Category Archives: Talking to your customers

Content creators: beware of AI telling you what to think

Content marketing, Social media, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Writing

Have you ever Googled your name? Of course, you have. Who doesn’t want to know about the weird and wonderful places where their name crops up online? Now, though, through the miracles of AI, you can go a step further and ask Google what it actually thinks about you.

Try it, ask it anything about yourself. I thought I’d have a go.

“Ahem, a question for Google’s AI assistant: is Sebastian St. John-Clarke any good at content creation?”

I’ve a delicate ego, so for the few seconds it took a data centre in Slough to come up with an answer, I fretted. My career is on the line here. But I need not have worried, dear reader, for the answer it came, with only good things to say:

My AI-powered testimonial
Sebastian St John Clarke is regarded as an expert in content creation specifically for B2B sectors and the insurance/reinsurance industry. With over 25 years of experience, he leads Paper Plane Communications, where his work focuses on storytelling and simplifying complex corporate messages.

His expertise is built on a “simple and engaging” philosophy, prioritising brevity and narrative over technical jargon.

B2B Specialisation: He has a strong track record of delivering communications for high-profile financial services and insurance firms.

Diverse Formats: His portfolio includes high-level copywriting for trade publications, blog creation and drafting whitepapers.

Training & Strategy: Beyond execution, he facilitates creative writing courses and idea creation workshops for corporate clients.

Buffing up my self-esteem
There was more, but I think you get the idea. AI really is a lovely, thoughtful thing and would be welcome to pen my career obituary. There is, though, more to this exercise than just a buff up of my self-esteem. Of course, all that Google knows is to repackage viewpoints that are already out there. And where did it scrape these viewpoints from? Well, from the very places where my name appears most regularly: my LinkedIn page and my own company website.

Admittedly, it’s added some verbiage that I wouldn’t write myself – I’m far too modest to say I’m “regarded as an expert” – but Google has simply recycled all the nice words it found on the internet that, by the way, I wrote in the first place. It’s saying what I’ve said about myself, but in an even more positive and flattering way.

For originality, only a human will do…
The point of this exercise? It’s not about knocking the power and uses of AI; the progress large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini have made in the last few years is incredible. It is, though, a reminder that AI assistants are not capable of being particularly objective, original or of always telling the truth. They are simply recycling the information that’s already out there.

From a content creation perspective, that’s not a bad thing if you want a first draft and would prefer AI to do the initial heavy lifting. But, by doing so, be aware that you’re not necessarily creating an objective, original or even factually true viewpoint. Only a human has the power to give you all that.

‘Damned with faint praise’ or ‘when less really is more’

Content marketing, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Writing

While perusing the bookshelves for some unchallenging summer holiday reading, I cast aside my usual literary haunts – James Joyce’s Ulysses perhaps or maybe War and Peace – and picked up a paperback which looked like it might be a good yarn.

Rightly or wrongly, I’m often swayed by the reviews you see all over a book cover provided by whoever the publisher could persuade to say something nice about the book. In this case, I was swayed but, sadly for the author and the publishers, not into buying the book.

There was only one review on the cover, which read: “This is just the novel for whiling away a few pleasant evenings with a nice cup of tea”.

It seems to me that this is the equivalent of a potential house buyer looking around a house and proclaiming “nice size room” if they can’t think of anything more positive to say.

It reminds me of that old communications adage that ‘less is usually more’. In this case, it would have been better to have left the book cover to speak for itself.  

Happy holiday reading everyone – maybe even enjoy with a nice cup of tea!

Top tips for a career in communications (and one thing to never get wrong)

Communicating in a crisis, Content marketing, Social media, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Working with the media, Writing

Somebody asked me for the best bit of career advice I could give after years of working in the communications business. I thought long and hard about it and came up with a few thoughts.…

Be curious; listen more than you speak; know your audience; tailor your messaging; keep it simple; less is more; be nice (or at least not objectionable); proof read and proof read again; don’t misspell a spokesperson’s name; be clear and concise; don’t be afraid to introduce a bit of humour; don’t be afraid to challenge those around you (and particularly those above you); the legal team might know the law but that doesn’t mean they write better than you; trust your instincts (they’re almost always right); don’t use jargon/corporate speak; if you don’t understand what’s being said, chances are most others don’t know either; and don’t let ‘busyness’ steal time needed for thinking creatively…

And then I realised, all these things are great and ‘must haves’ but ultimately it comes down to one thing:

Never – and that means absolutely never – send an email with an attachment without first opening the attachment and checking it is actually the attachment you want to send.

Have that as your bedrock and you’ll go far.

AI is not only eating a copy writer’s lunch, it’s writing about it too

Content marketing, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees, Writing

In my household we’re all vegetarians and do like the odd bit of meat fakery. Interrupting our usual Quorn fest (and no, this post isn’t sponsored by the purveyors of the fine microprotein – Fusarium Venenatum – me neither!), we plucked from the supermarket shelf a chicken imposter: ‘THIS isn’t roast chicken and stuffing’.

What has this to do with my normal communications beat I hear you ask (or perhaps you’ve already disappeared to throw another juicy slab of microprotein on the skillet)?

Writing chick lit
What tickled me was the brazen use of AI to write a description of the product on the packaging. Rather than pretend a human wrote it, the THIS marketeers were quite happy to admit that they’d handed the creative pen over to our unseen AI scribes who came up with this finger lickin’ piece of chick lit:

“You could say that THIS is like the ultimate and daring undercover secret agent in the food world – dressing up in perfect disguise as pork, chicken and beef, but without any of the actual animals involved. It has a license not to kill, but to fill – your belly.”

Poking fun at AI
It’s terribly cringey as THIS themselves admit, but it made me think that a) it’s quite a good way of using AI while poking fun at it; and b) is AI literally eating the copywriter’s lunch?

To be honest, reading this poultry effort reassured me that there is still plenty of room in the coop for the human touch.

How an upmarket department store and a celebrity chef could have benefited from some heads-up PR

Talking to your customers

Back in the day when playing for my school football team – swift down the right wing but usually an erratic delivery – I remember a frequent howl from the coach would be ‘heads-up’, so you can see what’s happening in the game around you and where to run and pass rather than focusing on your own feet.

I know, sounds obvious but it’s usually the obvious and simple things that go awry. And two recent reputational fails have reminded me about that ‘heads-up’ instruction.

Party invites in the post
First up in the court of PR gaffes, step forward the department store to the well-heeled. Trouble brewed for Fortnum & Mason when it became clear that an after party they were hosting following a Buckingham Palace reception for Team GB and Paralympics GB medallists was only open to Team GB. Even worse, the response that there would be a “separate reception for Paralympians in the works” served to ‘other’ Paralympians who have strived to be seen and treated on an equal basis with their Olympian counterparts.

No consultation
Next up in the dock, Jamie Oliver recently published a children’s book which included a story line featuring a First Nations girl, leading The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Commission to react that the book only serves to “erasure, trivialisation, and stereotyping of First Nations peoples and experiences”. Incredibly, Guardian Australia reported that neither Oliver or his publisher had consultations with “any Indigenous organisation, community or individual…before the book was published”.

It seems that both these issues could have been avoided if time had been taken to consider the wider stakeholders and interest groups involved and potentially affected. It’s understandable how this can happen given the pressures to deliver projects quickly and the tunnel vision that can result, but it’s unforgivable for any business to sacrifice that wider consultation and understanding of how a service, product or PR initiative could impact others and lead to unintended consequences, despite the best intentions.

Heads-up PR
Heads-up PR and better awareness of how a project will land with those beyond the initial target audiences could save your organisation from pain and reputational firefighting. As a schoolboy footballer, I’m sure that if I’d had my head up a little more often, some of those crosses might well have landed on the right heads…