Unleashing The Beast

When I was first hired at UnleashU – over ten years ago – the founder of the company issued me a challenge. He said: I want you to build a content engine where an idea is put into the content assembly line and out comes a blog, video, audio, presentation and so on.

Now, at the time, not only did I not know where to start, but I didn’t believe the vision was possible. So, I did what any rational employee would do and said, ‘sure thing!’ I had no idea where to start, but I had a secret weapon – I knew a gal.

I reached out to a former colleague, Ashley White, a wonderful content strategist and ran the idea by her. She was dubious at first…but then intrigued by the possibilities. I hired her on as a consultant and we got to work. We spent many a Saturday morning talking through ideas, concepts and challenges.

We developed what the organization’s tone and voice should be; we started working on audience profiles. We began mapping out requirements, goals and dashboards. We created what we lovingly called “the beast document.” This was a sprawling spreadsheet that encompassed all the information we had created and collated related to content execution. It had a social media planning tool. A monthly content planning tool and our content ideation template.

This ideation template was one of Ashley’s best ideas within the process. This template was given to our engineers and SMEs and simply asked them to document a high-level summary of the content piece and 4-6 ‘learnings’ or topic points for the content. Once the SME filled that out, we were able to append the template with the audience profile data we compiled, layer in the tone and voice information and send it off to a content writer who was able to produce a blog post that was 90% “there.” Ashley would do her magic top-edits, and the blog was created.

It was a great step forward from sitting with the engineers and asking, ‘what ideas do you have’ and trying to pull the content out of them, one conversation at a time.

Was the content engine “complete” then? No. I shared with my boss that we still had drag. We could only create blogs using this methodology, but still…progress was made towards the grand vision.

Years go by – and we still create content in a very similar way – but OpenAI launches their ChatGPT tool. I dust off the Beast Document and get back to work.

Now, with tools like ElevenLabs and professional voice cloning, Gamma.ai for presentations, Canva and ChatGPT – the content engine is coming alive. With a content idea – my team can now create a blog post, audio, video, presentations and social media posts. In a fraction of the time it has taken us in the past.

And if you look at UnleashU’s content? You’ll never figure out which of the content is written by yours truly (or one of our content team members) versus one of our robot friends. And that’s been the biggest complaint I’ve seen online about using bots for content creation – that it all “sounds” the same; it all sounds like AI. Of course it all sounds that way…because teams and organizations aren’t doing the front-end work to create “the beast document.”

I’m dating myself here – but remember the old phrase GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out. The same is true for our robot friends (AI). If you don’t help your AI assistants understand your context, if you don’t train it to sound like you or your brand…it won’t.

A lot of posts exist in the social media world that using AI to create content is ‘cheating’ – and it is…if you don’t do the work upfront. If you don’t take the time to develop your tone and voice, if you don’t take the time to work on audience development and feed your AI the contextually relevant information it needs to produce quality content.

This isn’t about outsourcing the work to AI, it’s getting back to the heart of content strategy. Content strategy isn’t about making a social post “go viral.” It isn’t about writing a pithy blog post – it’s leveraging tools, resources, defining goals and objectives and using content to accomplish those. AI lets us get back to being strategic in content, instead of just being a meme-finder.

Thank you, Ashley, for empowering and inspiring me and UnleashU to lay the foundation and give us the tools to execute our content engine!

*Ashley White is the Senior Director, Brand and Content Strategy at SelectQuote Insurance Services