Hey good folks and happy Thursday! Hope you are enjoying the final throes of summer!

In Texas, most kids are back in school. Our girls start dance classes next week, too (buying tap shoes for a 3 year old is just SO CUTE). I’m watering all of my plants daily in these >100 degree temps. Ezzy (my esperanza) and Paul (my baby tree) are loving it the most

Life just keeps on life-ing! Let’s dive in.

As you all know, I’ve built an AI content production tool with my internal team. She is pretty good, though not quite great. We iterate on her every single week to make her better and better. She is also expanding in her use cases, from blog content to lifecycle, and beyond.

And still, like I imagine so many of you, one of the main things me and my team find ourselves saying every single week to folks who ask if this tool can do “XYZ thing,” is this: Absolutely, but what’s the source documentation?

AI can do pretty good things, and at the very least get a half decent first draft on your desk in 10 minutes or less, but only if the source documentation itself is good, accurate, and ideally, templatized!

“Good” is so incredibly subjective here, but I’d argue that good in this specific case means written by a human, with clear citations and statuses, and even screenshots (if applicable). As a result, we’re working on so many hygiene and optimization projects right now to ensure documentation cleanliness and accuracy––and also to make sure we are getting the full benefit of the existing assets we have (i.e, optimization; and for this, we’re using humans only).

Right now, we are identifying two different factors that make an input “good” for editorial content Neither of these will be surprising to you, but they feel worth listing out.

SME interviews

The more human context you provide, and interviews are SO GOOD for this, the better the written output is––or so we’ve found.

One way we are thinking about implementing this is standing SME office hours, where we have folks come in and raise their ideas for blogs or any other editorial asset they think we should produce and why. And then, we want to debate that live with folks. Why is that interesting? Who is the audience? Tell us more––what is something people don’t expect about this topic? On and on.

From there, we may get additional time to interview the person further, or just use the Office Hours transcript to get us a first draft.

I’ll let ya know how this goes, but I bet a lot of you have already done something like this.

SME* stands for subject matter expert. 

Briefs and/or outlines (human-written ones)

I know AI can create briefs and outlines, but we’re finding that for long-form content, we need to be more explicit with what we tell AI to do. It should know what we want it to read, to cite, how to think about a specific problem and why it matters, the tone it should take, and so much more.

Against what I said earlier, we are not templatizing this, at least not yet. As long as it is less than 1 page long, we are letting our content strategist determine how they want to build the briefs––no AI allowed.

We tried to create prompts that would infuse this kind of stuff into AI, let it make its own decisions, and go from there. But, and I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear it, that did not work well.

So, it's back to humans because even if we could build a skill for this, this shouldn’t take someone that long. The efficiency gained at this stage with AI would likely result in a loss in the editing phase. So, in the name of efficiency, humans will write briefs.

Sometimes––ok, often––the easiest and most timed-tested of methods turns out to be the best. What are you doing that is making your outputs better? I’d love to know (and learn!).

A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE

You do you!

One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.

THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT

• What I’m reading: OK, not reading, but listening to: Yesteryear. I hear I’m right at the cusp of things getting CRAZY (around Chapter 28).

• What I’m looking forward to: Labor Day Weekend! My mom and cousin are coming in, and we’ll be romping around with two babies and two toddlers. Let’s go!

• What I’m wearing: Track shorts and loose t-shirts. Again, it’s >100 degrees here!

Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Very excited to be here with y’all. 

Tracey