, schema matters.
George B. Thomas:I'm gonna get real nerdy, like for AI FAQ schema, like things like that, that you're paying attention to. But strategy still matters tactics like content. And again, I'm not trying to be a homer of they ask you answer. I'm not saying that I'll forever love Marcus Sheridan because we had this like magic moment in time. I probably will because he's just a good human.
George B. Thomas:But like, it must be mapped to the buyer's pain points and their business goals. That, those things haven't changed. I don't think they'll ever change. If you just focus on like trust in human insights and best practices of structuring and paying attention to the humans that you're actually serving and the goals that they're trying to achieve at, then it doesn't matter if it's SEO, if it's social, if it's surface, if it's any of the five S's that I like to talk about.
Liz Moorehead:I love that. It also makes it reminded me of something. When we think about what people are running into on their new SERPs, right? So our search engine results pages, I was having a conversation this past weekend with some other marketers and we were talking about the fact that like, dude, that AI preview panel is garbage. It's usually wrong.
Liz Moorehead:It gives you factually inaccurate data. And somebody said to me, yeah, it feels very old school. I actually now don't trust anything on page one. I'm only taking a look at stuff that's on page two or three. Like the tech companies have been in this arms race to AI if I everything to the point where people are like, yeah, so I'm not gonna trust any of this and I'm gonna do more due diligence to make sure that what I'm getting is accurate.
Liz Moorehead:Even in their little chat TBT boxes. Literally yesterday, I was like, what year is it? It's like 2023. Whoopsie. Whoopsie.
Liz Moorehead:You know,
George B. Thomas:it's just
Liz Moorehead:little things like that. So what mistakes are people making right now because they're trying to apply old content rules to this new AI shaped ecosystem we're living in. I will just pick on somebody. Maximus.
Max Cohen:Wait. What's the the mythic Sorry.
George B. Thomas:Common mistakes.
Liz Moorehead:Noah, cut this part out.
Max Cohen:What are the common mistakes?
Liz Moorehead:What are the mistakes people are making right now because they're trying to apply old content rules to a new AI shaped ecosystem?
Max Cohen:Well, I mean, the old again, I think the old content rules are blog, blog, blog, SEO, SEO, SEO. Right? And so, like, you know, if you're if if if you're if you're the folks that, you know, made the mistake of not creating the content because it was it was too hard. And now you're like, oops. I got the easy button.
Max Cohen:Right? And you're just literally just firing off the stuff just to check a box to say to your boss, oh, see, we've got blog posts now. Right? I think that's that's probably a big mistake. Right?
Max Cohen:Because chances are you're generating some trash and not really paying attention to what you're putting out there. Right? And and in terms of, like, the I mean, it depends on, like, how far back we're calling, like, the old rules. It's think creating this stuff, like even we think of like the old rules of like, what was working with the AI videos, right? You know, it was a lot of these, like, sort of, like, list video.
Max Cohen:Like, I was thinking the kind of equivalent today that we see with with, like, short form video is the you remember how, like, everything when inbound really took off, everything became, like, a 10 things you need to know, like, about x Listicles. Like format. Right? Listicles. Right?
Max Cohen:I think the equivalent of that today is the short term video you hear with, like, the AI voice over that's, like, so recognizable. Like Mhmm. These 10 alpha male influencers do ba ba ba ba ba. Right? And then they just like it it it's just it's just clearly just like nonsense.
Max Cohen:Right? But I think enough people see this stuff and that's like their first sort of exposure to like what AI video is. And then there's 38 different like tools out there that build this stuff for people with like a single click. And I think it's probably pretty tempting for marketers to kind of, like, go down that path because they've been told by somebody that they need to embrace AI and use AI in their marketing by their higher ups when they don't even really know what that means to do in a thoughtful, creative, or intentional direction. Right?
Max Cohen:So I think, again, like, just like we had tons of marketers go, oh, I know I gotta write blog posts and everyone's doing listicles. I gotta do that. I think that would probably be, like, a very similar kind of 2025 mistake in that all you do is just, like, kinda what you're seeing everyone else do, which is these very weird voiced over listicle, like, videos, you know? Don't do that. Please don't.
Max Cohen:That's the slop that we want to avoid.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So I so I think there's a couple of things I wanna kind of jump in here and then, Chad, you go with it where you want, but I'm going to put my hat on here.
Liz Moorehead:Oh yeah.
George B. Thomas:One second.
Liz Moorehead:Oh yeah.
George B. Thomas:I think people are still clinging to vanity metrics,
Chad Hohn:traffic
George B. Thomas:and conversions. And I would really want them to pay attention to influence and conversations. Like, and how do you, how do you map those? And, and again, I'm talking very much of like business to business or business to human like type content. I'm not talking about the Stephen Colbert or the like, you know, how did X, Y, Z, your tomato in your kitchen or whatever, like, whatever.
George B. Thomas:Like, I'm not talking about that kind of stuff. I'm talking about relevant stuff. Clinging to those vanity metrics and not being able to like figure out how it's influencing the actual pipeline. And when I say that, I'm literally talking about the process of like selling the products and serving the humans. I, I think too, and I alluded to this earlier, a common mistake that's happening is people are not paying attention to the new norm or the need for structure, schema, FAQs to give that like AI visibility.
George B. Thomas:Some people are like head in the sand, not understanding how do I actually get things surfaced. And that just needs to be like, I would tell you, spend ample time doing research on how to actually get the content that you may already have, even optimized for that AI. Because, by the way, many of us, or many of you listening or watching this, have been creating content for years, and maybe it's a nice little schema and some FAQs that needed added to an article that was already ranking fine for search. Now all a sudden, boom, it's getting surfaced in AI. So like we've talked about historical optimization for SEO, but how about now historical optimization for AI?
George B. Thomas:Like that literally is a thing that you should be paying attention to. And last but not least is like, and Max alluded to this, but don't hit the like, here's the first draft, publish. Like, no, no. Like, you gotta focus on your brand voice. By the way, if you don't have a brand voice, you have a bland voice and no human wants to hear a bland voice.
George B. Thomas:So your brand voice, by the way, if you haven't listened to our data sources conversation and historical episodes and you haven't gotten your brand voice set up in HubSpot, this is a nice little juicy way to go from default draft, add a little humanness, put it in HubSpot, add your brand voice on top of it. Anyway, process, process, process, process is what people should be thinking about to actually make this stuff go in this world of like deeper, richer, more human, but also then focused where you can use it in these multiple areas, it's optimized for these multiple areas.
Liz Moorehead:You know, I think we also did an episode, George, just on brand voice and tone.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:Like a while back that people should go into the archives for.
Max Cohen:Mhmm.
Liz Moorehead:To throw in my 2¢ here, I think the big thing to keep in mind is that we used to rely on like really high level, even educational, just like, who are the best this? What is the top that? Like those listicle things that Max is talking about. That's not how you're going to differentiate yourself. I regret to inform all of my beautiful CEOs and owners and marketing leaders out there.
Liz Moorehead:You actually have to do thought leadership now. Have to have real opinions out loud. You have to solve real problems not imagined ones. You have to stop clutching your secret sauce so close to your vest that nobody knows there's even a bottle of Tabasco under there. Right?
Liz Moorehead:We need to stop hiding from content. Now, the thing is though, as we've been having this conversation, there has been a nagging thing in the back of my mind where I know there are some listeners out there going, it was already hard enough to prove the ROI of content when we had the tools, when AI wasn't stealing all of our traffic. And now you're telling us that we have to measure it and rethink how we measure the power of content through nebulous metrics like influence, right? Like how do we actually measure that?
Chad Hohn:Yeah, so that's I a question.
Liz Moorehead:I think what gets really tricky about this conversation is that we don't have the answers to that. We don't. We simply do not. But what I can tell you is that if you have a short sighted organization that decides you see your site traffic tanking, you can't outrun AI, so you're going to divert or cut out all of your content people or any sort of content initiatives, you are screwing yourself. You are going to watch revenue go out the door.
Liz Moorehead:This isn't the time to get rid of content. This is the time to realize the thing that George and I have been screaming about for years. Your content actually needs to be helpful and human. Your content needs to solve real problems not imagined ones. You can't phone it in.
Liz Moorehead:You can't just publish garbage. These were things that were true before now. They were true in vivid Technicolor. It's only now that you're actually seeing the consequences of those actions. And it's only gonna get harder.
Liz Moorehead:It's only gonna get more chaffey. So I know we're coming to the end of our conversation. So I have one more question I want to ask you guys before I turn it over to you, George, to take us home. We've already started talking about this, George, and maybe you want to kick off this part of the conversation for us. How we use tools like AI in our content without losing voice or diluting our message.
Liz Moorehead:So you've already been talking to this a bit, right? I'd love to get some more specificity around that.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. I think when I sit and think about this one, for me, it's been a big help to do things like outlines, data research, first passes, rough drafts, right? So you kind of think about AI as the draft and research assistant, right? Historically, this might have been like a ghostwriter or some type of like whatever. But I literally think that you can build a process around drafting and researching.
George B. Thomas:The other thing, and we kind of, again, alluded to this, if you have given the system, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, HubSpot, whatever, your styles, your guides, right? If you've given it examples of top performing pieces, and you've, you've aligned it so it can maintain your tone, now you're using your human brain for the research that you want to gather, for the outline that you want to create, for the draft that you're going to build, to then be able to give it into a system that understands what historically has worked or been working, which you might have to like kind of remanufacture that as you kind of move forward, because different things are going to work over different timeframes. But now you're going to have these kind of human powered storytelling based. You're going to give your opinions. You're going to have your personality.
George B. Thomas:By the way, you're always going to fact check anything that you've started with an AI draft. And then I think there's this level of, after you get to that point, you can then start to personalize it, or kind of refresh it, kind of over time. Because this is a problem that was happening when people were creating normal content. I think it'll still happen when they're having AI system in the content they're creating, is like, it shouldn't be one and done and dead. We create it, we publish it, we forget about it.
George B. Thomas:No. Like, one, you should create it, you should publish it, and then you should probably re update it over time or at least promote it more than just once anyway. That's that's what I'll say there. I I I'm sure everybody else has some other thoughts where they can say AI might help in in the creation of it.
Max Cohen:Yeah. I mean, I I'd say use it for this stuff that's like traditionally difficult when you don't have like a lot of resources. Right? So like, you know, for example, if you're making a video, like you can you can create some pretty easy b roll. Right?
Max Cohen:Like, instead of having to go, like, buy it from somewhere. Oh, yeah.
Chad Hohn:Right? You can Oh, man.
Max Cohen:You can, you know, it's same
Chad Hohn:way. All them.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Right. Yeah. Those guys are screwed.
George B. Thomas:Like, I don't
Max Cohen:know what So I don't know why. Like, they're toast. Like, I don't know how their business is gonna, you know, continue to stay. I mean, they're probably gonna create their content through AI and hopefully just create on people that don't know how to go to chat GBT and do another. Yeah.
Max Cohen:I mean but I'd say also, like, use it for the stuff that's, like, uniquely hard to you, like, to you. Right? Like, it's it's again, if you're a bad writer, kinda like George said, you know, no harm in throwing together an outline using AI. So you at least have a starting point. Right?
Max Cohen:Or, you know, if you're it's difficult for you to articulate things in certain ways. Right? Like, it's it's really easy to kind of give it a first pass and then, you know, have AI say, oh, this is a better way you could rewrite it or something along those lines. Right? And have it have it assist your original thoughts.
Max Cohen:Right? I think is the one of the best ways you could use it. But, you know, the other thing too is, like, sometimes inspiration is really difficult to come by. Yeah. Right?
Max Cohen:And I think it's totally okay to, like, go to AI and be like, I don't really know what I should make a video about or write an article about or do x y z about. Can you give me some ideas? And maybe it doesn't give you the ideas, but it mixes up your brain enough to have that original idea. Right? Once you kinda started thinking about some of these other things.
Max Cohen:Right? Like, oftentimes when I've done that with AI, I end up thinking of something that is not what it suggested, but if my brain hadn't, like, started going, oh, yeah. Think of that. Oh, think of that. Oh, think of that.
Max Cohen:Or, you know, it it was able to kind of, like, look at a suggestion and then kinda come up with a totally different one on my own. And it was just the, you know, the right amount of brain massaging I needed to have that, you know, next sort of, like, unique idea. Mhmm.
Liz Moorehead:It was worth
Chad Hohn:it.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Right? So, you know, don't don't let it take you and your creativity and your originality out of the process and just do it for you because then why are you even doing it in the first place?
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Was like the ultimate the ultimate writer's unblocker, you know, in a way. I mean, not really for me, a lot of ways, especially when I'm having a hard time coming up with, like, exactly what to do or where to go with certain things. But
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, many times, I'll be watching, like, a sermon or a TV show and somebody will say something, and I'll pull up my ChatGPT or my claud and be like, hey, if I was to write an article about this, but from the direction of that, the thing that I just heard, by the way, what would that look like? And then you go on a whole dope fricking journey where you're unlocking the thoughts of your brain to get to a point where you eventually create something that is so different and unique because it came from different vectors or verticals.
Liz Moorehead:I've gone into some of my tips and tricks and other podcasts that we've done on this topic, but I'm gonna keep mine super short. And this is for my content creators out there. The content creators who are still feeling friction around bringing AI into your process because you feel like it is corrupting what it is that you're doing. At some point, you are either an artist who understands that it's okay to embrace new tools and do things like George and Max are talking about, where you take a look at really cumbersome parts of your process. For example, I do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviewing.
Chad Hohn:How many?
George B. Thomas:Sometimes hundreds
Liz Moorehead:and hundreds. Hundreds and and hundreds. Sometimes I need my pouch out GBT to be like, it's on page seven where Rob said to do this thing, you beautiful ding dong. Right? Like, we're pulling out big themes.
Liz Moorehead:I'm still the writer. I'm still the thing doing the thing. At some point, you're either an artist who is willing to pick up new tools, new paintbrushes, or you're a masochist clinging to your craft, and you're gonna drown. That's fundamentally what we're talking about here.
Chad Hohn:Customization in your chat, GPT, to call you a beautiful ding dong.
Liz Moorehead:Yes. It's actually I'm not even kidding. I'll share it. It's called ding dong bot where it's like, I ask it to do dumb things where I can't it's programmed to find stuff I can't find because I have so much dense conversations with so many people that I get, like, a little lost. So, George, help us land this beautiful content plane.
Liz Moorehead:What is the between one and seventy five things you would like folks to leave today's conversation with?
George B. Thomas:No, one thing. Stop creating single use content. By the way, Liz, I'm proud of you because I remember back in the back back days where I was bringing up using AI and to see
Liz Moorehead:where I was very angry.
George B. Thomas:See where you're at with it now brings my heart great joy. But my one takeaway is stop creating single use content. You have to build an ecosystem where every piece that you're creating sells, ranks, surfaces in AI gets spread on social and turns customers into supporters. Like, that's just the world that we're living in now. So think about those things.
George B. Thomas:Listen, we live in an AI noisy world. It's just a true fact. You know, we've called it a couple different names during this episode, but ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to tell you that purpose driven, multitasking content is the edge that will compound the results that your organization needs. Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode.
George B. Thomas:Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend.
George B. Thomas:Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hashtag hub heroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
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