EP. 84- AVOID this AI Mistake! with INFLUENCER Ross Simmonds l Expert Quick Tips

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. Welcome back to do this, not that.

And I am absolutely excited about today for two reasons. We have an incredible guest and we're going to be talking about AI and content, and I love that stuff.

So let me tell you who's here before he tells you all about himself. So we have Ross Simmons. Now, if you don't follow Ross on social and LinkedIn and you don't go check out his podcast, I don't know what you're doing.

It was a one person agency in one of Canada's smallest provinces. Okay. And since then, he has grown foundation into a global brand that has been named one of the most influential.

He.

He's been named one of the most influential marketers in the world by all sorts of different publications. You'll see him everywhere online. I'm so excited to have him here. Ross, welcome to do this, not that.

Jay, thanks for having me on. I'm super excited to be here and thrilled to have this conversation. We're going to dive into it. It's going to be fun.

Nice. So before we get into some, like, quick wins that everyone can have here, who is Ross? What's the origin story? How did you become who you are?

Yeah, so I was born and raised in a small place called Nova Scotia. It's on the east coast of Canada, right above Maine if you're in the U.S. so yes, my boats will flare up over the course of this conversation.

I am a Canadian, but I'm also very friendly, so I'll probably let you cut me off or interrupt that you would like. In addition to that though, I got my start in the digital marketing game by essentially starting a fantasy football blog.

Ran that blog, was able to pay for my tuition. I graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and hr, Industrial Relations, minor in psych, all those things.

And that ultimately was funded on the back of understanding how to create content online. Fast forward.

My mark started to go down because I was making money off of this fantasy football blog and I was like spending way too much time on that. My mom made Me start writing about marketing and I started to write about my actual degree marketing on this blog and it started to take off.

I got an email from a company called Bacardi.

They reached out, they were like Ross, can you fly down to Miami and speak amongst our C suite about marketing and about growth around how you can target generation Y? Because that's when Gen Y was still young and hip. And I was like is wild.

I'm 22, living in my parents basement drinking instant coffee and you want me to fly from Nova Scotia to Miami? I am there. So I did that gave the talk. At that moment I realized that this Internet thing was going to last.

I went all in on content creation, started contributing to a bunch of sites like inbound.org, growth, hackers.com continued to grow my profile and my name in the industry, continued to get DMs from top brands all over the world, continued to work with those brands all over the world. And then from there I realized that you can't keep working until 4am every knight started to hire, started to build a team.

We've been fully remote since the beginning. Brought in some great people that became Foundationites. We went from just being RossSimmons.com to becoming a company called Foundation.

We work with brands like Canva, Eventbrite, Unbounce and so many more to help them scale their content engines and help them not only generate millions of views but millions of dollars. And it's been an absolute blast. And in the meantime had three kids and that's been another fun adventure along the way.

That is a wild, that is a wild ride. Before we get into the tips and tactics, I have a question.

Do you suggest to the universe if you want to really be successful in life, go deep on fantasy football. This is the path to success.

It's funny, I do have a piece of content that I wrote around the benefits of fantasy football because I do think that you can learn a lot from fantasy football if you take it really seriously like I did, that you can apply to business. I learned how to use Google sheets using fantasy football. I learned how to negotiate and argue and debate with other people around deals.

Through fantasy football, I was able to build a lot of raw skills that I apply in the business world today on the back of it. So no, I'm not saying, hey folks, go gamble and be like a person who's obsessed with this thing.

I do know that fantasy football has a massive reduction in productivity across offices everywhere. But I will say you can learn a lot from being obsessed about anything.

I think if you can become obsessed about your hobby and you go really deep and you try to monetize it, you can learn a lot that can then be applied to entrepreneurship and business down the road.

I think this might be the most shared episode of any podcast ever, because people are going to listen to it. Be like, all that time that I'm wasting on fancy football. I'm forwarding this episode because this guy just said I'm doing the right thing.

So this is. Other things are transformative. Let's talk about AI. And sometimes when you talk about AI, it's oh my God, it's 30,000 Foot View stuff.

I know it's going to take over. We're all going to be clipping robot toenails at some point, but how do we get it down to the 10 foot level?

As a marketer, what are we not doing with AI? How do we really take advantage of it?

Easily, Yeah. I think at the beginning stages we have to recognize that AI has actually been a part of a lot of our working environments for quite some time.

It's just been invisible.

When you think about Spotify happening to know all of the best songs to recommend to you, people being recommended to you on Tinder, to swipe right or swipe left or bumble, whatever channel you're on, all of these things are powered by AI. So as marketers, as creators, as entrepreneurs, the way that you should be viewing AI is as an assistant.

This is a assistant in your pocket that you can use to leverage to do things faster that you never could before, to do things that even an assistant, a proper assistant, couldn't help you do. For example, let's say I'm trying to do business with someone and there's a bit of a language barrier.

We can literally have a conversation now thanks to ChatGPT. That feels fluent, that feels directly in line with their language in mind without any gaps. We don't need to go out and hire a translator.

I had a conversation with someone who spoke Portuguese literally yesterday directly in the DMs on LinkedIn. They sent me a note in Portuguese.

I was able to translate it, I was able to respond back and we had a full on conversation to ultimately land on an actual speaking engagement where I'm going to get paid to go and speak at their conference and like those opportunities weren't feasible visible before, but now they are. So view this technology as an augmentation of your skills and your talents and don't sleep on the power of this tech.

I'm with you and I, people that are scared of AI, you might as well close up shop, because it's going to be part of all of our lives and all of our businesses. It's not going anywhere. Right?

So in your business, people will come to you, have a new client come to you, and they're like, okay, we want to leverage our content more. We have a webinar or we have a white paper, whatever it is. How do you marry AI with your clients trying to get more out of their content?

Yeah, it's a great question, because there's two key things happening right now in the market around marketing and AI.

The first thing that's happening is everybody is rushing to say, we need more content, we need to create more content, and let's use AI to create that. Here's the reality, though. AI is creating mediocre content every single day.

A bunch of brands have been publishing over the last year mediocre content that is created and regurgitated out of a prompt that they submitted into ChatGPT. Depressing publish on this content. They're assuming that it's good, but they're questioning why it's not getting any traction or traffic.

And if it does get traffic, they're now surprised because they get us.

Got a manual penalty from Google saying, you're going back down to the, to the basement and nobody's going to see you ever again because of your usage of AI. That has happened to a lot of brands, and it's going to continue to happen over the next few weeks.

But here's the thing, you can use AI and still get amazing results. The way that you do that, though, is you augment the content. You need to take that content and then edit it.

Apply a great editor, apply a great writer to that content and use it to get a better ROI out of it.

So when clients are coming to us at foundation and they're saying, foundation, we just want you to use AI and create a million pieces of content, we're saying, hold up, hold the phone for a second. If you want us to do that, you're essentially going to just add noise to the Internet.

And noise to the Internet typically doesn't actually start to stand out. It doesn't benefit your brand, it doesn't benefit your business.

But what would stand out is if we used AI to get halfway there to get to a noisy, messy draft and then take that draft now that we were able to create it faster and take it all the way across the finish line to create something that actually is valuable to your audience and to your customers. Now when we do that, we're able to deliver a piece that when you read it, doesn't feel like it's AI written.

Then the next step that we do, which is very different from a lot of organizations because a lot of content companies just focus on let's write content and call it quits. We'll use AI to think through strategies to distribute that content asset in a ton, ton of different ways.

That ebook can be turned into a carousel that lives on LinkedIn. That ebook or blog post can turn into a thread on X.

That thread on X can also have a bunch of screenshots that now turn into a carousel that lives on Instagram, on TikTok, you name it. You can create a piece of content that is good and valuable once and then repurpose it and distribute it forever. And that is where the ROI comes.

And now thanks to AI, it's way easier to do that type of work. So many people were afraid of distribution because of the time commitment is a gift.

Now it will take you less time to take a blog post that you wrote and create a thread, to create a status update, to create a LinkedIn post and to disseminate that asset across your entire org so they too feel empowered to promote and amplify the pieces that you're creating.

That's awesome. And it's such a powerful way to use it.

And you said something though that I want to make sure I dig into a little bit and for all the listeners to really wrap their mind around.

Yeah, if you go ahead and you create a piece of content using AI, you're asking to create a piece of content or whatever and then you literally take whatever it creates and then you put that out on your site, on social, on whatever. Do you get negative? You get ding negatively. Like you will be hurt if you literally just copy and paste.

Because Google and everything else can pick up on the fact that it is AI if you don't edit it, like you will have a problem.

Yeah.

There is recent case studies and examples of organizations that have had a ton of success copy and pasting ChatGPT responses directly to their website, covering topics and skyrocketing in terms of their organic traffic.

But as of the most recent Google Update, they have penalties and in my opinion tried to set an example across some of these sites where they have completely delisted websites from the Internet because they have, I say from the Internet, but essentially from Google and Google is the Internet. So they've delisted these sites from Google because They've used AI content.

Now, don't get me wrong, if you're a small business, you own a cafe, you own a local photography business, and you're trying to sell to a small radius of people, Google's not going to catch on to you.

But if you are trying to go to the moon and compete with some of the top brands, top publishing companies in the world, and you're using AI, it's a fool's game to think that you can copy and paste and get the millions and millions of traffic that they are. I think you're just going to get banned from the Internet really quick.

Wow, that is a game changer, because I think so many people right now are just doing copy and paste and they're moving on with their day and it can really hurt them. So let me ask you, what are people doing wrong? Like, sometimes I'll go and I'll stare at ChatGPT, and I'm like, all right, ChatGPT.

And I'll treat it almost like Google, like it's a search engine. I'm like, give me 10 ideas for a blog post, whatever.

Right?

Is that the. I'm not a prompt engineer. Is that how I do it?

Is there like a better way to get the most out of ChatGPT or any other AI tool that we're all just not aware of?

Yeah, there's a few things when you are crafting a great prompt that you need to understand. One is that if you put low quality prompts in, you're going to get low quality responses back.

There are a few key things that I love to always give ChatGPT. One of those things is I always like to communicate with ChatGPT by giving ChatGPT a Persona.

So when I say you're giving it a Persona, you want ChatGPT to act and become a certain individual.

For example, if I'm writing a piece of content that is dedicated to helping podcasters, I'm going to say, hey, chatgpt, pretend that you are a content marketing strategist who has deep 10 years experience studying the best practices of podcasts, like how I built this. And then I'm going to list a bunch of great podcasts and then I'm going to say, can you please do X, Y and Z.

Now that X, Y and Z is another part of a prompt that is very important. You want to be very specific with your request. Instead of just saying ChatGPT, can you create content marketing stuff for me?

You need to specify exactly what it is that you want and be detailed in that request the same way that you would be if you were advising or requesting something from an intern, someone that is new on a project. You need to give them much more clear direction on what you want from it. So again, let's use that podcast example.

You want to embrace chained prompting.

That's the fourth thing that you always want to do. Be nice to your AIs. If they come back, they are not coming to get me.

They might get, but they're going to be nice to me and they're not going to kill me and my family. So I'm always saying thank you. I'm always saying please. But I say thank you so much.

ChatGPT, can you pretend that you are now insert the name of a great writer like Ross Simmons or someone else. Pretend that you are this writer. Can you please flush out the rest of this content brief on my behalf?

ChatGPT is now going to fill out that content brief and you can tell it if you want it to make some additional adjustments, some additional changes. So long story a little bit longer.

The ideal situation when you are leveraging ChatGPT is to be specific, give it a Persona, embrace the prompt idea of chain prompts, and finally, be nice to your AI because you never know what's going to happen next.

Well, first of all, I love the idea of change prompts because I really don't think I have ever really done it that way, but that it allows you to build on the response. So chain prompts for the win. I love that and I am with you. I don't know why whenever I start out a prompt I write please.

And I'm looking at like why the hell am I writing please?

But I never thought of what you just said, which is ultimately one day when the robots come to get all of us, they'll look me up and be like, that guy's not a jerk. So we'll leave him alone.

Exactly 100%. And one of the other pieces of all of this, like once it's done writing all of that.

Now that ChatGPT in particular is integrated with Visual AI and it can create graphics, you say to it, chatgpt, based off of this graph, this ebook that you have written, can you create the social graphic for me or come up with an idea around if you social graphics that could make up this piece and ChatGPT will actually do that for you. The technology is mind blowing. Like you can't even imagine four years ago how much work it would take to do that type of a process.

But now, in the matter of 20 minutes, you can have all that done.

It's so wild, it's so cool. All right, well, let's get on to something completely ridiculous.

The last segment of this thing, this podcast is called since you didn't ask, where we talk about things that have nothing to do with anything and what people don't know about Ross Simmons, they're going to blow their mind. He is an award winning board game maker. And so tell us how you became. Are you like Mr. Monopoly? Is this like a big deal in your life?

I'm a die hard board game fanatic. I have a deep collection. If anybody's ever at a conference and they want to win over my heart, just ask me if I want to play Catan.

Ask me if I want to play Melbourne or something like that and I'm with you. We can do that Monopoly deal all of the games.

But when I was in elementary, I created my first board game and I didn't get the licensing rights to this board game, but it was called the Way to the NBA. And it was this game that talked about.

It was the board game life, but it talked about the path to the NBA and it was like a hit in my local community. Everybody wanted to play it. We won awards at school, we got these prizes and trophies, et cetera. It was awesome.

And it was like early days in my life. I think I would have been like grade six or five or something like that. I was a young Ross with no facial hair, no stress, nothing.

And it was like one of those moments that I still look back to and I'm like, I love board games. Why don't I create a board game.

And you should update it and make it the road to getting an nil deal A name Image and like this deal.

That's true. That could actually work. Yeah, I like it. That would actually be a hit. I think it would.

So do you play board games with like your family all day long? Is that what you do?

I do, I do. I was playing Hungry Hungry Hippos just earlier, my little. Only five and three. So we're on the Hungry Hungry Hippos.

I just taught my 5 year old how to play chess, so we're getting into that world. But yeah, we play all the games.

So wait, let me ask you this one question. Do you have young kids, right? Do you let them. You love board games. Do you let them win?

Or is it like, oh, I'm gonna crush you in Hungry Hungry Hippos?

It's once in a while I'm like, all right, you're getting annoying, so I'm gonna crush you Hungry Hungry Hippos. I'm like, all right, I'm bored. I'll let you guys win, blah, blah.

But then once in a while, when I see that ego starting to show up and they're like, I got you. All right, let's just kill. And then I just dominate.

Keep everybody in chat chest.

I don't like there's. She's still learning the fundamentals, so I'm not going to crush dreams yet. I'm just like, oh, that's good. Playing it cool.

What a nice guy. All right, this has been fantastic. How does everybody find Ross? Follow Ross. Consume all your info, information, content. What can they do?

Yeah, so you can find me on all the channels. If you do a quick search for Ross Immons, you'll find me. But I'm also a podcaster, so check out my podcast, Create like the Greats.

It's a podcast where I break down some of the greatest creators and creations of all time. But also, I think if you liked what we talked about today around the idea of taking individual assets and turning them into multiple assets.

I have a book coming out called Create Once, Distribute Forever, where I break down everything that I've learned over the decades of my career, studying how to take great things and distribute them on channels like Reddit, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Quora, on Social. You name it, it's all in this book. And I'd love for people to check it out. Let me know what you think.

And yeah, you can find that@rosssimmons.com or createonesdistributeforever.com as well.

I gotta tell you, Ross, one of my favorite followers on Social. Track him down. Track down his podcast. It is awesome. You're awesome. I appreciate you being here.

Likewise, thank you so much for bringing the value consistently to the community and to the industry. I appreciate you as well.

All right, man. Thank you.

Cheers.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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