What is AI Saying About You?

Episode Summary:

A few weeks ago I decided to have a little fun at the end of a long workday and asked ChatGPT one simple question: "What can you tell me about Teresa Schlup?" I’ve Googled myself for years out of curiosity, but this felt like a natural progression. The results were fascinating! AI saw me not just as a web designer, but as a "translator" between a business and its audience.

It got me thinking... If AI can see me that clearly, what else is it seeing that I might be missing? I’ve tried traditional brand audits before with surveys and coaches, but I rarely got the return on investment I was looking for. Clients don't want to hurt your feelings, and coaches don’t always know your heart. But AI is objective. It doesn’t care about my feelings; it just tells me what the data says.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing how you can use AI as an objective strategist to do a deep-dive brand audit on your own schedule and budget. I’ll even share the five categories of questions you need to ask to see if your messaging is actually attracting your dream clients. (And please excuse my "scattered puppy brain" today! My new puppy, Remy, is sleeping at my feet and being his adorable, naughty self!)

Questions I asked...

Category 1: The Basics

• "What can you tell me about [Insert Name or Business Name]?"
• "What kind of clients would be best for this business?"
• "Does this business feel approachable or intimidating?"

Category 2: Experience and Clarity

• "Is it immediately obvious what this business offers?"
• "Does this business sound experienced?"

Category 3: Gauging Emotional Reactions

• "Does this brand feel trustworthy?"
• "Does this business feel confident or uncertain?"

Category 4: Money and Mechanics

• "Does this business feel high-end, mid-range, or budget-focused?"
• "What assumptions would you make about their pricing based on their messaging?"
• "Would you expect a streamlined experience or a highly customized experience?"

Category 5: Hard Truth Questions

• "Does this business sound more experienced than its website looks?"
• "Does anything weaken the trust?"
• The Ultimate Test: "If you had to summarize this business in one sentence, what would you say?"

 What I hope you take away from today's episode...

• AI isn’t just a tool for writing emails; it’s an objective mirror that can show you the branding gaps you’re too close to see.
• Traditional audits often fail because of human bias, but AI only cares about the data you’ve put out into the world.
• There are 5 key areas to audit: The Basics, Experience & Clarity, Emotional Reaction, Money & Mechanics, and the Hard Truths.
• Your visuals must support your words. If your website looks janky but your copy sounds elite, you’re creating a "trust gap" that AI can help you spot.
• The ultimate test of your brand's clarity is whether AI can summarize your business in one clear, punchy sentence.

Links to the cool stuff mentioned in this episode...

• IntelligentX Brewing Co. (The AI-driven brewery)
• Junkstock (My favorite festival in Waterloo, Nebraska)
  

Links to connect with me... 

Book a Consult HERE! (https://caffeinecreative.io/consult/)

Email me HERE! theperfectblendcaffeinecreative.io

Episode Transcript: What is AI Saying About You?

Did you know that it has just been a little over 1,200 days since the launch of ChatGPT? Now, there were other models before, but ChatGPT is the one that really invited the public into the world of AI in a bold new way. And I know 1,200 days sounds like a long time, but it's really just about three and a half years. And I don't know about you, but it's hard to imagine a world without AI.

AI is literally everywhere. It is in our inboxes offering to write our emails. It is on our smartphones correcting our typos; or in my case, sometimes creating typos because it just doesn't seem to know what I'm trying to say.

AI in Unexpected Places

And it is also showing up in places that I personally would have never expected. For example, did you know there are washing machines now that use AI to detect the fabric type and the load size so that your washer and your detergent usage is more optimized? You can also buy toothbrushes to map your brushing habits and then offer you real-time coaching so that you can get back in there and brush where you didn't reach correctly.

There's even a brewery in London called IntelligentX that is using an algorithm to tweak their beer recipes based on feedback from brewers and tasters that love their product. So love it or hate it, my friends, AI is here to stay. I say, why not find some new ways to embrace it? And that's actually what we're going to be talking about today on The Solo Grind. Or let me just say this: what I hope to communicate clearly.

Welcome back my friends. If you are new here, a very special welcome to you. For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm Teresa Schlup as I just said in my intro. I am a brand strategist and a web designer who loves supporting solo small business owners out there doing their best to make their corner of the world a better place. Whether you need a brand new website or just a few tiny tweaks, I might just be who you're looking for. And you can learn more about me and my services at my website, caffeinecreative.io.

The AI Brand Experiment

And now that introductions are done and complete, I'd say let's get into today's episode: What is AI saying about you? All right, so this all started last week. It was the end of a long work day and I didn't feel like getting up out of my chair just yet. Sitting at my desk, I decided to have a little fun and I opened up a fresh ChatGPT window and asked one simple question: What can you tell me about Teresa Schlup?

Now, I don't know if you've ever been a person who Googled yourself, but I've honestly done that for years because I'm always interested in what Google had to share about me. And so this is just a natural progression for me to ask AI, "What can you tell me about Teresa Schlup?" The results were fascinating to say the least. It captured what I do in really clear direct terms, which I thought was pretty cool. It knew my voice really well. It knew where I show up online and it identified my niche perfectly.

It also shared a big picture view of me that I honestly thought was pretty cool. AI described me not just as a web designer, but as a translator between a business and its audience, and I loved that. Back in my corporate IT days, I used to call myself an IT translator because I could speak both techie and real person. Seeing AI pick up on that same energy today told me that my messaging is working.

The Reality of Traditional Brand Audits

This one response from this one little question actually got me thinking about something in a much deeper way. If AI can see me that clearly from one simple question, what else does it see? And more importantly, what is it seeing that I personally might be missing? Now, over the years, like you, I have been told that I need to do a brand audit.

And I have tried, I have given it the old college try to do a good solid brand audit on myself. I have done client surveys. I have hosted client group discussions. I have even hired a third party to do anonymous surveys for me, hoping that people would be more honest with me. And honestly, I never got the return on investment that I was looking for. And by investment, I am talking about time and money. I've also gone to coaches and gotten a review of my brand done. Still not exactly what I was looking for.

And here's why I think that is. First of all, clients don't want to hurt your feelings. 

They will say everything's fine, even when it isn't. This could be because they love you so much that they don't want to hurt your feelings and insult you, or because they just really hate conflict and they want to avoid it. But the reality is most are not going to give you a true honest answer about their experience in working with you.

Now coaches are going to be a little bit more objective and they're going to give you a little bit more open honesty. But the struggle with a coach is that they see your potential and what you could be doing out in the world, but they don't know your heart. For me, I've always run a very heart-centered business. So while they may have ideas of things that I could do to advance my business, if it doesn't fit within the model that I have within my heart, it's not a good fit. So all their well-intentioned advice may not be exactly what I need.

Why AI is Different

Now, as I said, I have never gotten the response out of all of these brand audits that I wanted to get. So I stopped doing them a long time ago. I know it's good advice and it's even well-intentioned advice that at some point I think we all should follow. But for me as a solo business owner doing all the things, it just hasn't been a priority for a long time. A brand audit, at one point in time, was a lot of work, could be incredibly [taxing], and it just delivered minimal results.

But my little experiment last week when I asked one simple question, "What can you tell me about Teresa Schlup," got me rethinking about doing a brand audit because this one question was incredibly insightful. The other thing is AI is objective. It doesn't care about my feelings. It doesn't even know my feelings. It just tells me what the data shares with it. So I realized that I could, as a solo entrepreneur, do this brand positioning audit in a way that actually worked for me; a way that fits into my schedule and into my budget just by… 

Sitting down and having a cup of coffee with my favorite AI buddy.

I got a lot of really good useful insights out of doing this and I wanted to share it with you and invite you to come along on this journey with me. So what I've done for this episode is I put together a list of questions that you can ask your favorite AI buddy to see how you are showing up online. For sake of clarity, I am breaking these down into five categories.

First is the basics about you. Next is going to be all about experience and clarity. We're going to take a look at gauging the emotional reaction from our messaging online and how we position ourselves from a financial perspective as well as our process in working with clients. And then finally, we're going to do a big reality check at the end where we ask some tough questions that we may not want the answers to, but we can't afford to ignore. I'm going to include all of the questions that I am sharing in today's episode in my extended show notes as well. So be sure that you go take a look at that when you're ready to do your own deep dive into your brand positioning.

Category 1: The Basics

All righty now, we're going to start by asking about the basics. And this is essentially, "What do people think I do?" I would say start with a question that actually inspired this episode: "What can you tell me about..." and then insert your name or business name. I know I personally was pleasantly surprised with the answer in a way that gave my ego a little bit of a boost, but that would not have always been the case. 

There are times in the past when I would not have gotten the answer that I was hoping for, and that's okay.If that happens to you, I don't want you to be bothered by that. 

Instead, I want you to use that information to make intentional shifts in your own messaging 

So that in the future when you do a search, you're much happier with the results. Next, I'd say ask: "What kind of clients would be best for this business?" This can be really telling because you are going to know right off the bat if you are talking to the people you want to work with or someone else entirely. For example, if it says "budget conscious" and you're aiming for "luxury," you know you have a disconnect.

Now another great question to ask is: "Does this business feel approachable or intimidating?" I personally wanted to ask this because I know that in the past there have been a few people who have found me intimidating. That is never my intention and I swear I try to be as nice as I know how to be, at least most of the time. But I also realize that I have a really bold personality and that is not always well received or comfortable for other people. So I wanted to make sure that I am positioning my brand as approachable because if I'm not, then I'm failing my clients and the people I'm here to serve. Thankfully, I did confirm that I am hitting that approachable mark in my messaging, but again, that hasn't always been the case. So I'm grateful that I had this confirmation.

Category 2: Experience and Clarity

All right, now we're going to move into the details about your experience and clarity, even greater clarity around what you do. And here's a great question that I think every business should ask: "Is it immediately obvious what this business offers?"

Now, last week my sister and I went to Junkstock, which is this fun little event just outside of Omaha in Waterloo, Nebraska. They have vendors and antique shops and my favorite honey guys are there. They've got food trucks and live music and all kinds of stuff. It's like a festival meets flea market in the best possible way. And right before we were going, I wanted to see what food trucks were going be there because the food trucks are a big part of the draw for Kara and I. And so I get on, I look at a list of food trucks, and honestly, I could not tell what most of the food trucks offered based on the names.

And that's really not that big of a deal. Food truck names tend to lean more to creative rather than clear anyway. So I thought, I'll just look up some that sound enticing. I'll go look up their Facebook page so I can see what kind of food they offer. And almost none of them had pictures of their food. They had picture after picture of their food truck, but no food images. So I still didn't know what kind of food they offered. And all of this food truck story is simply to share one important point… 

If you want people to know what you offer, you have to make it really clear. 

Don't let assumptions guide the way because assumptions never lead to clarity. They lead to confusion and ambiguity more than anything else.

All right, another good question to ask your AI buddy is: "Does this business sound experienced?" AI gave me a pretty cool reality check here. It did note that I sound like I have experience, but my focus is more relational and thoughtful rather than positioning myself as highly authoritative. And that is exactly what I want. A few years ago, I decided I needed to position myself as more authoritative, thinking that that is what I needed to do or how I needed to communicate with my audience in order to grow my business and the direction I wanted to go. And in doing so, I actually started attracting a whole bunch of the wrong clients. They were perfectly lovely people. They were not my people. I was not their people either. It was a bad fit and that's because there was a disconnect in my messaging. So I intentionally shifted to more relational, more relationship marketing, thoughtful, intentional about what I do. And as a result, I started attracting the clients that are my people and they appreciate that I'm their people as well.

Category 3: Gauging Emotional Reactions

Now once we've figured out what AI thinks that we do, which is part of that "What do you do?", the experience and the clarity, now's a good time to take a look at how we make people feel. Because buying, especially investing in higher dollar services, is a very emotional thing. In fact, low investments can be a very emotional thing. I know people who are emotionally attached to their toilet paper. If you mentioned toilet paper to my mom, it's a 20-minute deep dive on why her brand is the only brand that should exist and why all other brands of toilet paper are essentially sandpaper.

I share this not because I want to rip on my mom and her toilet paper choices, but I want to prove a point. Buying is very emotional. Like it or not, we are all emotional creatures. And when it comes to a solo business, we have to [not] forget that about our potential clients and that they're having an actual emotional reaction to what it is that we're sharing online. So take a little time with your AI buddy and let's start gauging what that emotional response to your messaging is.

The first question that I would have you ask is: "Does this brand feel trustworthy?" If we aren't building trust, we aren't building a business. Trust is the foundation. If they don't feel like they can trust you to deliver what you say you're going to deliver, they aren't even going to reach out to ask a question. They're just going to click away.

The second question is kind of a biggie…

And this is: "Does this business feel confident or uncertain?" As solopreneurs, we are so close to our work that sometimes our imposter syndrome leaks into our website copy. We use words like, "try to," or "I think I can," or "I am just a," and that is uncertainty. That uncertainty creates hesitation in the buyers. And as my friend Nancy Quinn says, "Confidence is a brand that sells." Uncertainty, my friends, is going to create doubt and hesitation, or they're just not going to reach out at all. AI is a whiz at spotting those weak words that are sabotaging our authority in our website copy, even when we don't realize they are.

Category 4: Money and Mechanics

Next, let's take a look at the money and mechanics or your financial and process positioning. Pricing is always a touchy subject and all too often, we attract people who don't have the budget necessary to work with us when we're in those higher dollar services like interior design or even web design. And a lot of that comes back to our messaging. If your messaging and your pricing are living in two different worlds, you're going to have a very hard time closing sales.

So the first thing that I recommend that you ask your AI buddy is this: "Does this business feel high-end, mid-range or budget focused?" This can be really telling and explain why the wrong people are showing up on your calendar. If you want to go deeper, and I recommend that you do, ask this follow-up question: "What assumptions would you make about their pricing based on their messaging?" This is so incredibly telling. You might think that you are positioning yourself as a luxury service, but if AI comes back and says, "This looks like a great budget-friendly option," you know that you have a major disconnect in your messaging. And now you know what you need to tweak to position yourself a little bit more clearly.

Now let's shift into your process. 

Ask your AI buddy: "Would you expect a streamlined experience or a highly customized experience?" This is a huge question for my interior design friends, because if you are a designer who provides a deeply personal one-on-one, "I will source every vintage tile myself" kind of transformation, your process is highly customized. But if your website is using generic language, photos that look like everyone else, and a process that sounds like a three-step automated funnel, then you are attracting the wrong crowd. If you sound like a template, but you're selling the dream, the person who wants the dream won't believe you can deliver and the person who wants the template will be shocked when they see your custom pricing.

And while this is specifically geared towards my interior design friends, I honestly think anyone in a service-based business could ask this question: "Would you expect a streamlined experience or a highly customized experience?" It's a telling question that can really help you see holes in the process that you communicate online and how you can make that sound a little bit more clear so the right people are clicking through and getting on your calendar.

Category 5: Hard Truth Questions

All righty, my friends, we have looked at what AI thinks that we do. We've made sure that our experience is shining bright and we've taken a look at the emotional response of our audience. We've even taken a look at money and process. Now it is time to move into the final category: hard truth questions. These are the ones that are going to make you squirm a little bit potentially, but they are truly, truly beneficial if you want to stand out in the very best way.

And the first question that I want you to ask can be a little bit of a gut punch, but it's an important one to ask: "Does this business sound more experienced than its website looks?" I've actually seen this go both ways. I have seen highly experienced businesses having janky websites that do not show the world how incredible they are. And I have seen people who have highly polished websites that do not meet the experience that they have to offer.

Here's what I want you to remember… 

Right now, copywriters, marketing experts, even our AI buddies can help us write website copy or social media copy that makes us sound like a world-class authority and the only person they should reach out to. But if that copy is sitting on a page that is dated, broken or looks like a DIY project from 2015, you have just created a trust gap. The words are making a promise that the visuals are not supporting. This is true with your social media as well. So ask your AI buddy: "Does this business sound more experienced than it looks?" And be open to the response that it gives.

We've all tried the path of "fake it until you make it." In fact, I just talked about this in my episode on the cost of pretending, but we really can't fake it. So just be who you are. The people who need you are going to appreciate your genuine authenticity. And if there is a gap between how you sound and how you look, AI is going to help you spot it and your dream clients are going to feel it. 

Use this to better position yourself.

And this leads us to the second question to take things even a little bit deeper: "Does anything weaken the trust?" Is there something out there in your online world that is sabotaging your credibility that maybe you don't see? Years ago, I was consulting with a business whose entire model was helping people deal with drug and alcohol addictions. Fabulous people, very big hearts, but their personal and very public social media persona showed them constantly intoxicated in their own photos. This was a huge trust killer and it was hurting their business. People saw them behave one way in their personal life while saying something completely different in their business life and it was a huge disconnect. This inconsistency weakened the very foundation of what they were trying to build. Now, this person, I don't think they had an alcohol or drug problem. They just didn't post on social media all that often except when they were out with friends. So it made them look like they were a big old hypocrite in all honesty. AI can help you view these types of disconnects in your messaging. They can help you see where there's a conflict in your presence. And it's a full-on reality check on your integrity and the messaging that you're putting out there. So ask the question and be honest with yourself: Is this how I want the world to see me?

The Ultimate One-Sentence Test

Now, finally, the ultimate test of clarity is to simply ask your AI buddy: "If you had to summarize this business in one sentence, what would you say?" If AI, which has access to all of your words, your website, your socials, and anything else out there in the online world. If it cannot give you a clear punchy sentence that sounds like the business that you actually run, then your human audience definitely cannot figure out who you are either.

If you ask that question and you don't love the answer, I also don't want you to panic. This isn't failure, it's an opportunity. Knowledge is power, my friends. The answer to that question is actually a roadmap that is going to show you exactly where your messaging is fuzzy so that you can get in there and sharpen it. This is an invitation to enhance your brand so that the next time you ask that question, the answer is exactly what you want it to say.

Bringing today’s episode to an end

All right, my friends, I know that we have covered a lot of ground today, from washing machines and beer brewing algorithms to deep, sometimes uncomfortable truths about how our brand is showing up in the world around us. If there's one thing that I would like you to take from this episode, it is simply this: AI isn't just a tool to help you write a faster email. It is a mirror. It's an objective data-driven strategist that can show you the gaps you are too close to see.

So whether you're a web designer, an interior designer, a coach, or something else, your brand is the bridge between your dream and your dream reality. If that bridge is shaky, if it is uncertain, confusing or just doesn't sound like the real you, then you're working harder than you have to. 

So I challenge you to go have a cup of coffee and a chat with your favorite AI buddy today. 

Ask it those hard questions. Ask it if you're trustworthy. Ask it if you sound like you're cookie cutter. And definitely ask it for that one sentence summary. Because once you know how the world is seeing you from an objective view that is not trying to spare your feelings, you can detect where the disconnect is if there is one and you fix it.

And if you find that your brand audit reveals you need a little help making those tiny tweaks, come find me at caffeinecreative.io. I would love to help you in any way I can so that your brand and your online persona are showing the world the real amazing person that you are. And with that, we are now at the end of this week's episode. My slightly scattered puppy brain, but hopefully very helpful episode of The Solo Grind. I am now off to go take this little guy on a potty break. But before I go, I just want to say thank you so much for tuning in today. I love connecting with you in this way, and I hope to connect with you again very, very soon.