Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Guest: Now within these custom GPTs, super easy to build, you just tell it what you want it to do. You give it as much detail, as many examples, as much documentation that you can upload into it. So we pointed it at our strategic priorities on our website and said, you know, make sure you're aware of these. We pointed it at our about page so it understood like what kind of students we're looking for. We pointed it at our student life page. These are the sort of activities and interests. And then we said, all right, now build a Persona from that builds a kind of a base level Persona.
[00:00:35] Host: Welcome to the EdTechConnect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
Our guest today is Brian Piper, a recognized expert in optimizing digital content. With over 25 years of experience in content optimization, strategy and development. Brian currently serves as the Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester. He's also an author, most recently of Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education. Drawing on insights from interviews with over 50 higher education leaders and marketers. Brian is an international keynote Guestnd consultant specializing in content marketing data, generative AI and search. His expertise lies in helping organizations increase discoverability across various channels like SEO, social voice, community and AI, and leveraging AI for content marketing tasks from ideation to optimization. Brian also hosts his own podcast, AI for you, which focuses on helping higher ed professionals use AI in their daily work.
So welcome to the show Brian. Good to have you here.
[00:02:14] Guest: Great to be here and thanks for having me on. Jeff.
[00:02:16] Host: So recently I saw on LinkedIn you put up an interesting post. I feel like I've been to enough of your talks where I've learned a lot about you, but I did not know that you're a skydiver. So tell me, quick question. How many times have you jumped out of an airplane?
[00:02:34] Guest: 2965.
[00:02:38] Host: So you jumped out of planes more than most people have boarded. I mean, I know haven't been on that many flights. What sparked that interest in skydiving? Free falling at 120 miles an hour?
[00:02:51] Guest: Well, I originally started in the military, so I enlisted when I was 19 and they asked me, well, do you want to jump out of planes? And I said, absolutely not. Sounds crazy. And they said, we'll pay you an extra $120 a month in hazard pay. I was like, oh, all right, sign me up. So I did my five military jumps in 1990 and wasn't thrilled with, you know, pounding into the ground under round parachutes with 70 pounds of gear strapped to you. I did two years in Germany and then got moved to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. And one of my friends was there and said, hey, there's this sport parachuting club. We should go check that out. And so we went over and I saw people landing their parachutes, like standing up and walking away and not wearing any gear. I was like, all right, this looks pretty cool. And started doing it in 1992 and have done it ever since. And now I teach other people how to do it and how to fly the wingsuits and. And do all sorts of fun things.
[00:03:53] Host: So that's really cool. I've done it once. I did it without a parachute because if you only have 30 minutes of training, you gotta be strapped to someone's.
[00:04:00] Guest: Someone else.
[00:04:01] Host: And I did the tandem. It was, it was fun. I think I like it better than bungee jumping back when that was illegal thing to do in Arizona where I did it. But yeah, so I have to tie this together somehow. When you craft AI driven enrollment strategies, do you call them the same split second decision making and altitude level perspective? You know, you honed in the sky to guide universities through that. Competitive headwinds.
[00:04:30] Guest: Absolutely. Well done. Well done. Yeah. Actually, I do a weekly newsletter that tends to. Every newsletter ties in a personal story and then connects that to something in marketing or in AI. And most of my examples are skydiving. Whether it's, you know, taking the leap or trying something new or going back to the fundamentals, all sorts of crossover and relationships there between, you know, facing the fear and convincing people that it's going to be okay. Same with AI.
[00:05:03] Host: Fear is the commonality. Right. Like, it's not really in my DNA to be that afraid. I'm kind of like, curious, and I'm always trying something new. But it's a little bit of the culture of higher ed, I think, is I'm afraid to try these out of new things. Let me ask you, what are some of the creative ways institutions can harvest this valuable internal knowledge and transform it into compelling content that stands out in this noisy digital world?
[00:05:29] Guest: Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways. So we're using AI in A variety of ways in marketing. So we've created virtual Personas that then we can test content out with them, we can ask them what content they're interested in, what perspective we should take, what channels we should be on. These are all models that we have trained and then validated with real humans from that audience to make sure that the feedback that we're getting is relevant. But we don't then have to do focus groups every time we want to get feedback on our content or on new ideas. We can test those out virtually. We've created these virtual focus groups so we can actually ask them questions and then have them talk to each other virtually and decide, you know, this is what an international student wants, this is what our prospective audience wants. But I think that the real power of AI is the ability to look at your data once you can get to the point where you can start putting your data into these tools. And so we'll put our content performance data into the tools because that's data that anybody can get, you know, about how you're ranking for keywords and things like that. So we get a lot of insights just from that data. But once you get to the point where you have an environment like probably on site is the way that we have our set up, where you can upload like admissions data or donor data or information like that, then the insights you can get out, the personalization, the hyper focused, relevant content that you can deliver to your audiences the way they want. It's just a game changer. It makes everything so much more relevant and so much more valuable to those audiences. The last one I'll share is identifying content that's working and then using tools to repurpose and redistribute that content for different audiences. It's a huge way to scale up. And especially as we're seeing organic traffic dropping as the search, you know, search behavior changes, we need to get our content onto all the channels where our audience is looking for it. We need to have the best content out there. So you start with original human generated content and then you use AI to redistribute retarget on all the different platforms?
[00:07:47] Host: Yeah, it seems to always most challenges these days I'm seeing go back to your content. Is your content structured right? Are you able to create once publish everywhere? Like it's. Whether it's digital governance or search or AI, it's all back to like. And part of it, I think I talk about this a lot is we're kind of the victims of our own success with all our content management systems we created years ago where we had our one webmaster who couldn't do it all, which maybe was kind of a good thing because we had a little bit of a bottleneck there to slow down all this sprawl. But you're saying the same things I'm hearing out there. And I want to go back to something you said because you introduced this to me. It might have been a year and a half ago now at one of the conferences. We're kind of on the same conference track. I always see you at the Hyatt Webb Digital Collegium conference, Edu Webb, and you had showed, hey Gen, which is the AI Persona tool that can translate. And I started using that, which is really cool. But you also have been talking about these Personas for a while too. So I feel like this is where higher ed is really behind. And I think most industries are, but higher ed is even more behind just because the AI, they think is like creating content, which is great, you know, creating, tuning your messaging. But tell us a little bit more about these Personas you're creating. I saw you do this in a. I think you set up a customer GPT for a Persona. Give us an example of one of these Personas that you can. How you would set that up.
[00:09:14] Guest: Yeah. So the first Persona we created was Potential Pat, the undergrad. And we trained the custom GPT on our common data set. So data we have out on the public posted on our website with all sorts of information about our student body.
So that's great. It gives it kind of an idea of like geographically, where they're from, ages, all those sorts of different factors. And it's safe data that we know we can play with. So we started off by uploading that into the data set. And then we, you know, within these custom GPTs, super easy to build, you just tell it what you want it to do. You give it as much detail, as many examples, as much documentation that you can upload into it. So we pointed it at our strategic priorities on our website and said, you know, make sure you're aware of these. We pointed it at our about page so it understood like what kind of students we're looking for. We pointed it at our student life page. These are the sort of activities and interests. And then we said, all right, now build a Persona from that builds a kind of a base level Persona. And then you go in and you ask it all the questions that you would ask if you were building a traditional Persona, like what are your barriers and what does success look like and your decision criteria and what's your ideal path through our content. And then you, you kind of take all this information together and you put that into your instructions and your custom GPT. And now you can just ask it questions, you can engage with it, you can interact with it. And of course, anytime you create these custom GPTs, you have to start off by testing it, modeling it, training it, having other people test it, bringing in a diverse group of people from that audience to test it to make sure that it's not biased, it's not skewing one way or another, it's not excluding certain audiences. And then you just keep tweaking the model and adjusting it until you feel pretty comfortable that this is creating good output for you. And then after that, you can distribute that to your team. Like, one person needs to have a paid account to create the custom GPT, but then anyone can use the model, you know, using the free version of ChatGPT, you just send them the link to it. So we've got, you know, dozens of people that are creating content and editing content across the university who are already going in now and using these Personas to test out content or to get ideas for content before they actually have to put any time into creating it and writing it.
[00:11:41] Host: I often get the question, like, what's the difference between just saving your prompt and a prompt library and doing a custom GPT? And what I say is, there's like two basic things. One is you can load it with all the information regarding that use case and not have to do that again. And then you can share it, like you said, like, share it with anyone, share it with the world, Share with your team. So what's the biggest barrier that's keeping keeping higher ed from using AI this way right now?
[00:12:08] Guest: I think fear. I think, you know, we are very comfortable in the culture that we have created. We tend to be slow to adopt and slow to change, which has served us well in the past. But AI is a whole different creature. It is moving so quickly and developing so quickly that if you wait six months to implement and give people access, you've missed out on all these capabilities and all the opportunities, all the learning, all the awareness, and now the models are farther ahead. So you're not building that foundational knowledge and you're throwing people in with concepts that are, you know, we're getting into the stage now where AI agents are going to be a thing. And if you haven't played with custom GPTs or you don't know how to prompt or you haven't had experience using the earlier forms of the technology, it's going to be more difficult for you to figure out how do I string these workflows together and how do I automate these entire processes. So I think a lot of it is, you know, we are. We tend to be overtaxed under resourced. We have too much on our plates, we're wearing lots of different hats. And most of the people I talk to are like, I don't have time to learn how to use a new tool, a new software that's going to change everything about the way I work. So I think that's part of it. I think fear of being replaced is part of it. I think people see this as a replacement for them in their jobs, which it's not, because you still need that expertise to be able to write the prompts, to provide the right information, to validate the outputs, to make sure that what you're getting out is useful and relevant to your audiences, works for your institutional goals. So there's a lot that's needed to be able to integrate this technology. But what I keep telling people is this is not AI integration is not a technology adoption project. It is a change management project. You need to have leadership buy in. You need to have understanding and awareness of what the capabilities are, what the potential is. And you need to get people on board at the bottom. You need to figure out where the fear is and figure out how to work with people to convince them that this is just. It is just another tool, but it's so powerful that it can change the entire way we work. Instead of just optimizing what we're already doing, we can shift the entire focus of why we're doing those tasks.
[00:14:46] Host: You know, regarding that whole conversation about, like, will AI replace us? I have the same conversations with the schools I talk to in that. You know, when I started playing around with these image generators, like Midjourney and Dall E, I'm like, how are these people getting such great result? Like, I can't do it. Why can't I not do it? And then I Mid Journey has the great front page where you can just see all the prompts. The prompts, right? I'm like, well, these are professional photographers that are doing this. So there's like, do this with a Leica camera at this aperture. I'm like, well, I'm learning how to do this now because I like that look. Like, exactly. So right along your point of, like, this is coming up from below. Like, grab on now. Start using it. You're going to learn a lot just by. And that's just one example. I also wrote an article about why are we so acceptant about, you know, we almost have all accepted that, like there's only a hundred coders in the world who are better than AI at this point or something like that. Like we're pretty much there. It can do anything programmatically, you know, that a developer could do, which is scary, but we're bragging about that. Developers will brag about that. Everyone will say, look, I had AI code this. And it's like no brainer, of course we're going to do that. Yeah, these young junior developers are going to have to embrace this quick. But why on the creative space in writing is it not the case? Why is it that when I consult with universities and say, hey, get a prompt library, share it with your team. Make sure, you know, in case, when people start leaving, we want to know, hey, that person was good at AI. How do they do it? We need to start sharing this and not be afraid. But there's still some reluctance and I think you hit on it a little bit. But why do you think that? Is that in the creative. I shouldn't say. Maybe that's it is the creative space, but in writing and editing, it's not quite as embraced or admitted. I think that we're using AI well.
[00:16:29] Guest: And I mean, writing is. It's a very personal thing when people, I mean, you have to put some of yourself into everything that you write and create. You know, in conversations we're kind of. A lot of times we're just spewing without a lot of thought. But when you put something down on paper, when you're typing it or writing it, you have to invest yourself. It's a time commitment, it's a thought process. You have to organize things before you can just throw them on paper if you want them to resonate with people. And I think people believe that using these tools for creativity is cheating. And I mean, that is how this technology was revealed to higher ed in the first place, is students were using it to do their work without doing any of the work, and it was cheating. So then it was like canceled. You cannot use these tools.
But that's not the best way to use these tools because there are things that we can do as humans that the tools cannot do. And there are things that these tools can do that we cannot do do. And it's really figuring out that collaboration and figuring out how you can work with these tools to get the most out of your creativity. There was a great conference I went to. Was it ama? No, it was Cuprap. This guy was talking about fun and play in work and he was like, come up with as many uses for the paperclip as you can in three minutes. So everybody in the room thinking about different ideas. I came up with 11, which turned out to be a pretty good, you know, it's pretty good number of like uses for a paperclip. And then I went to chat GPT and in about 10 seconds I had 60 different uses. So yes, brainstorm. Use your human ideations, come up with the story, put your emotions into it. But then when you need to expand on that, when you need to make that stronger, better, more ideas, get different perspectives, work with these AI tools and they can help you with all of that.
[00:18:24] Host: I think you're right. I think there's this tie to the higher ed space. The academic side thinks it's cheating. A lot of people still do. And then even, even though if you and I work mostly with administrative side people, there's still that like I'm in higher ed and it's more of a. More of a dilemma, perceived dilemma, I think. So as I mentioned in your intro, you are a multiple time author and your most recent book is Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education. It's incredible. We'll put a link to your site, you know, in the, in the show notes, but in there you have this, you talk about audience first approach. You know, with the vast number of potential audiences in higher ed, you know, we have prospective students, current students, alumni, faculty, staff, community. We could go on and on. How do institutions effectively prioritize and deeply understand the needs of this diverse audience, These diverse audiences we have.
[00:19:19] Guest: Yeah. And that really comes down to firmly understanding your strategic priorities. Leadership has to set a direction. You have to know where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish. And then basically everything that you, you know, every moment of time that you invest into your content, you need to be thinking about, is this helping? Is this reaching our goal? Is this the right audience to help us reach our goal? When I first started at the university, we'd go into the editorial meetings and the content officers would come in with some great new research findings that had just came out. And we'd be like, yes, that is a great story that needs to be written. Who's the audience? And they would say, everyone.
Everybody is the audience. Everyone needs to read this. And we would say, everyone is not an audience. You need to pick one primary audience who will take some action after reading this that will help us reach our goals most effectively. That's your primary audience, that's who you're writing this content for. So you really have to reframe it. Personas are a great way to keep people on that same track. And AI is a great, you know, muse to put an idea out there and say, how do we target this for a potential undergraduate student? How do we target this for alumni donors? And it will help figure out, especially if you have Personas created, you just dump it right into your custom GPT and it'll say, this is what I'm interested in. This is what resonates with me. This is what I'm concerned about. And my problems and questions all are related to this. So, yeah, I mean, being audience first is something that we talk about a lot. It's easy to say. It's harder to get people to stick to.
[00:21:01] Host: That's a great point, because I can see another manifestation of that problem in higher ed with a campus homepage. Back in the day, when I was at my universities, that was. The struggle is to. Is to get our stakeholders together and determine who was our homepage for. And you think that would be easy to do, but it was really hard because there's 10 to 20 people at the table and there's advancement, right? No, it's for fundraising or it's for prospective students, it's for current students. I think over the last decade, most schools have realized your homepage is not for the current students as much. You know, they have their mystery portal area to go. But that was not the case 10 plus years ago. That's just a very simple version of it. But I think it's kind of all tied together where. And I talk about this a lot too. Digital governance, right. Let's incorporate some AI guidelines into our digital governance policies. Even though maybe we don't quite have it yet. But we need to get there because I know presidents and cabinet members who are very much. There's a spectrum, right. We really want to embrace it. We're very reluctant. Well, whatever that tone is, I think we need some guidelines. Right? Do you profess to, like, mature digital governance at university campuses? Do you think that's a starting point?
[00:22:13] Guest: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when we started our AI Council, that was the first thing that we did was establish guidelines. Because until you have those usage guidelines out there posted on your website, shared within your institutional community, people are going to go to shadow AI because they don't want people to know they're doing this. They don't want people to know that I'm doing my work much faster and AI is helping me do that. But once you have those guidelines posted and once you have some governance around usage, then people kind of realize that they can experiment, they can play, they can try things out, it's okay. And, you know, if you don't have those set up, then people are going to be doing it anyway. They're just going to be doing it with no guardrails, not realizing that they shouldn't be uploading student records to the public version of chat GPT. So, yeah, I think governance and you know, we talk, we're talking about AI a lot.
Data governance and content governance are huge areas of missed opportunities as well. And I think more and more institutions are going to start recognizing their troublesome landscapes once they start trying to train chatbots with their data or with their content and then realize that, you know, they think they're getting hallucinations, but it's just that they're getting, you know, data spewed back from inaccurate content or old data that they have in their environment.
[00:23:39] Host: So, yeah, you mentioned if you don't have it right, don't have mature or don't have any digital governance, here's what's going to happen. And another example I kind of talk about at the faculty level is that if you don't have department level, college level, university level guidelines, it trickles down to that faculty member. How much of a spectrum are there with faculty in these opinions? I just did a podcast, you know, a few weeks ago with some research that came out of Elon University, and the question about, like, you know, if you tweak this prompt for this essay just a little bit, is it cheating or not? Something like that. And it was like 50% said yes, 50% said no. Like, it's, it was a great question because it showed this, this polarization of like, if we use AI to help us with writing, is it, you know, if you're at the same university and you perceive these differently, you know, we're going to have things all over the board at the faculty level. And then that can go to every, like, administrative and in every area. But I'm right, I'm right in there with you.
[00:24:39] Guest: So much of that goes back to that awareness and education. Because if you have conversations, if you have people coming together and sharing ideas, sharing information, then they'll see that, oh yeah, there are ways to use those prompts in that manner in a classroom in a way that expands the learning and teaching opportunities. But if you don't have those, then everyone's making up their own minds and forming their own opinions without any consistency.
[00:25:05] Host: In your book, you advocate for leveraging student creators and ambassadors. What are the benefits and challenges of empowering students to create content and how can institutions embrace that?
[00:25:18] Guest: Well, so talk to lots of students and at conferences a lot of times they'll have student panels, high school students, early college students that are coming in. And the one thing that they all say they want more of is day in the life content. They want to hear from other people that are at their age, in their experiences that they can understand, that they can connect with to be able to put themselves in that institution. I mean, that's why campus tours work so well, is because you're connecting potential students with representatives from the institution. The messenger really matters and especially because these students are on those platforms that these other students understand. So if you're going to have somebody creating TikTok, they certainly don't want me out there creating a TikTok and putting that out for, you know, 17 year old high school student to be watching because they're not going to connect with me. So I think it's a missed opportunity for a lot of institutions that aren't doing these ambassador programs. I think there's huge potential for those. If I was running an institution, I would sink so many resources into the campus tour program, into ambassador programs, connecting potential students with on campus students, these student communities like Zimi and those sort of communities. Great ways to connect with those audiences and start forming those relationships, building that trust. My wife and I have six kids. Between the two of us, we've gone through the college search process with all of them and every one of them made their final decision based on the vibe, the feeling they got from the institution they went to and visited. And that's really hard to get across in your content. But that is something that your student ambassadors, your student representatives can really deliver. And if you can get your ambassadors talking about your institution outside of your institutional channels, that's even better because now they're using their own channels to talk about how great your institution is. And it's like any business, any product, you're going to believe a review more than you're going to believe in AD because you know that's coming from an outside third party that's not connected, that you will eventually trust more than you know, you'll trust your peers more than you'll trust the business or the institution itself. I love it.
[00:27:49] Host: That's what our the EdTech Connect model is, we trust our peers. And I have two, not six, but I have two that have gone through the process and the vibe for, for my son, it was like the thing, it was like he changed his mind basically based on the vibe. My daughter was like, yeah, it was a factor too. So. So I've seen it, seen it firsthand. Well, I want to ask you one last question. What is one piece of advice you would give to a higher ed marketer who's just starting their journey with content marketing, especially with limited resources?
[00:28:16] Guest: I would say start small. Pick one place where you can have the biggest impact. One story, one idea, one channel. And work on creating the best content that you can for your target audience on that channel. And once you kind of have that and you've developed that and you've worked on that, then start looking to expand, look to go into other channels. And I'm telling everybody now, start using AI, Start playing, start experimenting. I tell people, if you don't want to use it at work, start using it in your personal life. It can do so many things to make life so much easier.
[00:28:54] Host: Yeah, love it. I agree. Great advice. Well, thank you for being on the show. I'm going to put your links to your, your LinkedIn and your site in the show notes and it was great to have you on Brian.
[00:29:06] Guest: Thanks so much, Jeff, and appreciate all the great content you're always putting out.
[00:29:09] Host: All right, thanks. Byebye.
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