Ross Simmonds Schools Me In All Things AI [Best of 2024]

Hey everybody, before we get started, I want to thank my friends at Hatch for producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcasts editing and strategy for one flat rate by visiting Hatch.fm. All right, let's get into the show. (upbeat music) Welcome to distribution first, the show where we flip content marketing on its head and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I share playbooks, motivations, stories and strategies to help you repurpose and distribute your content, because you deserve to get the most out of everything you create. (upbeat music) Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of distribution first. It could not be more excited to have Ross Simmons back on the show. Anytime I get to chat with Ross, even pre-call him like, man, I'm just, I'm loving this. I'm feeling inspired and happy. So Ross, man, thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited to chat. As you said, the feeling is 100% mutual. I love chatting with you. Love what you've done for the community and continue to do with the industry at large while in the distribution front. So I'm excited to chat today. It's gonna be fun. Amazing. And I'm sure we will touch on some of the distribution stuff as well at some point. Anybody watching this is seeing a little book back there behind Ross that he's been talking about a little bit on social if you follow him. So we'll get there at some point, but I would, Ross is also, if you've been paying attention, really been shifting more into AI, how marketers can use AI and not be afraid of AI, but use it wisely. Yeah. I've noticed in my world, I'm kind of, I was a little bit leery at first 'cause like, man, is this another, honestly, it was like, is this another clubhouse? Is this another, like, you know, a fad or is it, but then it just became too obvious for like, this is not going away. Right. I'm curious to hear from your standpoint, like, I was in the same spot. Yeah. Yeah. Like when I first got a glimpse at some of these tools and stuff, I was very anti it. And I like to say like, like, I thought, oh, this tool will never be as good as me. This tool will never be great. I'm not even going to give it a chance. And then I realized that AI for marketers is kind of like onions for kids. When we're young, it's not that great because it's like, we don't want it. We don't dig it, we're not feeling it. But as you get older, you realize like onions are key. Like if you throw onions into a dish, it can elevate it significantly. And I think AI works the same way. If you throw AI into the mix and you are not necessarily an expert, if you're not bought into the idea, you'll probably get mediocre results in the new walk away. If you don't understand prompt them generic and you get a response back that's mediocre, you'll walk away. And you'll say that you had a bad taste in your mouth. But when you commit to trying it and trying it in different ways with different prompts and with different strategies and techniques, you start to realize that this technology is going to fundamentally change humanity for a very long time. And yes, there's no question. You can wait on the sidelines and allow it to kind of evolve and change and work through all of the bugs. But I believe right now what AI is doing to our industry in the world is very similar to what social media did to our world probably 15, 20 years ago. And I think a lot of people are resistant, the same way that people were resistant about social. And to me, this is one of the most exciting times to be in the digital marketing world because the change is happening quickly. There's no question that it can accelerate and improve our capabilities, our capacity. And I don't see why any marketer would ignore it today. Yeah, and I think sometimes you just need to have your eyes up like the more I've seen for how people are using it or some of the tools that are being brought out and like the amount of speed at which I can get things done now compared to when I used to be able to get things done. I mean, the other day, we were talking about the membership before I'm building up this membership. And I was like, oh, I need to like do an onboarding sequence. I need to do an onboarding video. Well, I had all this base work that I had created and thought of, I was then able to go into chat GBT, prop my way into a full on onboarding email series and video script in an hour, an hour and a half. I mean, that's a week's worth of work. And just two or three years ago. Yeah, like the efficiency gains are, in my opinion, one of the most underrated elements of AI. Like, yes, there's a lot of validity to the idea that AI is going to have a hard time replacing human creativity and being able to take lived experiences and combine that with an opportunity and come up with something that connects with culture. Those are true real concerns. But here's something that people don't recognize. A lot of the things that we do on a day-to-day basis are very reputable tasks. They're tasks that other people have done in the past. They're tasks that other people have written about in the past. And they're tasks that AI can actually replicate quite well, especially if you give it a task to do it. Take, for example, the tasks that we all have as owners when we're trying to brief someone on how to do a project. We need to delegate a task, let's say it's video editing. Typically, we have our best practices around how we would like our videos to sound, how we would like our videos to kind of tell a story. We want a certain type of hook, all of those things. You can literally take a voice note using your phone today, explain and vomit all of your ideas into that voice note, upload it to ChatGPT, and then tell ChatGPT to use the audio to understand your concepts, your ideas, and write an SOP that you can use to brief a new video editor on this project. And then in the matter of seconds, you literally have taken two minutes to record, two seconds to upload. You hit enter, you now have an SOP, you can copy and paste that into a Google Doc, maybe you read it or you don't. You pass that off to this video editor and you ask them if they have any questions. And that allows you to then fine tune and improve based off of their responses. That task and that energy would have traditionally taken probably four to five hours of time for someone to create. Now it can be done in the matter of minutes and you can do it at scale. So you can no longer just, you don't limit yourself to that video thing, you can start to do it for Twitter. How do we manage our Twitter account? How do we manage responses? You can get all of this directly out of the ChatGPT in order of these tools and inform ultimately your team on your best practices. And that's where I find the most significant advantages come from is by accelerating and improving your ability to have standardization across your org with content that is rooted exclusively in your own IP and your knowledge, which you have shared directly with the AI. Yeah, it makes me think too. Like you said, it might take four to five hours to do that task and I'm thinking in my brain as somebody who doesn't always love perfect process and like that type of task would actually take me four or five days because they'd be like, start and stop, start and stop, right? And so I think that's where those type of things can be, especially for like if you know where your weak spots are, where you can kind of fill gaps internally. I mean, that's where, I mean, it's small things. It's everything from AI can create meta descriptions way smarter than you can. Why do I mean like those type of things where it's like, you're saving hours and hours of time. Yeah, 100% and there's plugins now that can go directly into Google Sheets where you can have like a GPT prompt where you can literally just say, okay, these are the titles of all of our blog posts. Hey, ChatGPT using best practices around X, Y and Z. I want you to write that meta description. You drag that cell and it's gonna write those meta descriptions for every single element within that spreadsheet. Similarly, you can take looms that you record. If you record looms or videos for your team, you can take the transcripts and upload those to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to turn those transcripts into a blog post or turn them into an internal document that breaks down how we do certain things. I've gotten so many resources and assets built directly from that process that it is ridiculous. And it saves me a ton of time. So the team no longer has to rely on me to now have a conversation. Again, they have a central system with pretty much my entire brain uploaded and downloaded for them to consume and to use when they're trying to be informed about how to do a certain task. - Dang, love that. Yeah, and like you said, that scales because now you have it. You need to do that task again. It's there, you've gotten it. And again, you might need to adjust it a little bit, but. - Right, and that's where the magic happens, right? Like I think one of the issues that I have with the state of the industry today is that a lot of people are making the mistake of assuming that AI replaces everyone and that they no longer need humans. That's not reality. Sure, some tasks are no longer needed, but I do believe that humans still play a pivotal role, especially in marketing communication. When we are thinking about distributing content or creating content, does AI play a role? Yes, but I don't believe that AI can manage the full spectrum of the content that is being created, the stories that are being told, or even determine whether or not an ad or a visual that it's created through mid-journey is actually worth being amplified and promoted. I think there's still some human element that needs to be applied to it. So the way that we view AI at foundation is that AI is more of an augmentation tool rather than a replacement tool. So when we're thinking about using AI to create a long-form blog post or an e-book, we're not thinking about, hey, ChatGPT, write us this e-book and then we walk away. We're ensuring that the same way that we would brief a writer as a human, we're giving as much details as possible around what we want this piece to cover. Then ChatGPT will give us a very bad or mediocre draft, a draft that somebody could have probably written if they were fresh out of school, no shade, but that's what you would get. We then take that and then we revise it, we update it, we improve it, we have a checklist of what we call the content elevation list, and then we elevate that piece to meet our standard. And then once it's meet our standard, then we are confident that we can share this with an editor who does a final review and then it goes to the client. We do that same thinking and approach to content distribution efforts, to content creation efforts, you name it. That is where I think the biggest gap exists today. A lot of people are thinking I'm gonna connect ChatGPT to the back end of my CMS and let the words run. And then they get surprised when Google erases them from the internet. No, that's what you get. You tried to game the system by publishing mediocre content and now you get below mediocre results. You need to add the humans on top of the AI-driven content to reach content excellence. And then you actually have things that are worth promoting and distributing. - I've used this example a couple of times. I'm sure on the show and definitely in conversations with other marketers. But I heard Daniel Priestley say this from Scorap and over subscribed and all that. And he said, "Hey, 'cause Scorap, he built his tool with AI built into it." And he was describing it and he said, "You gotta map, like yes, you can build a landing page." But he said, "It's just the cake. A bakery isn't going to go out and sell just a plain cake without icing. It's on the humans to go add the icing, to add the decoration, to add the stuff on top that's gonna actually make that thing desirable and want to be able to actually enjoy consume and all that stuff, right?" - 100%. Yeah, I think it's the analogy I like to also give is like, Iron Man, Tony Stark exists and I know some listeners have no idea where I'm going with this. Might not follow any Marvel movies, but I'm a comic book geek, so bear with me for a second. But Tony Stark has a human, has tons of flaws and is filled with lots of issues. If you poke him, he's gonna feel pain. But when you put on the Iron Man suit, he has superpowers. And I think AI is the same way. Me as Ross Simmons, the human, I am a human. Cool. But when you give me AI tools, I can do things in a time span that would have not been humanly possible before. I am able to execute and implement tasks that I couldn't do before. Simply because I have this tool. So I think when I talk to brands and I talk to people about like, how should they view AI? View it as an accelerant and as an augmentation and realize you're still very important. You have to guide it, you have to direct it and you need to understand the value of a good prompt to be able to make it all work. - So I guess for anybody listening and I'll throw a link to it in the description as well, Ross has a full course that's super reasonably priced and you can go get, it's got a whole ton of prompts. I got it at the beginning of the year. And so I think for me, one of the biggest roadblocks for folks is like, what the heck do I ask? What am I asking for? What are those types of, like your term of the SOP thing? I never would have thought about doing the SOP thing. So Ross, tell me what are some of the main things I need to be thinking about as far as like, general, I'm a content marketer. I'm running a small business trying to do content marketing. What are those types of things I need to be thinking about prompting? - Yeah, so the AI marketing console is the course that I launched and it's because again, I'm a geek and I love video games and I think like, this needs to be thought of like a system. The technology changes so quickly that we need to have system thinking across the board with all AI, whether we're talking about audio AI, video AI, or written text AI. And it's all covered within the AI marketing console. We have to have systems in place for how we will use these tools. So when we're thinking about prompts for written text, there are a few simple things that you need to remember and keep in mind. First, you always want to be very, very clear to the AI with what you want. A lot of people make the mistake of saying, "Chatchy PT, can you write me a blog post?" That's not enough. You need to be very specific. What is the goal of the blog post? What are you trying to get it to do? And then if you can give it an exemplar and an example of exactly how you wanted to sound so it can kind of go into the back of its brain to say, all right, I have a framework that I'm going to apply to it. It makes it better. So what can you do in that case? You can say, "Hey, Chatchy PT, please. I always like to use my please." And thank you just in case the AI comes to life someday and doesn't try to get me, I like to do that. And then you're going to say something like, I want you to use the inbound marketing model to identify 10 different types of blog posts that I should create. And then it's going to give them to you. So now, Chatchy PT has understood the inbound marketing model and it's making recommendations based off a top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel. Great. That could be good. What would be 10 times better is if you gave it context around the types of content that you wanted to give you back. And the way that you do that is you give it a persona. So I would oftentimes tell Chatchy PT, "Not just, hey, can you write this for me?" I would say, "You are a digital marketer named Ross Simmons, named Seth Godin, or whoever that is like your goat in the industry, and then ask them to create a recommendation like they would. Then they're again going to understand what's their style, what's their approach, and then they're going to craft it in that format." Now, at this point, you will probably have better results than the vast majority of the people who use Chatchy PT. And the system that you put in place after that is essentially, let's do some chain prompting to now take these titles and turn them into full-fledged blog posts. So I want Chatchy PT to now write me briefs. And from those briefs, you ask Chatchy PT to turn those briefs into full-on blog posts. And then you communicate that back over to editors, they review, they edit, and they bring it to life. Now, this is where it starts to get really, really interesting. Because now, within Chatchy PT, they have a section called Dolly, which allows you to have images. And you can ask Chatchy PT to create the social media graphics that should go with that blog posts. And it will read it, it will understand the context, and then it will give you an image that it thinks is relevant to that piece. You can then talk to it, just like you would a designer, with records and insights around your brand, so it meets your brand quality guidelines, all of that stuff to modify it and tweak it to hit your best practices. There's also a GPT plugin. I believe plugins are getting replaced in Chatchy PT, so it might be just called GPT in the future, called Wimsical, where you're able to even say to Chatchy PT, I want you to create a flow chart. Let's say, for example, I wrote a blog post about the 20 things that you need to know about content distribution in 2024. And in that blog post, I had a section that talked about the workflow of distro. I could say, hey, Chatchy PT, I want you to create a workflow visual using a diagram and a chart that showcases how someone can go from an asset to 20 different assets. And Chatchy PT will actually design that for me. Now, let's just say that that graphic wasn't exactly what you wanted. You can now download that graphic, upload it back to Dolly and say, design this in a way that hits this type of state, this type of style, and it will do that for you. That whole process took me a long time to articulate with words, but as an actual executor, it probably took about an hour of time. And within that hour, you were able to create 10 blog post titles, probably get five briefs, five final drafts, and imagery for all of that content. This is why I believe this technology is absolutely going to fundamentally change the way we do our work. Yeah, I love that. And there's, so it's funny. I haven't experimented too much with the image stuff yet. Knowing that it's in Chatchy PT, I'm going to have to do that now. But one of the things in Ross' course is he has a bunch of sort of image prompts. 'Cause I think like, there's really like, in my mind, anyway, there's like sort of the AI for content, traditional like written type content, maybe even some video stuff, which is super wild, which I know you're experimenting with. And then you've got images, which is a whole other world. But some of the, just the prompts alone for images are really, really cool and interesting to just go through and try different styles. You know, I was playing with one. It was like retro Fuji Phil and something. And I'm like, oh, this is sweet. You know, I would have never thought to try that. So yeah, it's super cool. But the thing that I think is really interesting is for your company too, you can start to tailor those things with your own custom templates where if you get an outline for a bottom funnel blog, for instance, you can rinse and repeat that as the basis for the brief that AI creates for you. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it just allows for so much more scale and efficiencies. And one of the other efficiencies that I found with AI is you can take a blog post that you've written. And we talk about this often. So I know you're gonna love this. But you can take a blog post that you've written and you can ask @chatchypt to write a script that would live on TikTok or that would live on YouTube with that same concept. And then you can do two things. One, you can go the old fashioned approach where you set up your camera and you read that script and you say it into a camera and now you have a video. Or you can take that script that you've just got @chatchypt to create. And you're gonna upload it to a tool called DID or 11 Labs or Hagen, which are AI tools that create essentially deep fix of yourself. And you're going to have AI Ross or AI Justin go on and look just like you would stand in front of a camera, read that script. And then you're gonna upload it to TikTok. You're gonna upload it to Instagram. You're gonna upload it to YouTube. And you're going to essentially articulate that script without the words actually coming out of your real mouth and instead of coming out through a synthetic version of you. And you throw some hashtags on it and you get some comments. Why do I know this works? I experimented with one of these. I took a script from a blog post that I wrote. I downloaded the entire script. I uploaded it to 11 Labs and I got our video editor to place video on top of it and I uploaded that to YouTube. It's called What is Onsite SEO? And I encouraged folks to check out that video on my YouTube channel. It sounds just like me. And people sent it to me saying, Ross, I love how deep you went into this video. It's not me. I never actually said those words, but it is me, but it's not me. And that is the wild part of this entire space. It's like you don't know who is and isn't really an AI. It's gonna be wild. It is gonna be wild. It's gonna be, I've even started playing with some of that stuff with like inside of Descript and inside like there's all, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff. And for me, I was like, it's not perfect, but for 30 seconds of audio that I had to give you, it's just frequently shocking. It's honestly, it's like pacing more than the audio. Like the audio sounds great. It's just, you're not quite on how I would pace. So, but they don't get there. It's all wild because like I was working with it brand and I had to send them a 30 minute video. And in the video, I think I said here are four ways instead of saying five ways. And in Descript, I could actually edit my words. So instead of saying four, I could change it to five and then it replicated my voice and changed it to five. And I sent it back to them and they were like, we don't know how you did that. And I was like, exactly, wild. It is a wild time to be alive. But that saved me literally a lot of money because I would have been, I would have had to go record, I recorded it in a nice studio. I booked a studio and I said the wrong thing. I would have had to go back to the studio. I would have had to set up a camera. I would have had to record. I would have had to find out what shirt I was wearing. Make sure that I looked the same. Everything was looking good. But instead, I just changed the words. And AI picked up my voice through it and made my mouth look like it matched and what a time to be alive. Amazing, amazing. For the traditional sort of marketer thinking about doing this, one of the things I think, and you brought it up with the video script, is the ability to take the one thing you've made and maybe not straight repurpose it like you maybe traditionally would think of repurposing but repurpose that into multiple other things, right? Like I was able to take, like I mentioned earlier, like take an email outline that came from like basically an outline of how I'm going to onboard. And then I could come up with a full on email sequence. And then from there, I could say, take everything you know about this email sequence and write it out in a perfect how to step by step video. Yeah. And so it's like those are the types of, and instantly, you know, and again, is it perfect? No, does it maybe need a little bit of massaging? Yes, but I can do that in minutes instead of hours. 100%. I think it's, we're going to live in a time very soon where the responsibilities of an individual marketer goes up and a lot of people are afraid of that. But because of our capabilities now thanks to AI, you should be able to get more done. You should be able to execute more frequently tasks and do more. And I think that's going to wreak a lot of havoc on a lot of folks because the expectations for marketers is going to rise due to the fact that we should have AI in our back pocket. And that's why I launched the AI market in consoles because I am ridiculously confident that this technology is going to wreak havoc on the careers of people who do not embrace it. And I think it's important for repurposing, for paid media, for creation, all of the things. AI should be a part of your mix and a part of your tools that you're using today. I mean, I can say just speaking from me running my own business, I got on a call a couple of weeks ago with somebody and is like, dude, you're just a machine. You're in my feed, and then you're in my inbox, and then you're like, why are you doing it all? And it's like, really? It's me, but it's me using AI as my assistant. Like that, when I first heard somebody say that, and you're speaking the same language there, like that completely opened up my brain to not be afraid of it and be like, oh, no, no, no, no. You're my intern now. You're my marketing manager now. You know, 100%, I am with you 100%. I don't even just view AI as my assistant. I view it as my mentor. I use it as my partner in crime, my colleague. It's not just someone that I'm giving tasks to. It's someone who I will use as like a, someone to just like bounce ideas off of. So I'll ask Chatty PT, like, I don't know if you're familiar with, I think it's called the trillion dollar coach, Bill Campbell. He coached like all the topics at Google and brands like that. I will tell Chatty PT to think like him and personify him and be him. And then I'll say, this is what I'm trying to work through. What advice do you have for me? And then typically it is good advice. Or I'm trying to make a decision on whether or not I should take on a project. And I need to bounce the idea off of Chatty PT on like the pros and cons and tell it to go and do some total addressable market research. So hey, Chatty PT, I have these two ideas. Please do a deep dive on what you believe might be the opportunity worth chasing. Thinking about the total number of amount of impact. How much time it's going to take. The investment that I will have to make both from a time and cost perspective. And the responses are always enlightening and eye opening. So for me, I don't think you should view it just as the intern. Also, don't be afraid to ask it for advice and get guidance on things. And of course, sometimes the advice will be bad and it will be wrong. But that's OK because at least it will start to open the little doors of sequences where you can poke in and navigate and say, I never would have went down this path. Nope, not for me, shut it and then on to the next one. So I use it as not just an assistant, but also as a mentor. And I think that there is a ton of value in using it for that. And for brainstorming and things like that. That's amazing. Brain storming is huge. The mentor thing I've maybe done it, not maybe as strong as you have there. That's really cool to think about. Have you just like a really strong editor at times where, you know, for, hey, you are X, Y and Z, like edit this thing, what's missing? What would make this stronger? And that way it's not like, and then from there you can take that and either you can implement those changes yourself. You can do more prompting if you want the ad to do that. But it's a good way to use it for, yeah, getting advice, getting uploaded, like literal sales calls to chat GPT and been like, look, I just had this sales call with a company would love to get your feedback on what I could have done better. Oh, that's so good. And then it will tell me like, I've had times where it says the best amount of time to actually talk on a call is on average about three minutes for the person who's pitching. You went long and I'll be like, cool, I need to slow down on that. Or it'll say like they brought up this major concern, but you didn't really address it. And then I'm like, right, I should have listened a little bit closer to that. You can get some ridiculous value out of that just again, playing the mentor role. That's amazing. I've done sales calls, but not from that perspective. That's super cool. Yeah. I mean, even with the sales call thing too, it's like just as a reminder, okay, what are the, if I've done this like, even if the sales call didn't work out, right? It's going back and saying, what were the biggest problems that they were having? And then it's like, oh, cool. Now I can create some, give me, you know, and now you're starting that chain over again. And then you can frame it up to say like off that sales call. If you're talking to Jane, Jane is the avatar for all the content in this thread. And so everything that I'm going to be creating is for Jane. Exactly. Even though we didn't make the sale. Right. Exactly. And what you can say is like, hey, ChatGPT, recognizing meeting closed that sale. But I want to nurture that relationship with Jane three months from now. What are some pieces of content that I could create that I can center that will demonstrate why we would have been the right partner for, then you get that answer, then you go and create it or you ask ChatGPT to create it. And then you can nurture that relationship down the road with those same exact assets. It's interesting. I saw a quote from Sam Altman a few weeks ago and it was like, he believes that 95% of the roles and the work that marketing agencies do is going to be completely replaced by AI. And that to me was like, okay, this is the go to AI right now talking about how 95% of the tasks that marketers do could be wiped out. And in some cases, I think he's right. A lot of the repeatable tasks that marketers do on a regular basis will be replaced by AI because we're still in early days of this technology. But the creativity, the connection of culture, the human touch, the things that make you unique and the things that allow you to get closer to your customers on a human personal level will never be replicable by AI. And because of that, I think there will always be a room for great marketers, great storytellers, great creators and great creatives. But if you are mediocre and you are average, now is the time to invest ridiculously in elevating your skill sets because the talent that is going to be required to win in this new age is going to be beyond mediocre. And that would be my big message to anyone who wants to get into marketing, who wants to continue to have a long career in marketing, things are going to change. And I encourage you to really double down on some of those even soft skills that a lot of people have put to the waste side for the last little bit around management, empathy, communication, internal relationships, sales, all of those things are going to matter more than ever before. Yeah. The days of scooting by at a place because you're a cog in the machine and they need XYZ thing every week. And so I'm here at a place because they need that. That's going to be long gone because what it's going to be and you know, think about it too, from somebody who's managed teams or if you're not great at what you're doing or bringing something else to the table, right? That's a lot of my time. Yeah. You know this, running teams and say, your time has always spent on the first and that's not doing the good work first. It is. And now there's a very easy alternative that even if you try out, well, we're going to try out AI and see if we can replace these systems and even if you can't nail out a thousand percent. Right. You're probably going to get pretty close. And I think that's where teams and companies are going at, you know, especially we had to continue to attack mass layoffs, it's going to be curious eventually money will come back. Everything's cyclical. But what are teams going to look like when the money comes back? Right. And I think that's the biggest thing that a lot of people don't realize is like, there's two forces going on right now that are not necessarily in the favor of people who are mediocre. One globalization has happened. Brands can now employ and hire people from all over the globe. We have all gone through the work from home experience, thus people are more, more comfortable with outsourcing and partnering with people on a global scale. Due to that, the competition for jobs is at an all time high. In addition to that, we throw in the mix AI. Great. Now, not only are we competing on a global scale, but we're also competing with the smartest technology since Siri, right? Like, okay, how do you compete with that? You need creativity. You need to be good at communicating internally. You need to be good at being able to pick up on new trends, understand culture, understand storytelling, understand community. The whole idea of a T-shaped marketer just got a lot more interesting where not only do you need to be deep in one thing, but you also need to know a lot of the soft skills to be the balancing act to all of those skills that you've gained. It's a wild time, and I really do believe that more than ever before, people need to invest in themselves and try to find companies if you are early on in your career. Find companies to work for that are going to invest in your education and invest in your development and skills by not only giving you room to learn, but also giving you projects that allow you to learn. Yeah, it's, and to me, the other aspect of it, which is honestly, I'm super bullish on it's why I'm doing a lot of the things I'm doing is learning together, right? Being in community with people who are trying to do the same thing. So then you don't have to sit in a silo and try to figure out if this tactic is the right thing or if this is what I should be leaning on, what are other companies, VP's telling them that they're focused on? The more you can get those answers and have those questions sort of figured out and really understand, I think, from the macro perspective, why are we doing what we're doing here? You know, when I was running a team, that was the biggest thing. I was like, do you know why we're doing what we're doing here? I don't need to know, like, you know the how, like, you know your individual tactic. I think the how's or what's going to be outsourced, right? But it's like you, as a human, you still have to know the why, why am I telling the story I'm telling? So why am I telling this story and not that one? Why am I talking to this audience and not that one? And then that's what's going to inform all of these other things. 100%. Like, communities built my career, my entire career was built on the back of communities. So hearing that you're launching one, it's getting, gotten me really excited because I think we need more communities, especially focusing on things like distribution, but like, communities gave me not only the access to the right people to build relationships, to unlock, again, new opportunities, but also the idea of publishing my thoughts in front of a community and allowing that community to be essentially my crowdsourced space to give me feedback and thumbs up or thumbs down or debate and argue and fine tune my thinking. There's a lot of value in communities and especially early in your career, if you are not already where you want to be, find a community where you can really make it your own and add as much value as possible, because when you add value to these communities, you get value back. And that value that you get back will literally last the rest of your career. So I don't know where I'm going with that, but long response to probably not even a question, communities are great, definitely encourage people to join communities. It's a great place to be. Yeah. It's that shared experience. It's that, again, I think that you can learn so much by yourself. I'm a huge advocate. I've said this anytime anybody asked me about career growth or what it's like work harder on yourself than you do at your job and you will succeed. Like I truly believe that if you are improving your skills, your mindset, how you're thinking about things, how you're trying to, if you're focusing on growing, like most people are not, you know, that's the other thing too, right? Like most people are not focused on growth at all. They're just like focused on thriving. So if you turn that dial just a little bit and want to focus on growing yourself, you would be a complete game changer. Yeah. I 100% agree. I can remember my first job. I came in relatively fresh out of school and my mission was to kind of be able to compete with the peers who I knew were making six figures and I was coming in very junior and I wasn't making that. And I was like, all right, I need to be able to do everything they did. So I blocked off time in my calendar even after hours where I would go in and read all of their work. I would go on websites like SlideShare back in the day. It was a great place for reading briefs and studying documents and I would study how to write a creative brief, how to manage a project. What does it mean to be a project manager? I wanted to understand the entire system and the entire org and I viewed myself as essentially a computer and I need to download as much info as possible. When I grind it and I put in that work so eventually I could get on stage, I can have these conversations with my colleagues and my peers at the time and be able to say like, look, don't look at me as just some young 22-year-olds who doesn't know anything. I need you to understand that I have put in the time to understand these channels. This network, social media, this is now my thing and I'm going to own it. So my advice to folks who aren't early in their career would be to be known internally as the person who understands things like AI better than anyone else. If you can be positioned internally as the person who is obsessed that knows how to use all of the tools who understands what complexity is, who understands what Chachi PT is, who understands mid-journey and can support the team in those efforts. I can say with confidence, if you still do your job and you deliver value and you are seen as the expert in that world, you will not be on the list when layoffs come. You will not be on the list, not even close, because the leadership team is going to view you as somebody who has a key role in the future at being able to grow that work. And with that, it's a soft skill that is showing your willingness to adapt, learn, be agile, not be stuck in your ways, not be boots in the sand. I'm not moving. This is how I've always done things, you know, which are all of those things add up to say like, all right, the world is changing, Ross is with us. You know, 100% like be great, try to be great at your job and don't get caught up in the noise in the chaos of, oh, you just do the bare minimum and get by no, like you're talking about your livelihood folks, like your life is hopefully long for you. And in life, you're going to do a lot of things. If some of it is self-employment, amazing, go do that, be a run your own show. I'm a huge fan of side hustles of entrepreneurship, all of those things. I'm a big believer in it. But I also recognize that some people want to have a full-time career and that's their goal in their ambitions. Great. Do that too. But recognize that if you want to thrive in your career, you are very likely going to need to differentiate, especially with the rise of AI and the technologies that are coming down the pipe across our industry. Yeah, it's becoming more and more as somebody who worked in house for over a decade and then is now building his own thing. I can speak from first-hand experience that I had to learn my craft, but then I had to learn about marketing in general. It wasn't just websites. It wasn't just copy. I had to learn about how does the ads that they're running tie-in with the thing I'm doing here? How does this work with that, right? Like you're expanding and learning and then it was, how does, oh, how does this tie-in to the business? What sales is trying to, like, and now we're in my own business, I'm just doing everything, so it's like, you know, crash, crash, crash, crash, and everything, so this is an expense, not an expense, it's coffee, yeah, all of that stuff. How can I expense this coffee, that's the question. Real quick before we wrap, I'm curious because this is actually something that one of my clients brought up with me and I wasn't sure I had a great answer, so I was curious to ask you, how do we think about plagiarism in a world of AI, knowing we can do a lot of things, how can, and without the core updates that Google's doing and all that type of stuff, how can we, as marketers, feel confident in that? Like, I'm tapping into every bit of potential that AI is giving me, but I'm not crossing some sort of the serious line. Yeah, it's a great question. So there's two trains of thought that I apply to plagiarism with AI. The first one is you always want to do plagiarism checks at the end of producing an asset. So there are a ton of plagiarism checkers that will actually analyze what you've created across the internet and determine whether or not things were plagiarized and whether or not they need to be rewritten, redeveloped and rewrote. That's the first piece of always embrace plagiarism checkers to make sure that you are not taking someone else's IP and turning it into something. Now the little internet voices might be saying, yeah, but Ross, it was trained on other people's content, so it's plagiarism anyway. I hear you. This is my thought on that. The same way that I learned content marketing by reading blog posts from some of the great content marketers, AI has learned content marketing by reading content from some of the greatest marketers. If I want to learn how to be great at sewing, I'm going to read a ton of books on sewing and that's going to form my thoughts and my perspective on sewing. If I decide that I am great at sewing and then I write a book on sewing, I'm very likely not going to go out into the wilderness and think back to 10 years ago when I was informed by a famous sewing who wrote a blog post or an article on that and then use that as a quote and source them as the IP of that original idea. It's not going to happen, right? All of the greats learned from other greats. You don't see LeBron James saying, oh, that shot was created by Michael Jordan. You don't see Michael Jordan talking about how every shot that he did was inspired by Dr. Jay and Dr. Jay doing the same thing for World Chamberlain and then World Chamberlain with Bill Russell blah, blah, blah, it doesn't work that way. And the same thing exists with AI, AI has learned from humans. The same way that we as humans would have learned from other humans. The only reason why me and you can even have this conversation is because over the course of our life, people have taught us English and we can speak English. But every time I talk to you, I might be plagiarizing things that my dad would have said. My dad always said, long story a little bit longer. That is like my go-to line, but I'm not saying source, my father hangs in, I'm not doing that, right? So I think a lot of people get caught up in this idea, not realizing that all ideas that we have as humans are taken from humans in the past that we've interacted with and that we've connected with, unless you're in a research lab and you're coming up with new things in math, but that's a whole different ballgame. So for me, long story, a little bit longer, I think the plagiarism side, run your checks, but also, when it comes down to it, folks, realize that the ideas that AI has captured and is grabbing are very similar to the same ones that you would, except instead of it being flesh and chemicals inside of our brain, it's pixels and data inside of a computer. Yeah, it's like I gave him credit because earlier Dana Presley talked about AI, but at some point, I will not. At some point, I'm just going to, you know what I mean? It's going to be so baked into the conversations that I'm having. I'm just like, yeah, AI is like cake and it's like that, you know, I think about all the books, all the books that I read and it's like, oh, that's a really interesting idea. That's a way to build a business or that's a way to frame this up. I mean, I was watching a YouTube video the other day and you know, some guys pitching his framework and I'm like, boy, that's a lot like so and so's framework that I saw over here, right? So it's like, I think the more comfortable and confident you can be unless it's like a named process thing that you, you know, you know, I was talking to somebody earlier. Well, everyone heard that the flywheel, like the flywheel has been around years, like Disney and the flywheel. Then so and so I had the flywheel, HubSpot had this flywheel, everyone's flywheel, flywheel, flywheel. It's not a new concept. Yep. Right? But it's coming back. You know, I see it all the time now. It's like, you got to build this flywheel. Do these things. So yeah, it's, it's the classic, nothing is new under the sun. So before we wrap, I do want to touch on the book because we didn't talk too much about it, but I'm super pumped for it. Why don't you talk to a little bit about the book? I don't know when you're officially releasing or doing anything, but let me know about this, man. I appreciate it. So April 9th, the book is officially going to hit the stores, the shelves, et cetera. It's called Create Once Distribute Forever, which is the mantra and idea that I've kind of fine tune and spent a lot of time and energy thinking about over the last few years, especially when I think back to like my early days in marketing, where I was creating a lot of content, but I actually wasn't getting any results. And then I realized the reason why I wasn't getting any results is because yes, the content was good, but my audience was small. And I needed to get that content into a larger audience to increase my sample size to ultimately drive more results. And in this book, I wouldn't say it's exclusively around content distribution, but it's also around creative distribution, business distribution, startup distribution, organizational distribution, whether you're running a store on Etsy, you're running a blog, you're running a YouTube channel, whatever it might be, distribution is very likely the one thing that's holding a lot of people back from their dreams. And my goal with this book is to unblock so many great creators, so many great minds, so many great companies from being in their own way as it relates to distribution and giving them not only the playbooks, but also the confidence in the systems that they can use to understand how important it is to distribute their stories and amplify their message to maximize their likelihood of actually becoming successful. Love it, man. That's how I got into the distribution game myself is just the understanding of like the things that create that step one exactly exactly that's 100% it like we oftentimes fallen to the mistake of thinking just because we created something, we can pop the bubbly and celebrate. When in reality, that's when the job starts, the job starts after you have created this thing and you need to get the word out about the thing that you've developed. And for a lot of people, the reason why they don't amplify is because of fear. And on the other side of that fear is the outcomes that most of us actually want. Yeah, and it's interesting to the more, I mean, I'm sure you know this from working with all the companies you work with, the volume play of just we're going to create as much content as humanly possible with no other strategy. We're just going to, you know, spray and pray and make this thing work. That is long gone and it's, I mean, it's really eye opening. Some of the companies I've been working with recently, like for core products, we're talking about a couple pages driving the vast majority of the content around there. And so it's like, okay, let's do a better job of amplifying those bad boys if they're the ones that are driving it. Exactly. If you're seeing the results of the few assets, then pour the gasoline on the fire, right? Like don't just say on to the next one, let's create something new. Let's see and look at what's working and try to melt that for all its worth. And the best brands do this every single day. And when you can crack that code as an organization, it just unlocks ridiculous potential and opportunity. And like you said, too, I think the underrated thing when I talk about it as well that usually when I say it kind of lights up for people is around you're amplifying your business, you're amplifying your message, you're amplifying your story. Like you're not just distributing a piece of content, hopefully, hopefully you're distributing your point of view, you're distributing all of those things that you wish people would understand. Right. I'm not forcing them to take all this time out of their day to understand that, oh, you've got this blog post like, right, right. No, you're just presenting it to them in unique ways and native ways wherever they're at. So where eventually over time, oh, Ross talks about X, Y and Z, oh, Justin talks about X, Y and Z. Cool. I'm in. That's it. 100%. And everyone's like, oh, but I don't want to say the same thing over and over again. And it's like, folks, how long has Nike said just do it? A very, very long time. And you're afraid to share a blog post twice in one week? Really? Think about that. Like, it makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense. So I encourage people to get out of your own way and just try it. And that's when the light bulbs start to come off. When they share something in week one and then they share the same thing in week two and they see that the amount of impact was the exact same. Oh, cool. Nobody's commenting saying why you share this thing. He's just doing what we wanted them to do twice, ching ching. And what it does is when I started implementing this system, what it does is completely unlocks the amount of content that you realize you even need to be need to be making to be successful. You can create a big old engine and be successful and do that. But you can also be super lean, be super strategic, amplify distribution. And I said it in an episode a couple of weeks ago, but I don't have to do a podcast every week to get a content engine that goes for the year, you know what I mean? Exactly. Like, I don't have to. It's fun. I love having the conversations. But it's sometimes even for me, I'm like, boy, I'm creating so much good stuff. I'm struggling to keep up with the amount of, you know, stuff that I can create. And I try my best to build those systems in place. But it's just once you learn the process of repurposing and distributing that content, it just opens up. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I hope people can get out of the book. It's exactly right. It's breaking down how you can get more out of the things that you create that are already valuable, that already educate, engage, entertain or empower people and then give you the ability to say, okay, how can we get the most out of this thing and get this story out here? And my hope is that the book will deliver the playbook and much more for you. Love it. I'm pumped to read it. I'm super excited. And Ross, man, thanks for coming on the show again. It was a blast talking to you. Thanks for having me. This was fun. You need to, again, like I said last time, I appreciate what you do for the industry overall. And thank you for beating the horn around distribution and the world needs it and the industry needs it as well. So thank you so much for having me. Awesome. Chessie, man. Cheers. Alright, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Distribution first. And thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so, so much. And I hope you're able to apply what you learned in this episode. And wear your another into your content strategy as well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that are going to help you build your brand, 10X your content, and transform the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe to the show and sign up for my newsletter at JustinSimon.co so you don't miss a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next episode as well. And until then, take care and I'll see you next time. [Music]