HR and Marketing: AI's Transformative Role with Mark Willaman

Discover how AI is reshaping the HR and marketing landscape in our engaging conversation with entrepreneur Mark Willaman. From pioneering the employee benefits technology sector to creating innovative platforms like HRMarketer, Mark's journey is a fascinating tale of entrepreneurship and foresight. Our discussion with Mark offers valuable insights into his latest ventures, Newsworthy AI and Newsramp, which promise to revolutionize press release distribution. Learn how AI tools can enhance content creation, providing a powerful ally for brainstorming and writing enhancement.

Join us as we explore the merging worlds of HR and marketing, uncovering strategies that HR professionals can employ to boost employer branding and attract the best talent. With Mark's expertise, we dissect the reliability of AI-generated content detection tools and highlight the increasing adoption of marketing techniques within HR functions. We also share Mark’s expert tips on press release strategies, demonstrating how platforms like Newsworthy AI and Newsramp can significantly amplify a company's visibility and engagement. Tune in to gain practical insights and stay at the forefront of the evolving work environment.

Chapters

• 0:03 AI Impact on Content Creation
• 8:35 The Role of Marketing in HR
• 21:01 Press Release Strategy Discussion

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit HRGazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannum, and joining me on the episode today is someone I've known for quite a few years actually, as he just reminded me before we hit record. He's a lovely chap, he's a serial entrepreneur and he's founded such businesses as hr marketer, fisher, vista marketing and pr agency, social ears corporation and a whole bunch more super successful and lovely guy. Uh, his latest ventures include newsworthy ai, which I have seen and I'm still yet to sort out, within which I need to do newsrampcom and others. His name, of course, is Mark Mark. Welcome to the show today.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Bill, thanks so much. That was a very kind introduction and probably more than I deserve. It's great to be here and chatting with you, Mark.

Speaker 2: 1:21

I cannot begin to do you justice, so why didn't you do it for yourself? Why don't you take a couple of minutes to tell the listeners a bit more about you, your career background and the projects that you're working on at the moment?

Speaker 3: 1:33

Sure, I'll be very brief, I shouldn't need a couple of minutes. But yeah, going back to the beginning, what brought me into this human resources space? I was working in another industry biotechnology and a friend of mine had called me up and said, hey, my brother's starting a company, would you want to be a part of it? And that was crazy enough to to sound good and and I believed in that team. So I left and I joined one of the first employee benefits technology firms back east in Connecticut. Very great experience Seven years, I think.

Speaker 3: 2:11

The company grew from about you know, four hundred thousand to over 40 million in under seven years. Very successful is when the Internet was just, you know, coming to be in the World Wide Web, in the, in the. I spent about seven years there and then left and, as you said, did something on my own. I started an HR marketer. What I'd realized when I was working for the technology firm was every HR vendor at the time was looking for the same information and trying to reach the same journalists and analysts and go to the same events and apply for the same speaking. So it sounds silly, but back then it was actually innovative to grab all that data and then sell a subscription through a SaaS product for everyone to access and that was really the genesis of HR Marketer Did that for a number of years and, as you said, then started a marketing and PR agency that focused on the HR space social ears, the press release newswire that he ultimately sold to what is today Cision Corporation.

Speaker 3: 3:30

He said, hey, nothing's really changed in news distribution in the newswire space. I got some great ideas that can disrupt the space, just as PRWeb did back in the day. You want to join me and I said I'd love to. And here we are and fast forward about a year and a half. We've been building out the platform and we have two products that we're marketing newsworthyai, which is a press release distribution platform that leverages AI technology, but not too much. We can talk about that and then a sister product we call newsrampcom, which curates Newswire content and does some pretty amazing things with that. Again, the entire objective of what we're doing is to help companies, mostly SMBs, get more visibility for their company and drive more engagement and interest in the news that they're announcing. So that is a quick background of how I got to where I am today.

Speaker 2: 4:32

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. Okay, thank you, love it, david, if you're listening.

Speaker 2: 4:51

You are a pretty cool guy and I would very much like to have a conversation with you too. Maybe Mark can put in a good word for me. Anyway, mark, I want to get you to educate our audience a wee bit now, because you're a very clever man. I know this. I've worked with you. I use the HR marketer tool and thought it was fantastic. You know your stuff, so big question for you. To start with, how is AI changing up content creation? I am loving it. I got up at this is a true story. I got up at 5 5 30 this morning. Okay, because I bought a couple of new licenses for a couple of different things video creation, really cool ai technology using that, and then a bunch of new add-ons through chat, gpt4, which I am getting obsessed with. It's kind of taking over my life, but the content you can create with it is incredible. Mark, how is AI changing up content creation?

Speaker 3: 5:53

Yeah, and there's so much discussion now some positive, some negative, some fearful about AI. I'm not an expert on artificial intelligence from a technological standpoint, so I know I have to get me in trouble. And AI, to me is is a wonderful thing. I I don't buy into it's going to replace jobs or take people's jobs away. I think it's a it, it. It's a tremendous productivity tool and when it comes to writing specifically, you got to be careful because a lot of it's a great brainstorming partner.

Speaker 3: 6:29

Like a lot of times I'll go in with with with something I've drafted and just ask AI, can you improve it? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, and more often than not it gives me some ideas so that I can go back and rewrite it in my voice and put something out there. That is not you know, quote, unquote AI generated, but it does help you with brainstorming. So in our tool, we would never allow someone to automate the writing of their press release and put it out. For example, you know you have to take a draft which AI can give you and you know you have to take a draft which AI can give you and you have to spend some time dotting the I's, crossing the T's and putting it into your voice and making sure there's nothing inaccurate in the release.

Speaker 3: 7:15

But I think it's a great productivity tool and we're doing a lot with AI. What's interesting, bill, is when we came up with the domain name, newsworthyai ChatGPT had not been released yet, so that kind of blindsided us. David had some background in natural language processing and other really great AI-related skills, so when ChatGPT came out, we're like, oh my gosh, this is great for us. We don't have to write a lot of this from scratch. But yeah, so I think when it comes to news releases, it's really great to help you come up with better headlines and better ideas and how to write it. But I would never say just don't blindly rely on AI to write your content.

Speaker 4: 8:06

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the HR Chat Show. Iea training provides professional development to a changing workforce with changing needs, and we're proud to support this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. Iea offers lots of courses, webinars and on-demand training to meet our students where they are and help them reach their goals. We're proud of our contribution to better risk analysis and high operating standards in the industry. Learn more at IEATrainingorg. And now back to the conversation.

Speaker 2: 8:40

We are getting a little bit off HR topic here, but this is interesting. Mark has worked in the space for a long time from a content production and distribution point of view, so I still think it's relevant. And, uh, well, I founded the show, so I want to have mark on and talk more about this stuff and what I want to talk about. Just to understand this, how does one go about, uh, checking that content? So I've seen some um versions where it says that it can check whether it's been generated by. You know, press release, for example, has been generated by ai, a bit like these plagiarism tools that you see out there. How good are they? Uh, what are some of the checks that should be in place? So you know, let's carry this forward for an hr person listening who wants to create content to improve the employer brand, perhaps and they're using some ai for that. You know, how can you? How can you do checks?

Speaker 3: 9:34

and yeah, bill, there's a lot of tools out there and I've actually fooled them. I've actually taken something that I've just written myself in a notepad and type it into the computer all my voice, 100 and there's some tools that will say, hey, that's that's, that's partly AI generated, when it had nothing to do with it. And, conversely, I've I've generated content through various you know AI platforms and really went in and just edited it to kind of resemble my voice, maybe took five minutes to edit it and the tools say, nope, that wasn't AI, that was an individual. So I think you know, when you're reading something, typically if it comes across as AI a lot of unnecessary words and intros and you know the in conclusion and it's just very structured in a way that doesn't look real.

Speaker 3: 10:26

The thing with news releases and again we'll bring it back to HR, because I think anybody in HR is involved in marketing their business and I think that the press release format brings credibility and allows you to, you know, on a regular, monthly basis, announce news of what your company is doing, a venture going to where you're speaking, new content you're releasing, like research reports, new product launches, and with AI it's hard to mess that up. A product launch is a product launch. You going to an event? Is you going to an event? And it's really difficult for AI to screw that up.

Speaker 3: 11:11

But again, it's just that you want to have a draft but then put it in your own words. But there's not a lot of inaccurate or fake news, as they say, that can come out of your own news that a company is announcing. It's not like you're an opinion piece on what's going on in the world, or this or that. It's news, it's factual and if it's about your company, it's less likely to, you know, have a hallucination, as they say in the AI world, or making mistakes, but you know. So I think that we're not too concerned about the use of AI when it comes to, you know, assisting with improving a press release. That's that's about you know news of your company.

Speaker 2: 12:00

Okay, thank you. In your answer just a moment ago, mark, you said let's see anyone in HR is involved in marketing their business Interesting. I agree. How much of the modern HR function then is is marketing. You know how much does. How much of the modern hr function then is is marketing. You know how much does that role of the of the average hr person uh changed in the last five, maybe more years. So it's now much more about using tools which traditionally were owned by the marketing department, at email, for example, um, uh, creating copy and adding blog posts, you know, projecting the employee brand, whatever it might be. How much has the HR function changed and gone towards what were traditional marketing roles?

Speaker 3: 12:38

Yeah, so let's split the industry in half and because I think your question is more toward the human resource professional within an organization versus the companies, which was all the tools I built were geared toward the companies that are marketing their HR solution or their HR service into the HR departments of organizations. So I think when you look at marketing, it's definitely relevant to both audiences. So I think we have to look at it that way. Now for the vendors, we'll just quickly, that's obvious. You have a new software tool, you have a new service, you have a new consulting company, payroll, whatever it is.

Speaker 3: 13:22

Obviously marketing is a huge part of getting your product noticed by your buyers and generating interest and ultimately, conversions in terms of, you know, scheduling your call, scheduling a presentation, getting involved in an RFP, that's what it's all about. It's marketing your business and that's just a constant challenge for companies, especially the smaller companies that are breaking into the industry, to get noticed, to get visibility, to get interest in their company and to ultimately sell more of their product. Now, where you were going with inside the actual HR department of an organization which, depending on the size of a company, that's a massive department, you know there's people that are in charge of, you know, getting the right talent into the company through recruiting and talent management, of course. And then there's the employee benefit side, you know there's the payroll compensation side. It's a large space.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Absolutely, but in terms of them adopting the communication channels, the marketing tools, that might be fairly consistent regardless of where they are. And that's what I'm getting at. You know, what are those sorts of tools, what are those sorts of responsibilities that have been taken over to a large extent by HR?

Speaker 3: 14:39

Yeah, and it's certainly the employment. Branding side is critical today. Critical today. You know your company spent a lot of money on making jobs aware, making people I'm sorry, you know aware of the jobs and the opportunities there and recruiting the right talent. But there's nothing better than people proactively coming to you because they want to work at your company, because they know it's got a great reputation, it's going to be a great career for the individual. So they want to work for you. Whether you're a small, midsize or large business, that's a great place to be, where people are aware of you and you have a good reputation and your onboarding is great and you're you know, as they say, your candidate experience is great.

Speaker 3: 15:24

That means a lot and a big part of that, of course, is is marketing. It's not all of it. You have to practice what you preach, so to speak, but it does help with the HR departments when they're going out and proactively sharing positive stories. It could be in multiple content formats of people speaking at shows, using examples of what they're doing at the company. It could be blogs telling employee stories. There's a lot of newsletters, even some PR, to get positive coverage about your company. But I think it's a great opportunity for human resources if they're tasked with that employment branding initiative to really get some great marketing going in a variety of ways just to brand, so to speak, the company as a great place to work and a place where people are going to want to go and apply.

Speaker 2: 16:23

Mark, I want to absolutely switch tack now and, as this is an audience of HR folks and similar, I want to throw in a more human question here. Substantial career, an impressive career. I'd love to hear from you if there's been someone that you've worked with or worked for. Perhaps they've become a mentor and they've given you some advice in your career that shaped how you manage or work with others.

Speaker 3: 17:00

Oh boy, I don't know if I want to name names, but I mean, I've had plenty of mentors, including some individuals in my own family and early bosses that I had, and what I try to practice is it's within an organization, whether it's a small company you're running or you're part of a larger organization. It's I'm trying to find the right words, bill, but it's just be a good person, be honest, be transparent. You know, never ask others to take on tasks or do things that you wouldn't be willing to do yourself. When I was with a very large organization, I think the mentors that I had, or at least the managers and others that I looked up to, were those types of individuals. So, you know, when I had an early job and was called into the mailroom to help out because we had to get a bunch of marketing help out, because we had to get a bunch of marketing packets out, and you know they were short staff, it's. It's seeing, you know, seeing the CMO stop by and spend an hour and actually you know, you know, roll his or her sleeves up and and and help.

Speaker 3: 18:20

And I and I think this in in any community, whether it's a, whether it's a business, whether it's a family, it's just you know there's whether it's a business, whether it's a family, it's just you know there's a way of managing that really resonates with people. And I think that's the takeaway that I had over the years, and the people that I always looked up to were those that you know kind of practiced that type of management. So there you go. I'm not sure that's what you're looking for, but that was of management. So there you go. That's a. I'm not sure that's what you're looking for, but but that was my experience.

Speaker 2: 18:51

It was exactly what I was looking for, mark, because it was authentic. Thank you, sir. Okay, just finally for today. How can we learn more about you and connect with you? And, of course, how can we learn more about newsworthyai and newsrampcom?

Speaker 3: 19:04

Yeah, so, so quickly about newsworthy. The reason let's go back to press releases for just a minute, bill, because I think what people need to realize, regardless of the marketing position they're in, is that there's a lot of changes going on now in search and how people are finding information. I read a fascinating stat just this morning in an article I was reading, where it said're now search and answer engines as opposed to just search engines, and everyone's seeing their traffic decline. And that's actually impacted press releases quite a bit, where they're just not surfacing like they used to, which means less people are seeing them and certainly clicking through to them. And there was another update that penalizes duplicate content. So taking the same piece of content and just plastering it all over the internet, which is what traditionally press release news wires did that's actually hurting companies now and certainly hurting the visibility of the press release.

Speaker 3: 20:22

So what we're all about at Newsworthy is getting around that and actually getting your news seen by the people that you want to see it, and that means putting your press release out in multiple content formats. It could be zero-click content for things like LinkedIn blogs and news articles and podcasts and sub-stack newsletters, but taking the release and this is where we do use some of the AI and curating it into multiple content formats that are appropriate for different types of platforms and then pushing it out to those platforms so that you're not reliant solely on a Google search for people to discover your news. So if that sounds interesting to you, I would love to connect with you, have a conversation about you, talk about your press release strategy, and it's simple Go to newsworthyai, you can go to newsrampcom or you can just email me at mark at newsworthyai, and I would love to have a conversation with you.

Speaker 2: 21:22

Very good and that just leaves me to say for today Mark, you're a superstar. Thank you very much for joining me on this episode. Thanks for having me and listeners as always.

Speaker 1: 21:31

Until next time, happy working thanks for listening to the hr chat show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.