Here is how you keep the conversation going and stay connected:

• MarketingEDGE Newsletter Subscription
• Erin Hallstrom's LinkedIn
• Seth Hastings' LinkedIn

Seth Hastings: Welcome Welcome to Search and Sustain a Marketing Edge Podcast. I am your host, Seth Hastings, joined as always by the expert of AEO, SEO, and every other acronym you can imagine, Erin Hallstrom. 

Erin Hallstrom: It’s great to be here again. 

Seth Hastings: I’m looking forward to today. As I mentioned last episode, I have a love-hate relationship with AI. It’s a wonderful tool, but it can be over-talked about. So, we’re going to talk about it because everybody else is, right? But we’re going to look at it through that "search and sustain" lens. We’re going to find the secret sauce to make it sticky. 

We want to actually learn something from AI and not just give those generic tips that never actually tell you anything. We’ve even created an AI prompt recipe book called The Secret Sauce That Sticks. Yes, it’s a BBQ reference—I love BBQ sauce, so you’ll just have to deal with being hungry while you read through it. That will be available for download on our website. 

Erin, I did something. I decided to run our LinkedIn profiles through AI to generate origami animals for us. Since our Marketing Edge logo is a beautiful origami bird, I wanted to see what our animals would be. Are you ready? 

Erin Hallstrom: I think I am! Tell me. 

Seth Hastings: Yours was actually a lot nicer than mine. AI was a bit rude to me, but we’ll get to that. Yours is an owl. The AI said it's "not the decorative gift shop owl, but the intelligent origami owl layered with folds and hidden details." 

Erin Hallstrom: Oh! 

Seth Hastings: I thought that was good. For me, it gave the fox—but "not the cute woodland fox." It described a "sharp, geometric, planner-strategist fox with precise lines and layered structure." I didn't think it was necessary to specify that I wasn't a "cute woodland fox." I felt a little insulted! ChatGPT and I had a little fight over that one. I am jealous you got the owl, though the fox is fun. 

Erin Hallstrom: When I think of owls, I just wonder how many licks it takes to get to the center of a ChatGPT. Maybe the world will never know! Hopefully, that isn't a copyright violation. You might be upset it didn't call you cute, but as a woman of my age, I’m just wondering if ChatGPT called me old! But I’ll take an origami owl. I like it. 

Seth Hastings: I like it too. Now, here’s the thing about AI. I feel like people use it to write all the time, and they end up sounding like robots. I want to play a quick game. I’ll read a LinkedIn ad, and you tell me if you think it was written by an AI. 

The ad says: "Transform your work with AI. Get 1,000+ free customizable prompts for content creation, strategy, and productivity." 

Erin Hallstrom: I do think that has a high probability of being AI-written or AI-adjacent. 

Seth Hastings: I agree. Honestly, anytime I read something about AI, I assume AI wrote it. It doesn't bother me in this context, but it highlights the main point of our discussion today: personality. When people use AI, they often lose the personality in their prompts or the final output. 

Erin, do you have any dead giveaways that scream, "AI wrote this"? 

Erin Hallstrom: It’s exactly what you just said: if it is devoid of personality. If there’s no voice, language cadence, or perspective. My background is in journalism and English, so I’ve studied language closely. Before generative AI, you could really tell a person wrote something because they had a specific style or tenor. AI has made us a bit numb to that. 

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the usual hallmarks like "too many bullet points" or specific punctuation. I love writing in bullet points because that’s how I think! I’ve been optimizing content for so long that I think in heading tags and intro graphs even on my to-do lists. To me, the giveaway is when it lacks a perspective. 

Seth Hastings: AI is trained to create perfectly structured sentences, but then it picks up these nuances and creates its own style. For example, if you see the phrase "gives you the edge"—which we use because it's our name—it can be a giveaway. When you lose that personal connection, you lose the audience. People are becoming numb to it because it's part of the norm now, but you still have to approach it with a psychologist's mindset: I still need to make the reader feel a certain way. 

Erin Hallstrom: Exactly. I try to help the journalists in our newsroom understand the value of first-person experience or a specific point of view. I am pulled in by a brand story that says, "We went through this, and this is what we learned," or "Our expert found these issues." 

As humans looking for trust in other humans, we want that lived experience. AI doesn't have experiences. If a brand’s messaging is "How Brand X turned a profit in 45 days: the things we learned," I’m much more likely to click that than "The Top 10 things companies learn." 

I recently wrote a piece for Marketing Edge about "commodity" versus "non-commodity" content. Commodity content—the generic "10 things you need to know"—tends to lose trust. Content written by a human explaining their specific experiences is far more credible. 

Seth Hastings: When you have that first-person perspective, you’re following a story. That adds a level of entertainment, which is so underutilized in B2B. I always say B2B and B2C are both just "people to people." Even if it’s person-to-AI-to-person, a human is reading it at the end of the day, and they don’t want to be bored. There are so many boring headlines out there. If it’s just a generic AI line, you won’t get the connection, the conversions, or the sales. 

Another red flag I see is "over-hedging." AI often uses phrases like "It’s worth noting" or adds disclaimers because it doesn't want to be wrong. It loses the confidence level, and if you lose confidence, you lose trust. 

Erin Hallstrom: I’m laughing on the inside because I write a monthly email to the whole company. I know for a fact I started a paragraph in the last one with "It’s worth noting." Now I’m going to be very conscious of that! 

Seth Hastings: It’s funny because when I get your emails, I know it's fact because you are the expert and the authority. I know it’s Erin, not AI. That brings up a good point: if you’re a massive corporate brand, you already have that trust and can get away with more. But if you’re a small B2B brand trying to break through, you have to be much more conscious of your voice because you haven't built that authority yet. 

Erin Hallstrom: People trust people. Once you have that loyal customer base, the trust is there. But for people who are still getting to know you, language matters. 

I’m also impressed by people who write exactly like they speak. If you’ve heard a subject matter expert on a podcast and then read their writing, and the cadence and alliteration are the same, that’s a huge trust variable. It feels authentic. 

Seth Hastings: I have a small problem with that. My wife tells me that since we moved to Kansas City, my first language isn't English—it's "Pretty Prairian," from my hometown of Pretty Prairie. It has a little bit of "hick" in it, so the way I speak isn't always how I'm supposed to write! 

One last thing: I am officially releasing the em dash from "em dash jail." People used to say it was an AI giveaway, but it’s actually a great tool that makes writing look better and flow easier. 

Erin Hallstrom: I’ll bang the gavel on that! As an English minor, I’ve used em dashes since before the internet was a big thing. I wholeheartedly reject the idea that it’s an AI giveaway. I will admit, though, that I sometimes add spaces around an em dash—even if technically you aren't supposed to—because I speak in segments. I flavor my sentences with punctuation. AI was trained on literature that used punctuation correctly, so the em dash should be free to fly! 

Seth Hastings: As you say that, I’m looking at my ebook and realizing I used spaces before and after my em dashes. I learned something today! 

Before we wrap up, do you have any quick AI prompts you use to help focus your writing? 

Erin Hallstrom: I mostly use AI as a copy editor. I’ll write a long-form article—maybe 1,000 words—and ask the AI to do a proper edit for grammar, syntax, and continuity. 

I have a hard time asking it for ideas because I prefer to write from my own experience. I might ask for 20 topical related items just to brainstorm, but I want the core to be human. What about you? 

Seth Hastings: I have nine prompts in our "Secret Sauce" guide, but I’ll highlight two. 

First, I always ask AI to use psychological triggers. Whether it’s FOMO, curiosity gaps, or other triggers, asking for that specific tone changes the writing tremendously. 

Second, I use a 1-to-5 scale for uniqueness. If you ask Gemini or ChatGPT for a joke about the sun, they all give you the same basic answer. But if you tell it to give you five options, where "1" is the most basic and "5" is the most unique, the higher numbers will actually start to sound original and less like everyone else. 

Finally, I use it for site analysis. Use AI to look for pain points or where people might be clicking away. We often have blinders on when it comes to our own websites. An unbiased AI analysis can tell you exactly why people aren't staying. 

Erin Hallstrom: That’s a topic for a whole other episode! Part of my role involves brand visibility, and I constantly run prompts to see how outside entities and engines perceive our brands. It’s like being a human—we see ourselves one way, but others see us differently. Taking in that external data and deciding what to do with it is crucial. 

Seth Hastings: Well, Erin, we did it. We talked about the subject everyone is talking about, but hopefully, you learned something new. Go to our site to download the free prompt sheet. You’re already awesome marketers, but a second glance never hurts. 

Subscribe to Marketing Edge—we’re here to stay and will be back monthly. Thanks for joining us!