Generative AI Prompt Engineering for the Modern AI Marketer With Pam Didner

Pam Didner is a B2B marketing consultant, fractional CMO, speaker, and author. With 20 years of experience in B2B marketing, she helps companies bridge the gap between technology and marketing to build seamless customer experiences and boost sales. Pam is also the author of The Modern AI Marketer book series, which includes The Modern AI Marketer in The GPT Era, The Modern AI Marketing: Guide to Gen AI Prompts, Effective Sales Enablement, and Global Content Marketing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[4:52] What marketers are doing wrong with generative AI prompting — and how to leverage the tool effectively
[9:09] The elements of a strong AI prompt
[13:03] Strategies for refining and optimizing AI prompts
[21:32] Pam Didner’s process for building AI chatbots
[29:12] Practical examples of AI content creation
[36:30] AI tools for image creation
[43:01] Will AI replace jobs?
[49:13] How to overcome barriers to accelerate growth
[57:55] Pam shares why she practices yoga five days a week
[1:04:31] The importance of doing right by your customers

In this episode…

AI is still just an algorithm and isn’t at the human intelligence level, yet many marketers provide generic inputs yielding subpar results. AI doesn’t understand your brand story or target audience, so you must provide specific information for valuable results. How can you create winning AI prompts to elevate your brand?

Generative AI expert and B2B marketer Pam Didner recommends customizing AI prompts to your brand goals. This includes creating detailed, context-rich prompts to guide AI to meaningful and actionable outputs. For instance, a strong prompt should include specifics such as target audience details, product descriptions, competitor insights, and the generated content’s intended outcome. To maximize results, Pam suggests training AI systems on proprietary data sets, allowing you to develop custom bots that automate repetitive tasks, streamline workflows, and create consistent outputs.

In the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris invites B2B marketing consultant Pam Didner to speak about engineering custom AI prompts for your business. Pam shares her recommended AI tools for image and content creation, how to overcome growth barriers, and the importance of treating your customers with dignity.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"If you give generic guidance, you're going to get a generic answer."
"AI is an amplifier, right? It’s going to take you and level you up."
"It's never easy. You are not going to be liked by everybody. Never."
"From my perspective, you should definitely give AI a try because it's important that you know how."
"You need to make sure you have cash to make things happen."

Action Steps

Enhance your prompt engineering skills: Focus on creating detailed and context-rich prompts when working with generative AI. This approach ensures AI tools like ChatGPT can provide tailored and relevant responses, addressing the common challenge of receiving generic outputs.
Experiment with custom AI bots: Consider building custom AI bots for repetitive tasks to streamline your workflow. This allows you to automate processes like content generation, freeing up time for strategic decision-making and increasing operational efficiency.
Leverage AI for content repurposing: Use AI tools to transform your core content into multiple formats, like turning blog posts into video scripts or social media snippets. This technique maximizes your content’s reach across various platforms, addressing the challenge of maintaining a consistent brand presence.
Stay updated on AI integration in tools: Familiarize yourself with the latest AI integrations in software you use, such as Canva's Smart Studio or Midjourney for visual content creation. This keeps you competitive by utilizing cutting-edge technology, addressing the opportunity to enhance your creative outputs.
Adopt a long-term learning mindset: Continuously educate yourself on the evolving AI landscape and explore new applications in your field. This is effective in ensuring that you remain relevant and adaptable, addressing the challenge of AI potentially automating certain job functions while opening up new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris 0:16

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 to 100 million and beyond. As you up arrow your business and your personal life, I'm excited about the guest joining me today, Pam Didner. Pam loves helping her clients solve problems. She also loves marketing, digital and all the latest technologies. She is a B2B marketer, host of the podcast, B2B marketing and more, and the author of five books, the modern AI marketer in the ChatGPT era. The modern AI marketer guide to Gen AI prompts effective sales enablement, the modern AI marketer in global content marketing. And in case you're wondering, Wait, are we chatting to a BDP marketer? That's because we're going to be digging into generative AI prompt engineering for the modern AI marketer today, and she's got a lot of really good information on this that I'm excited to chat about. Pam, welcome to the show.

Pam Didner 1:09

Thank you so much for having me. I mean, you were talking about five books. That's just I was thinking, oh my god, that is so mouthful.

William Harris 1:17

Well, you're the one who wrote all the extra words that go into all of those books. You know,

Pam Didner 1:25

AI marketing. Am I getting pot 2am? I getting

William Harris 1:31

really simple? I'm excited to get into this. I do want to give a shout out to Nancy Harhut. Nancy is the one who introduced us everybody she's got, yes, she was on the podcast as well, so go check out that episode. She's got an amazing book too, calledUsing Behavioral Science in Marketing, fantastic read, and that's how Pam and I got connected. So thank you, Nancy.

Pam Didner 1:54

Thank you, Nancy. We're just

William Harris 1:58

about to dig in. I do want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with one that sold for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com, which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com that said, onto the good stuff, generative AI, prompt engineering for the modern AI marketer. We were talking about this a little bit before I get into, like, the what's the problem here? We're talking about three monitors versus Apple vision Pro, but you're running three monitors typically, right now, right? Yeah.

Pam Didner 2:36

So if I'm actually not traveling and I mean, in my office, which is I'm, I'm right now, I usually have three monitors going out. I have two big monitors, 27 inches, and I also have my MacBook Pro, and those are three. And I also have my, you know, the iPad and but most of the time is just three monitors going out all at once. Yes,

William Harris 2:58

yeah, I'm right there with you. I've got three monitors. I've got one here, one here. I've got my MacBook Pro here. I've got the iPad up here, which I right now using as the teleprompter so I can see you clearly.

Pam Didner 3:09

Oh, I should have done, yeah, never used. People told me I should use that. I was just never used to it. So I it's, I need to look into it, all

William Harris 3:20

right, I'll send you my setup afterwards. What's interesting, I don't know if you saw this, and by the time this launches, it'll hopefully be live for everybody. Right now, it's just developers have access to it, but I have the apple vision pro. A big fan of the apple vision Pro, bought it the day that it came out, and I have a video about how I use it to work at coffee shops. And what's interesting is, when I use my apple vision Pro. I've got six monitors. There's so many different things you can do with it, but there they just released the ultra wide monitor on the Apple vision Pro. Again, it's only a developer, so I don't have access to it yet, but I've seen the videos, and you've just got this massive, curved monitor, basically, that you, they say, the equivalent of three monitors. And so I'm excited about that for working remote for people like you and me. You know,

Pam Didner 4:04

honestly, my husband was like, What do you want for holiday? I was like, I actually have a list for you. What's on it, yeah, give me a vision set. Okay, I want that very expensive. That's not cheap. Actually, every single apple product is like, cost of fortune,

William Harris 4:24

okay, but here's, here's the thing, what's the cost of a really good, ultra wide monitor, right? Like, $1,000 up. And then this is one that you could take with you at a coffee shop. Yeah,

Pam Didner 4:35

I know, but I hear you. I get it. I know. I'm not. I understand you are totally right. Yes.

William Harris 4:42

Okay, now, back into the generative AI stuff. The question I want to start off with is, what's the problem with generative AI prompting? Right now? What are we doing wrong?

Pam Didner 4:52

Okay, so it depends. There are some people are using it very effectively, and they use it every day and whenever they have a question. Question, they just go to ChatGPT, or they go into Gen AI, and they get answered. Okay? But there are some people, some marketers, they have tried it, they don't really have a lot of success. And they also have other sets of people. Is like, you know what? It's not for me. I don't want to bother I don't want to give it a shot, right? So depending on who you're, who are listening, and you are at a different stages of the AI usage, right, especially on the J and AI prompt. And if you are successfully using you know the AI and whatever prompts you are doing are giving you great results. Yay. Good for you. Okay, keep doing what you're doing, but have a point of view, right? Have a point of view on like, what AI is telling you is good or bad. If you are not, if you are using AI prongs but not getting a result, you have to think about it. Why? Why is not doing that a lot of time? It has a lot to do with you are not giving a very specific guidance, or you are not putting things in the context that AI understand. So and try that. And you also have to be patient, right? A lot of time that when you try first time, the answer is like, I don't know about that. You know, you should try it again. You should paraphrase it. It's kind of like teaching children, right? If you teach your child, your children to do something, if they didn't get it right, you have to say it differently, right? So what that is. And for people who are not using it, you should definitely give it a try, because it's important that you know how to do yes,

William Harris 6:27

yes. Step one, if you're you're doing it incorrectly. If you're not doing it at all, that's the first thing, right? So you have to do it. You have to start using it. And you started to get into this a little bit. So it's like, but what's the solution? How do we do smart, generative AI prompting, as you know, a modern, modern AI marketer.

Pam Didner 6:50

So the way I use it, I just want to share my point of view and how I use it, and it may apply to you may not, but just kind of give it a thought, whatever jobs you are doing right now. It doesn't matter you are email marketer, or you are social media marketer, or you are even just writing a strategy, or you have to create a marketing plan as a strategist, for example, AI can actually provide help in every single role. The thing is, a lot of people was like, Oh, I don't know why I can do AI can do a lot of things. The problem is, AI can wear multiple hats depending on what your roles are. That's the things you have to understand. If you are a domain generation Manager, you can literally ask AI or ChatGPT, please write me a demand generation plan for this industry and sell this type of product. And my company does blah blah blah. My audience are blah blah blah, and I need to create 1000 leads. My budget is blah, blah, blah. And what are some demand generation tactics can I use? You can literally, why what I just said, and the AI will idea make that noise I did, basically spill all the stuff. And then you will take a look and see, does this make sense? Doesn't matter what kind of question you ask. Yeah, I can give you an answer, one answer, but you are the one. Need to make a judgment call. Is that a good answer? Or is that something that you can you know, you need to modify it so you need to have a point of view.

William Harris 8:37

Yeah, having a point of view is good. Let's say that we go ahead and start doing this. What are the Elements of a good prompt that that takes it to the next level? Because I feel like even people on my team sometimes I'm showing them, so the different prompts that I'm using, and they'll sometimes say, ah, you know, I'm not that good at prompting yet. And it's like so we're working through different things, and there are maybe some things that I've found that work better than others. But what are the things that you found help to take your prompt from just being okay to being this is an excellent prompt.

Pam Didner 9:10

Okay, so I wrote a book. Yes, five of them. This is only 50 pages, okay, it's very small book, but they are over 75 prompts for sales and marketing professionals. And the way I write those prompt is kind of like a template, right? And I'm going to read a couple of them so you can get a sense of it, and then you can just opened it and you're like, Okay, if I really want to say, create a strategy, what should I do, and if I need to, like, I want AI to actually help me to find the target customers, or what can I do? Right? So this is one prompt I have written, and I want to just read it. I'm a marketer for parentheses, business or organization name. So I'm a marketer for your. Company, and this company is in whatever industry, healthcare or manufacturing. So describe, then our products does blah blah blah. Describe your products, right, your organization's product, our competitors are blah blah blah blah. Our competitors, our current customers demographics. Now you describe our current customers are kind of like this type of customers demographics, right? And also describe the details of what is the customer trait like you understand what the current customer is. So what are some of the marketing strategy that could help us better reach out to our target customers. Can you list this specific number of the target customer for me and tailor for the strategy to reach out to them? So it's kind of like you have to provide a lot of input, right? So I'm not saying, like, Okay, give me your target customer for this type of company. That's too generic. If you give a generic guidance, guess what? You're going to get generic answer. But if you provide a lot of information, as if you understand your product, your company, right? Your current customers? Well, then how can these, my products serve other type of customers? Can you identify who they are? So that's how you need to write. So the way to write, actually, a good sales and marketing prongs is you actually need to know your business. You need to know your audience well, and you need to know your company well. That's the,

William Harris 11:48

you know, it reminds me a lot of working with, let's say, Upwork or something like that, right? Where

Pam Didner 11:56

you have to write a very solid job description, right?

William Harris 11:59

You do, and if you, if you give, let's say something to somebody who is not a native English speaker in another country, on Upwork, and you give them very generic directions, the likelihood that you're going to get the output you want is is low, and the fault is on you, because you didn't provide the likelihood is that they could execute very excellently if you know what you want, who you're trying to get. Yeah, yeah. And so better communication like that. I think that's a really good call out, and the different functions and features that you had there are important, right? So you're calling out, like, here's like, who I am, here's who the customer is. Here's what our products do, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. Now ChatGPT, can say, Oh, got an understanding? Yes.

Pam Didner 12:49

And let me see what I can come up for you, yeah.

William Harris 12:53

Now, if you didn't get what you wanted out of it, how do you refine that? Let's say it gave you something like this is good. But what are some of the follow up prompts you would use there? So

Pam Didner 13:03

there are a lot of way to actually do rewrite. So again, when the AI provides like an answer to you, obviously it's a very tailored and a very customized answer. You have to kind of read it, and you kind of have to have a good sense where it feels short, where is not giving you enough information. Does that make sense? So if they give you answer, and you're like the way they talk about the target customers in the health care it's a little bit shallow, so you can basically the next kind of, like the chain of thought type of prompt. That's how you call how I call it. It's basically the next thing is, like, you know you can say, based on the information you provide previously, they kind of know that the target customers for healthcare segment, you mentioned this, but can you elaborate a little bit more? And when you say elaborate a little bit more, you have to give them a specific direction, elaborate in terms of how you want to understand that target customers a little bit more give them a very specific direction. And that sometimes can be a challenge that requires you have a sense of a clarity what you are asking for. And a lot of time we don't have that, especially come down to a second time we ask you know additional information that you think requires you to know right, your product, your business and the and also potential customers. What you have in mind go ahead, well,

William Harris 14:45

it's something that Andy Crestodina said on a podcast earlier that I liked, which was something along the lines of, you know, it's AI is an amplifier, right? It's going to take you and level you up, but you still have. To know what you need to know. And to your point, it's like, if you get an answer that sounds good enough to a lay person, they might take that and run with it. But if you somebody is an expert in this, you should be able to spot where there are issues and increase that or or optimize it, or tweak that,

Pam Didner 15:17

which goes back to Andy, amend to end, yes, yeah.

William Harris 15:23

Well, and then, and then the idea of, like, these follow up questions. These are thoughtful follow up questions. It's not just elaborate, like you said, it's like having a thoughtful and this goes back to, I don't even know who said this, but something along the lines of, the most powerful person in the room is the one asking questions, right? And sometimes people ask questions just to appear as if they know what they're doing, but they're doing, but they're really asking generic questions, like, can you elaborate that? And it's like, that's not a very thoughtful question. That's not really like, you know what's going on you, but if you have a more thoughtful way of approaching that, elaborate like this, about these things on this topic, or I don't just I disagree with you on this, can you look at this from this perspective? Right? And so I disagree with you on on that tactic. But can you look at that again from a, maybe a behavioral science perspective, right? Whatever that might be, I think is a better way to follow up.

Pam Didner 16:10

Agree. Well, said, yeah. Um, okay,

William Harris 16:15

so let's take this a little bit deeper. Then what if your prompt gets a little bit too long. There's a limit to a lot of these prompts that you can get into. Yes, that does Yeah. How do you handle when you have a lot of information that you're trying to share? Because you really want to get very deep, but you can't fit it all into one prompt.

Pam Didner 16:37

So yes, I kind of there was one time that one of my clients said, I want the AI to read the whole website, sure, just to read the whole website. They have hundreds of content and and identify. What are some of the proposed what are the content they should create in the future? That's a that's a huge topic. So we initially, that was kind of like a while back and the previous generation of the ChatGPT we, because it's a public information. Their website is public, so it doesn't matter. So we we try to actually have the ChatGPT go read like through the website, but, but unfortunately, it doesn't. It doesn't read the whole thing as far as like hell, because there are some topics that was missing. And then we also, then we decided try different way to do it. One is we just use a simple, you know, URL, and then basically ask the ChatGPT to read it and come up with the existing content and the topics and also what the gaps are. Okay. Then the other way we were doing is a little bit different is we write a huge loan prompt and to explain that for this specific website, these are who our target audiences are, and the type of content we already created. And we write a huge like a description and and at some point there's a cut off, you know, like it's like there's a character limitation. And so what we did with that is we kind of break down the the long prompts into three sections, and we feel like that started with something very general, and see what they come up with, and then we ask the question based on the answer and see they can come up with a little bit more elaborate or detailed answers. So we did that, and the answer is, actually the results are mixed. And because we try to do that in many different way, because when you are asking AI, you can ask them differently. So we try, kind of like several different approach of asking them and see what is the recommendations are in terms of the content gap that we need to do so that is one, then the other one we did is we actually use kind of like a code and to Pull the data actually from, like the content management tools, in terms of the for all the contents they have on their website, we kind of know how many downloads for each content pieces. So we have that information. We also have the target audience information, so we take additional data and also the prompts we have, and then we kind of using a data as additional information to determine what are some of the potential gap that we need to do? Does that make sense? So we tried three different approaches. Interesting enough, the. The answer at the end, are actually different. Sure, are slightly different in terms of the content gap that the AI recommend to us, that has a lot to do with because on this specific website, they target multiple personas and multiple customers, and they are gap for each target customers and and they are a little bit different, and we did not do a good job to tell the AI like, Okay, for this specific target customers, what are the gap with the type the type of content we need to engage with that customer. For these type of customers, what are the content gap? We didn't specify the product early enough, so the outcomes we got are actually a little bit different. And then we have to kind of think it through and read it through and kind of like, interpret. AI was like, why am I doing this? I'm trying to interpret an artificial intelligence answer. That's kind of dumb, but anyway, long story short, it does give us some insight in terms of what we need to move forward, but we are the ones still need to make that call. Is that helpful? Yeah,

William Harris 21:11

yeah, yeah. Let's take it another level. When you and I are talking before you talk about, you know, the first, the most minimal level, is just really engineering those prompts better. But if we take it deeper, the idea is building your own, building your own. Ai, right? How are you going about building this? And why does that take it deeper?

Pam Didner 21:31

So I actually did talk about it on the first book that, again, this is like only 100 pages. So I wrote two books kind of pretty much at the same time, which is right here and this, these two books will launch in September. This nice 24 very recent. This is like only 100 pages, and this is only 50 pages, and this is basically all AI prompt examples. So if you want to see what kind of AI prom example you can use, this is very much like a tool book. Okay, if you just want to learn about prom, just get this one and go to chapter three. And the reason is, there's not a lot of setup I get to the point. I really just get to the point on both books and on this specific book, and I did talk about it. They are many ways of using AI, and there are different tiers, if you will. Of course, the easiest way that you can do is basically, you use copilot, use Gemini from Microsoft, from Google, or you use ChatGPT or claw from anthropic. The bottom line is, you open an AI bot, you stop asking question. That's minimal, right? That you don't create anything. You're just asking questions. It's kind of like Google search, but it's very tailored. Google search, instead of, when you search on the you search on Google, they give you hundreds of hundreds of content pieces you have to sift through. Don't do we don't do that on ChatGPT. You still do a search in a way answer. So that's one way. The second way is like, maybe you are asking same questions, you know, every day, right? For example, you are doing the podcast. You have to come up with the podcast title, you have to come up with the podcast description, and you have a brief bio about PAMP dinner. You have to write, kind of like a bio for your podcast show notes, right? These are the three things you have to do every single time, like when you have an episode, can AI automate this for you? Like, the only thing you have to enter every single time is like, you enter PM, somebody's file. Okay, AI doesn't make that noise, that something will come up you you enter like, the the transcript they come up with the title you enter, you know, something else. And, for example, okay, they come up with title, or even you enter the raw footage, they can do an edit for you. So there is a very consistent tab every single time that you have to do. Is it possible that you can build a bot to do that, right? That's kind of automating the process, right? So there are way to do that. You can do a customized bot, and that you can just enter a specific tasks every single time to that bot. And that's that, that that bot would do it for you.

William Harris 24:32

So and where are you doing this? Which one

Pam Didner 24:35

they are, I think so at least I cannot speak to I'm not technical, so I cannot speak to everything. If you actually have a point of view, please jump in and help, in general, like in the ChatGPT or even co pilot, that you can build a custom you can build custom bot, like, literally on the platform, and you can see, like, there's a lot of bots has been built. And. Kind of like the App Store. Think about this, a bot store, like you can type a specific a functional task, and they are bots probably being built by someone else that you can use. It's also very similar to plug in in the WordPress, right? Yeah, same. It's

a great way to describe so

you can do it pretty much within kind of like the ChatGPT or any kind of Lo large language model platform. Then there's another level right, which is, think about that you have HubSpot and or and you have salesforce.com you also have point of sale and accounting software and everything. All the data can be accessed by API. Can you pull all this information in theory right and also add that information as a part of large language model, and then you can ask specific questions related about your customers? Does that make sense? So that require a little bit of customization? Probably it. Or anybody who does AI consulting know how to do the back end. That's one way. That's also the next tier of using all your data integrated with a large language model. And hopefully you can as a back end, then you can build a front end as a chat, as a customized AI bot. The next level, the highest, is you build predictive model right using the large language model, plus all the data, and you build a specific regression analysis or predictive models to forecast or help you address some of the key decisions that you need to make. So these are the four levels, you know, as in a nutshell, if you will

William Harris 26:53

love it, I'm going to pull back to, let's call it level two, building the bot, because you had asked, you know, if there are some of the things, some of the tools that I'm using then to help build out those bots. I love exactly what you call it, almost like the App Store, if you would, for ChatGPT, etc. And it's really good, right? Because it can pull in from other sources then too. So if you're not familiar with it, and you're thinking, well, I need something more that's data capable. Well, ChatGPT bots can pull in from Wolfram Alpha. If you're like, well, I need something that's very visual. Well, it's pulling in from Dall e right? And so using all those, if people aren't aware of that, that it's like, you can do all of it still from within that system. But, yes, but what I also have really enjoyed is you.com I was first turned on to this by Noah Kravitz, which is another guest on this episode. We talked all about this. He's the host of Nvidia's AI podcast. Oh yeah, it is really, really good episode to get into if you're into AI at all. But with you.com you have access, I think it's still like five different ones. You have access to ChatGPT and Gemini, and you have access to Claude, and you have access to a couple others that I don't remember, where they all are. You have options, yeah, and so if you're like, hey, this one, I think is me better served with ChatGPT, you could build out that bot. This one's gonna be better served, and you could share it with your team very easily. So that way it's not public, but it's not private. You can share it with just anybody else that's on your team's plan. And so you can say, hey, I built this bot for writing ad copy or writing, yeah,

Pam Didner 28:23

for this specific industry, again, it's very specific task, right? Centric functionality. Yes, go ahead, yes.

William Harris 28:30

Sorry, yep. And so that's been one that I've really enjoyed working with a lot more than as well. For those who are looking and saying, Well, where do I start building up my own bot?

Pam Didner 28:41

I am so proud of you.

William Harris 28:45

Thank you, Pam. Let's get into some of the some of the practical stuff. I know that you and I talked about maybe sharing some practical examples. You shared one already. What are, what are some other practical like, here's an exact one that you can copy, or here's something you can show that kind of just takes us through a very real world. Example.

Pam Didner 29:12

I am just going to share the things at least I try to do and but this is more kind of repurposing content. So for content creators out there, you won't know exactly what I'm talking about. And a lot of time when I create content, I always think about that, how can I repurpose them for different formats? Okay, for example, when I write a blog post, and it's very detailed, it's long, 1200 words, and I provide a lot of know how, and it's very nicely structured, and honestly, most of the time, and this is probably not the best use my time, but I like it this way is I. Will write a draft like, I will literally write a draft myself, and then I will and then I will ask, kind of like ChatGPT to rewrite a little bit, and I will compare my draft with the ChatGPT strapped. There are some stuff they say a whole lot better than me. Then I take it. But there are some stuff I was like, I like mine. Then I will keep that. So that's one way of using it, in terms of easy way of using it. I'm using I'm talking about the basic right then, when I created the blog post and I write it, and I do actually have but it's my original content. A lot of time when I created the any kind of blog post, at least for me, is I write my initial draft. That's just me, sure. Then I will see how can AI can improve, make it better. Then a lot of time I will take that blog post and I will say, I want to create a video, but you have to understand the way that you write the opening for the blog post is different than if you write the opening for the video on the blog post, you can, you can have a setup, right? And then you go on into your key point, but on the video, and I want to make it only eight to, you know, eight to nine minutes, eight to 10 minutes. It's a very short period of time to talk about 1200 words of a blog post, sure. So I have the cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and plus, I need to have a nice hook. So the first five second, hi everybody today, I want to talk about the challenges of creating marketing plan, you know. So it's like, what is the hook? You have to talk about that hook in a very upfront. So I will also write, kind of like opening and I will pick and choose what are the things I want to add to the video. And then again, sometimes I will ask ChatGPT to write a video script based on the blog post. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to home in. I will write a quick draft and I ask Japanese ChatGPT to modify it. Does that make sense? The other thing is, now you have blog posts, you have a video script. Okay, then, of course, you do the video recording. Once I do the video recording, I actually use Opus clip to actually do kind of like the shorts, like YouTube shorts that they going to cut it. They also can add a caption on top of it. So I'm using a third party do tools to actually cut the the final edited video and to to kind of YouTube shorts or the Tiktok shorts,

William Harris 32:31

then you found, okay, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

I found that Opus works well for shorter videos. I have plugged it in for my podcasts, which are, like, an hour and 15 minutes long, and it pulls out some interesting clips that I'm like, Ah, that didn't work out, but I have found, yeah, a 10 minute video is great for it.

Pam Didner 32:52

I totally agree. So I can tell you in terms of the the number of the video I tend to pick up from Opus clip. Obviously, AI make that selection. Okay, yep, and, and I would say, when they give me, they usually give you, average about eight to 12, you know, clips. And most of the time I can pick only two or less, sure. So a lot of them are, and I don't know, you know, it's not that great and but AI is, is working on it, it's improving. It's going to get better over a period of time, right? And so that is one. Then the other thing I do using AI, I'm explaining to you so you can see how use in terms of content creation is now I have a video. Now I have a blog post. If I actually want to, I can also do TikTok video. When I do a TikTok video is 90 seconds or less, so if I want to talk about one topic, like a 1200 words a blog post, now to eight to 10 minutes of the YouTube video. If I want to do a TikTok, I have to cut it even shorter, right? So sometimes I will ask ChatGPT to create TikTok video script. Sometimes I will just write it and have ChatGPT to rewrite it. Is that helpful? So, and you can see that, at least at the minimal level, from my perspective, is you can, if you create one type of content, how you can use AI to actually change the content and then modify the content and have them create the new script or the new content pieces for you.

William Harris 34:31

I'm curious if you've solved something that I've tried to figure out. And I have not been successful with it in AI yet, and I think it's just not quite there yet. So I also like to use it for repurposing content. And it's very good at being able to go through the transcripts and pull out quotes. So I use ChatGPT for that, and I've got that trained very well. I still find that sometimes it pulls out some quotes and I'm like, that's a really weird quote, but that's fine. It pulls out enough good ones to where they're used. Possible. Then I want to turn those quotes sometimes into, like, a quote image, like you would on social media, right? Nice, square or whatever, and it's got, you know, some good font that it's using. And it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, Pam didner. And I'm like, Oh, this was something really great that Pam said on the episode, and I want to share that. And I put it into chat, CPT Dolly, and I get garbage now I will say that it handles words fairly well, but when I like the thing that I got out, it was like the font wasn't even remotely closed. I'll have to, I'll share it to you. I tweeted about this yesterday. I've tried it now in mid journey, and it doesn't handle words very well. I tried it in somebody. What's that?

Pam Didner 35:42

No, no, you cannot. No, that's where the mid journey, in terms of images for for like my, for my, for my line of work, if you will, sure

William Harris 35:54

I like mid journey. I think mid journey is still better at creating life like images than I've seen with Dall, E, like, I get some like, like, if I want like a person and I want it to look like a person, it does a really good job. Adobe Firefly is another really good one. But again, it doesn't handle words very well. Somebody suggested to me ideagram, which is i, d, e, o, G, R, A, M. It did a much better job. But it still didn't. It still fumbled over really getting this into something that I thought was good. I don't know if you've had any experience trying to do this, but I'm curious if you have,

Pam Didner 36:30

no I have not. Okay. I tried initially, I did try. Have aI create images, even photo stocks, if you will, sure, but I have not been very successful. That has a lot to do with, I don't know the technical jargons about how to give AI accurate prompt. For example, you know, I would say, create an image with two people talking, but I have to tell what type of people talking? It's an upper body, or do they have to show the whole body is a side angle, and also, what is the background? Is the background is next to the window, have the light coming through. So honestly, on the the B2B side of the image creation, you actually have to have a specific vision in mind and then give the directions to the AI, and then you kind of have to know a lot of technical jargons in terms of how shot is done. When I say shot is like a movie, shot is not like drinking shot. It's like how you know a frame like you see, like a lot of time, is a side shot? Is it, you know, full angle? And also, is it Caucasian men or versus Asian woman and and when they talk, you know what? What part of the face did you see? Do you not see? Does that make sense? So I have not. I have not been very successful because I'm not technical enough or understand the jargon well enough to give that kind of specific instruction. So yeah, I see a lot of stuff being creative, but they are more sci fi. They're more gaming, and some of the shots are gorgeous, but I don't know how to use them. I cannot use for my line of work not for the audience I want to go after? Does that make sense? So I I decided, because there's a barriers I have to go through, because I have to learn whole new Jag, uh, technical jargons to actually do the image creation, I give that up 100% and just use Canva. I'm still using Canva, and they also have a smart studio, and you can try, you know, some of the AI features within the Canva studio, but no, I feel miserably on the image creation, especially on the B2B fun. So

William Harris 38:58

the, I think the thing that you called out that I like the most there is still you're going to get out of this, what you put into it, and so it can. We talked about this being like a level enhancer, right? So it's going to enhance what we do. But it's like, if I have no, like you said, if I don't have enough frame of reference technical jargon to use that fits within video and, you know, graphic design knowledge, if I'm still just like, hey, I need this. Don't know how to do it,

Pam Didner 39:27

how to make it work. And that's why that expertise still comes into important because AI at this time is still like, right? Sure you still follow exact direction you provide do this, and then you give a very enough, you know, my target customer is this. My call to action this. I want you to do this right. So imagine you want to do that on images or on the video. You need to know the technical jargon. Otherwise they cannot function because AI still. Go up. Or should I say it nicely, a bot?

William Harris 40:03

Yeah. So I, I will share one example that I did that it's moderately successful with the AI generation. For images,

Pam Didner 40:13

love to hear like love to hear that. And you can please enlight, enlighten all of us.

William Harris 40:19

I Yeah, we'll see if it's enlightenment. I'll just say that it worked out well, which was, I like, where you went with Canva. But I did use mid journey for this. My dad is a country music singer, Todd Harris. He's on Apple Music, yeah. And so he wanted a new, like, album cover, if you would, for a single that he was releasing stuff, yes, yeah. And so I was able to use it to get the image that I wanted, and then I was able to take that image that we liked, and we're like, great, this is I could feed it into the lyrics from the song. It's like, here's the lyrics from the song, here's what we're trying to convey, here's the title of the song. And it did a good job with that. I did use ChatGPT to refine my prompt, because I wasn't quite getting what I wanted. So I said, ChatGPT, this is what I'm trying to convey to mid journey. Can you help me? Because this was before Dolly was

Pam Didner 41:07

incorporated. I love that. That's great. And then I took that well,

William Harris 41:11

then I took that to Canva and added the lyrics over or added the words over top, so the title, the song and his name over top. But I used that in Canva, like you said.

Pam Didner 41:19

So you did one thing that I didn't think about. So I I was whenever I tried to do image creation, which is not something I'm not very autistic, okay, I'm not okay. So I always feel like, if I want to create some image, I need to give a very specific technical instructions, right? But you did something a little bit different, which is, I like, because you already know the the feel of the songs, you know your dad's personality, and then you feed the AI lyric, the sound and you know, and also, possibly, maybe you're dancing in style. So there's a lot of inside information that the AI can actually take on to create something that more aligned with what you envision, but, but imagine you don't have those information, right? It's somebody you don't even know very well, and then then you have to it's an artist you don't know very well. That's a zoom, and in that it's a painter that don't really have a lot of painting that you can make a references, and then you have to create something that will be very challenging, but I'm very happy that the way that you are talking about it is like, you still know, you feed the Lyric, you feed the title, and there's additional insight you can feed into AI for them to come up with something that the image that you love,

William Harris 42:42

yeah, and it worked out well, getting into, let's say, theoretical stuff, because we started talking a little bit about theory, this is a good question that you and I were talking about before. And you have a good stance on this, or a strong stance on this, is AI going to take my job?

Pam Didner 43:01

Okay? I want to answer that in the long term and short term, okay? In the long term, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Nobody knows. If anybody say they know, they don't know, nobody does right? Nobody can see the future. The

William Harris 43:14

microwave didn't take a lot of jobs from people, right? What? Microwave didn't take a lot of jobs from people, right? Like we have other inventions that that do things fast, but it doesn't remove jobs. Okay? So,

Pam Didner 43:28

but in the short term, what I can see in foreseeable is the next four, five years, you have to understand AI at this time, at least the AI that can do a lot of business work, including the coding work AI is still a software or a code or algorithm embedded into, you know, your computer or in the cloud. There's no physical form of like a B2B marketer, there's no physical form of a sales manager. There's no physical form. I know, I know a lot of companies are trying to get to that stage and build a physical form to house the AI brain. I get that. Okay, so if you think about it, we are training AI. We are, we are working very hard to train AI right now. So mainly what we are doing is we are kind of build a brain, right? Somebody has to build like the physical of us in order to really take our jobs. But it we are not there yet, but people are working toward that direction. And that's one thing. And second thing is a lot of time at this time, it still require judgment call, right? So AI probably can create domain generation plan. Ai probably can give you, you know, what are the keywords you need to do for a specific blog post. Ai possibly can even tell you. Who are your future target customers should be based on your new product? Those are very challenging questions that AI can answer, but you have to understand one thing. Ai doesn't know your brand, your company's brands. Ai doesn't know your company's products as good as you are. Ai doesn't know the company politics, right? So there are stuff that a I still don't know, there's still human needs to get involved, right? And, well, how will that eventually morph? I don't know, maybe, well, one day, but as of now, what I can see is here to actually help you, but will eventually cross that line, maybe, maybe not. But based on what I have seen in the history, there's a job. They are job being terminated, but they also new jobs being created, right? So you can see that with the Ford assembly line, right? Initially, they hire tons of people, and they ultimately assembly line, they lay off a bunch of people. And you can see that with the phone. For longest time, they use the cable girls, right? And then the automatic lines, and then the cable girls were gone, and but the different jobs are created, right? So for longest time, the receptionist also have to type, because a typewriter then company computer got invented. So I don't know what kind of jobs will be created, right? But as a, as a, as a professional, you always have to have a sense that if AI continues to learn, so should we sure that's also continue to learn, build a different skill set. It's very important, right? So if AI is learning, why shouldn't? Why should we stop learning? Keep up. I

William Harris 46:53

like where you're going with this. It's a very it's a it's non dystopic, right?

Pam Didner 46:59

It's, I don't know, I don't have the answer. But the only thing is that's do the best we can.

William Harris 47:05

But I like the point that you just brought up that it's like, yeah, it might, it might replace certain jobs. In fact, let's just say it's very likely to replace certain jobs, yeah, but it's also going to create need for other jobs, just like other technology has done for so many years,

Pam Didner 47:22

right? A lot of people say AI is different. AI is going to take over. Okay, yes, maybe, yes, and but I I don't know what other jobs might be created just because AI takes over. You know these jobs? I mean, long time ago, every single technology changes. We never, we don't know. We never know, like, what kind of job will be eliminated and what job will be created, and maybe AI is different. And I'm trying to be, you know, I don't want to be very adamant about it, but I want to be hopeful,

William Harris 47:59

you know, yeah, at the very least, the to the person who adopts the new technology and becomes proficient at it ends up still, let's say, usually, benefiting very well in the short and long term. I'm thinking of, there's the James J Hill House here in Minnesota, and apparently he was one of the railroad tycoons, and, you know, adopting that at that time worked out very well to a server. So if you're somebody who is a marketer, you are doing a job and you're worried about AI replacing your job, one of the best things you can do is to be the best at using AI for your job. That's

Pam Didner 48:33

one way, or learn other new skill sets. Sure, from my perspective, I mean, there is very there's various disciplines in marketing fields, right? So if you are doing content creation, well, what else can you learn that there's might be opportunities for you to come along in the future? I

William Harris 48:51

like that you're very well seasoned. You've learned a lot. You've done a lot in business. So outside of generative AI, if businesses are scaling from 10 to 100 million, what are some of the other things that you've learned along the way that you think helped to break through those barriers to accelerate growth? Okay?

Pam Didner 49:13

Obviously, as a founder, or if you are growing your company, there's always a certain stage of growing pain, right? It's, it's just, it's just part of the the life you are 10 million, you're like, yes, and it was like, Okay, how can I grow to 20 million? How can I grow to 50 million? So from my perspective, as a founder or as the owner, you always have to think ahead, not necessarily in terms of what's the revenue growth? Is what you need to support that growth. When I talking about what you need is, what's the back end that needs to make sure everything's not tied together to support that? You know, 20 million and 50 million, for example, maybe you use, I'm just when I when I say. Specific marketing platform. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just making a point of I'm making a point. So Zoho, for example, is a great suite for small businesses, and maybe you grow to a mid sized company, Zoho is not necessarily for you. Then you have to use a little bit Missis or enterprise version, you know, the suite. What is that? Right? So my take on this is there are two things you should worry about, hiring people you should worry about your product needs to be relevant and and and current. Oh, to me, everybody's worried about that, but things that tend to worry people tend to worry less and take for granted, and it always kind of like a reactive and a passive is nobody's think about technology. What technology you need to actually make that happen and to get ahead of technology to make that transition, from my perspective, super important. You know you're going to grow in 20 million and 50 million. What? How can you change your marketing automation? How do you change some of the technology to an enterprise version of it to actually support and embrace that the growth? A lot of people always wait until last minute to do that, or is it, after thought, from my perspective, that needs to be and it creates a huge amount of headache for everybody. I think that's important to address. But the flip side of that is you want to address that proactively. Guess what? All this enterprise version platform costs money nobody wants to invest so you have to think about it like you want to grow. Do you want to also put the money in first to make sure that you have a technology that's set up your people are ready to use those technology to welcome that growth? That's a chicken and egg question.

William Harris 51:46

So this is a good topic, because I feel like as an entrepreneur, you take risks to start the business in the first place, and then you get to a point where things are maybe they've you've grown, but you've plateaued, yeah, and the last thing you want to do is take another risk, because you've already risked so much sometimes. And so I do see a lot of entrepreneur founders get to that plateau, and they're just unwilling or afraid to take the risk again to get to that next level. The things that need to happen, like you said, to invest in this and on where we see this on the advertising side is, you know, maybe you have reached a plateau where, you know, maybe you started working with us, you were spending $10,000 a month. Now we're spending, you, you know, $500,000 a month and but you're reaching a plateau, and it's like, I'm not sure that we can get to a million dollars a month and still keep your CAC where it needs to be, or the return, or the M, E, R, whatever it needs to be, without, let's just say, some significant investment into maybe a new product line. Or maybe this is, you know, a different customer segment than who you've currently been going after. Or maybe this is an investment into wildly different creative than what you've used before. There are these other things, and some of those, you know, really good creative is going to cost money, and so we're optimizing the ads, but we can only do so much with the creative that we have. Whatever that might be, there's like this, this next level of risk that you have to take again and then again and then again and again. I know

Pam Didner 53:12

it's it never stops. The thing is, and this happens to me too, and I always feel like, I'm just going to climb over this mountain, and everything will be good. Then when you climb over that mountain, then there's a mountain, like another mountain you need to climb. And when you climb that mountain, you said, everything's going to be great. I'm going to be just fine. And then once you get to that stage, it was like, Okay, there's a higher mountain is waiting. It's waiting for you, and for longest time, like when I I've been on my own in the past 10 years, and I have good days, I have bad days. And you don't know how many time I have told myself, I I just need to get through today, and I just need to make sure that the workflow I build for today work for tomorrow. I will be good. I'll be just good. This is great. This is for demand engine. I just need to create another email. And for this email, I have this kind of tutorial, and I just gonna guess do this, it's gonna be good. Then I come to realize it never ends. And the technology and everything you do is a money pit.It's a money that's another thing we all have to understand. And, and I talk about this cash, it's like, you need to make sure that you have a cash to to kind of, you know, to make things happen. And I totally understand a lot of founders at a certain stage, it was like, Okay, 10 million, 15 million. We did that, and they are not willing to invest. I get I get it. I get it because it is money pit. It never ends, especially on SAS based platform, if you don't invest in the technology, you constantly adding features, you're going to be obsolete within the. Actor. So, so whenever people want to do, like to be a founder, I was like, You sure you want to do this. It's a lot of work.

William Harris 55:11

I like the mountain analogy that you gave, though, and it reminds me a lot of Ryan Holiday's the opposite.

Pam Didner 55:17

I love his. I love his books. And I read, I have not read the recent book, but the earlier books I have, I have read a bunch of them, Yeah,

William Harris 55:25

same. And I think that just that concept of exactly what you just described, which is I fell into that trap for a while, right? It was like, once I hired this person, then I'll have time this person, yeah, I realized that it's no but, but, but in a good way, where it's like, Wait a minute. What if, you know, if you're if your whole mindset is, I just got to get over this mountain, and then things are going to be okay. What if climbing the mountain is the thing? Yeah. What if that is the thing, right? It's like, when you enjoy your journey, yes. So there was a, I don't even remember what movie it was, but there was, like, it was almost kind of like karate kid type style. There's this young kid in this older guru that was, you know, teaching him some things and and they climb up this mountain. As they're climbing up the mountain, it's grueling, and they get to the top of the mountain, and the kids, like, well, like, Okay, so we're here, but now what? And he was like, what do we what are we here for? And the guru kind of looks around and goes, Uh, that rock. He points to this little pebble, kind of, he's like, We climbed all the way for the rock, for this rock. He was like, it was never about the destination. It was about journey. You're now stronger, you are mentally sharp, like, all of these things had nothing to do with the summit itself.

Pam Didner 56:44

Well, Said, I totally understand, you know, it just kind of, you know, sometimes I was like, Oh, my God, it's pointless. That just sounds so bad to say no,

William Harris 56:57

but it's honest. And I'd say anybody who's a founder, who's listening this, who's feeling that, just know that you are in good company. Because I don't know a single founder who has ever not felt that way before. I have some other really good episodes on that really good one there would be with Robert Gilbreth, where we talk about, basically, something along the lines of, like, being the CEO is the loneliest feeling in the world. So if you are this person, listen to that one. It'll help. Okay, let's dig into a little bit more. Now I want to get into who is Pam Didner, because it's always fun to get to know person that we're talking to as well. One of the ones that I want to start with is you do yoga five days a week. You said you recently went to Patagonia. You do a lot of really good fun, which I've never been to Patagonia, but the pictures are amazing. I'd love to go sometime. Tell me a little bit about like, why did you decide to start doing yoga five days? Why did that become such a passion for you?

Pam Didner 57:55

So I started yoga literally about, I would say, more than two decades ago, and I'm a type, a person. I don't know how to relax, okay, just code is like, this is status, Asian mentality, okay, Asian people just don't know how to relax. They will work until they drop. And then I had a corporate job. It was very stressful, and I always take the job with me wherever I go, like, if I have to get something done for my manager, and I was like, I don't know the answer, I will be thinking about it all the time. And and then I I like, I said, I don't know how to relax. And then a friend of mine told me to say, you probably should do yoga. Yoga is going to help you. I was like, Yeah, whatever, whatever. And then I started doing yoga. And initially it was not, it never really helped. Okay, you were like, what? It never really helped. And you did it for, like, almost two decades. What are you doing? Well, it's more kind of like when they tell you to stretch, or when they tell you to move at a certain way. You just, you kind of just go with the flow. But my mind never really stopped thinking. I'm always like, I call it this, like, do you know there's a term called shower thought? Like, when you're washing your hair and you are, like, scrubbing your your your body in the shower, and you're like, you have shower thoughts. You're like, things will pop into your mind, right? So when I was doing the yoga same thing, I were like, Okay, what is my yoga thought? Oh, what is my grocery list? Oh, okay, all right, let me just breathe a little and I would like move and so, so there are moments I'm actually just, I will relax a little bit. So, and I started doing that and that that helped me to be, that helps me to be, become very self aware of my body, like if I, if I feel sore, or I, you know, icky, at a certain way, and I, I'm very attuned with my body, and that, I think that's the biggest benefit about yoga. And I also become pretty self aware. Right, like I'm talking to you, and I was like, Okay, I'm moving my hand. What am I doing? Pam, whatever, you know, that kind of thing. So that really helps in terms of, like, doing yoga, but that just for me and some people can, like, really walking. They walk into a yoga room, they're like, completely tuned out. I can, but somehow it does help me to be a better Pam, if you will. You know,

William Harris 1:00:27

I like that. I like yoga. I can remember my wife would tease me because when I we were, you know, maybe even just dating, yeah, I don't think we were married yet at the fitness center in our little neighborhood there, there was just me in the old ladies doing yoga, right? But, like, for the same reason that you were where it's like, I am, I am, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And I was like, I need, this is something that I need to develop and get better at, yeah,

Pam Didner 1:00:56

a little. And it's just like, put you, put you in, kind of like in the right place, at least for me, you know? But,

William Harris 1:01:03

yeah, but so here's the question, though, that I have to ask as a follow up, because I am a go, go, go, go, go. Do you ever get to the point where even yoga becomes competitive to you, or you just like, I'm going to be the most flexible of this that person's stretching better than I can get I can get lower, but I can't. But I try, right? It's like, yes and

Pam Didner 1:01:19

So I for that. I try to be very intentional about it and not try to be too competitive. And I always, whenever I was like, Oh, my God, she can do that. I need to do that too. And I was like, stop Pam, you are here for yourself. Don't worry about her. So I will, kind of like, talk to myself. So initially, I won't. Initially, I was like, Oh, my God, I need to do that. I need to stretch. Oh, look at that. Let's do the precision stretch as tall as you can, right? And now I was like, You know what? I'm here for. Pam, if I can do this, great. If I can't, it's okay. So, but it took me a long time to get to where I am today. Just be okay with who I am, so. But I guess everybody struggles with that, so it's all good.

William Harris 1:02:12

So you have gotten to a point where you're good with Pam, how does your crush, how does your crush, Ryan Reynolds, feel about that?

Pam Didner 1:02:21

Oh, my God. I love Ryan Reynolds. Who does it?

William Harris 1:02:27

I do know somebody. Martha Stewart, did you see that? This was literally just this week. I have not

Pam Didner 1:02:36

watched a documentary, and she hates, she hates that documentary, but apparently everybody's think it's actually pretty

William Harris 1:02:42

good, sure.

Pam Didner 1:02:44

So I have not I heard about that, I heard about that, but I have not watched that documentary yet. Now you mentioned that I was like, let me put on my to do list. There

William Harris 1:02:53

you go. Yeah. So Ryan Reynolds? Why? Why are you? Why do you have a crush on Ryan Reynolds?

Pam Didner 1:02:58

Because he just has such a joy sense of humor, like when he talks and he has this, like, dead pen, you know, when he talk and he's not laughing and the stuff he said, you're like, Oh, that's so funny, right? And, and then he, I love his character, Deadpool, I don't know if you ever watch it, super violent. I hate violent thoughts. I mean, like, bloods just fly over the place. I hate that stuff and but I would watch it just because it's Ryan Reynolds. And he would just, he would just talk crap. And I was and I would just laugh. My name is pool, Dead Pool, you know, you know, something like that. I was like, Oh, my God, that's funny. And he's just very, very funny. He will be talking, talking, talking, and then he will break the fourth wall and start talking to the audience. And it was just very funny, like, in terms of how, you know, he's He's always making it easy not to take anything seriously. But I'm pretty sure he's probably a very, very serious person. I never talked to him? So I don't know. And although

William Harris 1:04:02

he's a marketer, we need to get him a copy of your book. Oh, he's,

Pam Didner 1:04:06

he's a marketer. Is that everybody strive to be right and can't be Yeah. Oh, a huge question on the Ryan Reynolds,

William Harris 1:04:17

there was a quote that you told me the other day that I really appreciated. I always like finding out. It's like, what's a quote that you live by? And you said, Do what's right for your customers. And I thought that was really good. Why is that a quote that you live by?

Pam Didner 1:04:32

So I think when I work in the corporation, and one of our value statements, and one of them, one of the value statements, is do the right thing. And I always love that. And sometimes do the right thing is not the right thing is the right thing for the company, but may not be the right thing for me, sure. And then I. There was period of time. There was one time, and the team I, I was in, we kind of went through a reorg, and the product we are selling is not doing that well, okay? And there was a conversation at a much higher level say, Should we kill this product? Honestly, that's the right things to do is kill the product. So the management was asking us to come up with a recommendation. Should we kill the product? Should we keep it going? Right? But at the same time, it impacts my job. If we keep this I should make a recommendation to keep this product because I want this job, or should I make the recommendation? We should kill it, and then I have to find a different job, right? So we actually, the several of us, we struggle. What kind of recommendation should we do? Because it does impact us. And at the end, we come up with, kind of like two solutions. One we did say one of solution is we should kill this, and then the other one is when we do a last one, Hail Mary. If we add those features, should we give it a try it again? Right? And we do give a try again. How much would that cost to do that, right? So my gut at that time, and several of my colleagues kind of agree. I say, let's be honest with each other. What's the point? You know? What do we think? We actually think we should kill that product? But when we go in and make recommendation, we did make that as one of the recommendation at the same time, we say, maybe there's a chance we don't know. So we present the two options, and the management decide to kill it, and we feel like the management is making the right decision. And that was like, oh my god, we need to update our resumes. So it's hard to do the right things. I know how hard it is and and sometimes I have to fire myself with my client, and I would tell my clients, you don't need me anymore. And it's when I said that I was like, oh my god, I just turned down, you know, $10,000 retainer. But they don't really need me anymore. You know, that's good. That's honorable. I want to, I kind of want to do the right thing. So I think

William Harris 1:07:32

you brought up a really good point, too, about how it becomes an ethical dilemma. And I really love getting into it's hard.

Pam Didner 1:07:39

Oh, there's so many time I was like, Why? Why do I decide to fire myself? Am I a moron? You know? I was like, yeah,

William Harris 1:07:46

yeah. Well, the dilemma comes down. It's like, well, that might be right for the customer. Let's, let's remove you from the picture your teammates. Let's say that they only asked you and it wasn't your teammates, right? Like, Well, wait a minute, it's definitely the wrong thing for your teammates. It's the right thing for your customer, maybe for you to do that, but the wrong thing for your teammates, because you're putting them out of a job. It's maybe, if you have shareholders, that's

Pam Didner 1:08:10

even, yeah, right? That's so hard and and most of the time, the way I deal with that is that's, that's, go find all the gig. That's let me go find all the gig for everyone. That's, you know, it's still coming back to me, right? That that's fine, something, there's got to be something out there we can do, right? Yeah, I hear you. It's never easy. No, that's,

William Harris 1:08:39

that's the decision that we have to make, you know, and anytime we're in leadership positions, I think about that all the time with people that are in leadership positions, people that are, let's just even say, running government and things like that. And the hard part about anybody is that you're hated by significant amount of people, because every decision, every decision you make, is going to negatively impact somebody, somebody. Every decision, yeah,

Pam Didner 1:09:03

you are not going to be liked by everybody. Never. Yeah, that you know, you just don't please everyone. Don't. I tried that. It was not successful. No, sometimes you just have to tell the truth and then just say it as it is. There's not much joy. It's hard, but don't sugar, COVID, it's right. It's the right thing.

William Harris 1:09:23

I also understand that you are a new mom, although not in the traditional sense. You are a plant mom. You said, when your kids moved out, you decided to get a lot more into plants. Tell me a little bit more about this.

Pam Didner 1:09:35

Yes, I am a planned parent. Okay, yeah, I have to tell you something. I kill plants. Okay. Like, okay. Like, I touch a plan, they literally just die. Oh no, I was like, Okay. And my, my son was like, Don't touch that, please. Okay, you're gonna kill them. So when I was growing up, my, my. Attention is always my job and my family, and then if I have little time left, is doing yoga. Okay? So I don't have, I don't have any space, mentally and physically for anything else, nothing. I just don't okay and and I try not to do like there, are some moms. They are perfect moms. They can do everything. They are mighty and they can cover. They can make everybody happy. They have great parties. Whatever I can. I can only do two things, two and a half, I take care of my family. Okay? We are going to play speed, place, a to place, be done, and we get through today. And then I do my job, and do my job very well, that's about it. And then have little bit of time doing yoga. That's it. Okay. I cannot do anything else. I never have own, yes, if I own any plans, that's because people gave me plans as present, like I said, I tend to kill them all. And then when the kids are grown, and then all of a sudden, you know, you don't worry about kids anymore, and there's a mental space that you can you feel like you can take if something else, but I, I'm not. I don't want to take care of pets, because I travel a lot and and so I started, I bought a couple orchids, and they were beautiful. I love them dearly. And and, and I started taking care of them, and they die, and they came back, several then came back. I was like, Oh, my God, you're still alive. This is amazing. And then, and I bought, like, two, and then I bought three. I bought four. Now I got 10 different orchids, and they all bloom at all. And then I bought different plants, and I still kill a bunch of them, don't get me wrong, but I keep some of them alive. So, you know, they are my children.

William Harris 1:11:55

What's beautiful about that, though, too, is plants are so good to have in the home. They remove a lot of chemicals that are in the air replace it with, you know,

Pam Didner 1:12:06

lovely. I love them all. And I, I named them, you know, I was like, oh, oh, I say, yeah, that so I, there are two of them. I was like, they are my kids, Aaron Joey. They are the Aaron and Joey. And they are my kids. And then also, I was like, Hello, beautiful. There was wine is Hello, beautiful. And then it was like, gorgeous. You know, it's like, I give them different names.

William Harris 1:12:27

I've seen studies on this too, and I can't remember exactly where when, but something along the lines of Talking to plants in positive ways impacts them more than just talk to them. The obvious thought was people saying, yes. So people thought you Yeah, yeah, and they can tell whether it's good or bad thought, which is interesting,

Pam Didner 1:12:50

exactly, exactly they can hear you and that they actually respond, you know, just like if you just like everybody. I mean, we animal plants, we all response, respond to positive vibes. We do every one of us, right? I mean, if I'm, like, a very negative, I'm I'm an E or, you know what, up to your podcast that's not going to fly, hey, so I'm so happy I'm here, then all of a sudden, you know, you feel it. So I think that positivity Does, does translate. And, you know, pass, I

William Harris 1:13:22

think there's a lot we're still going to discover about that over the years, about which we don't understand. Maybe we attribute it to, like, you said, Good Vibrations or whatever, but it's like, I think there's scientific explanations that we'll understand more and more. Let's just say, as as AI evolves and takes over our medical and science research as well. Yeah. Well said. Pam, it has been absolutely amazing talking to you today. You shared your knowledge with us, your wisdom, your time, if people want to work with you or if they want to follow you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Pam Didner 1:13:54

I'm actually on every single social media, including TikTok, yeah, okay, so connect with me on LinkedIn and also follow me on TikTok, Instagram, on every single social media, or you can Google me Pam Didner, or my website, pamdidner.com if you are very interested about AI and marketing. So for prompts, this is great book. Go to chapter three. And if you want to know a little bit more about AI, what AI will do, and I actually have a chapter four, five and six are pretty solid. You can just dive into that in terms of how you can scale AI. And also there's additional AI prompts right here, and also a little bit of AI history. So just help you to understand AI and put things in perspective. Awesome,

William Harris 1:14:41

wonderful. Pam, again. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your time with us anytime.

Pam Didner 1:14:46

Thank you so much for having me Take care. Bye.

William Harris 1:14:50

Thank you everyone for listening. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.

Outro 1:14:53

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click some. Subscribe to get future episodes.

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