Welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm Paul Zelizer, your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs and it costs you nothing. Thank you so much. Today our guest is me, Paul Zelizer and our topic is the cost of sloppy AI marketing and a holiday break. I've been a business coach for social entrepreneurs and clean tech companies for the past 18 years. I'm the host of the AwarePreneurs podcast and the co founder of NM TechTalks and NM Climate 2 Tech for Good Communities here in New Mexico, where I live. I want to start this episode off with a quick story.

Recently I interviewed someone for the AwarePreneurs podcast who came on to talk about AI for social entrepreneurs. Really nice person, smart, well spoken. The language was polished and familiar. But when I listened back, I realized something was missing. There were lots of big ideas and buzzwords, AI for good and enhancing or accelerating your impact, etc. Etc. But very little about what a founder could actually use the next day or the next week. There were no concrete examples, no lived experiences beyond the words.

And and in the end, I couldn't use the episode. That moment crystallized something for me. AI can help us communicate more clearly, but when it replaces real gritty experience instead of sharpening it, it ends up sounding impressive while delivering very little value. And I'm seeing more and more of this right now. AI is everywhere and it's making a lot of people sound the same. And when we're not being thoughtful about how to use it, AI is cheapening our brands, it's eroding our trust, and instead of us helping us grow our impact businesses, it's actually getting in the way. So let's talk about how, when done sloppily, AI is a brand risk. Polished language doesn't equal real value.

We have to be really thoughtful about real stories, real market tested strategies and the things that we're doing for our clients. We got to keep in mind what their problems are. Mentor mind says fallen in love with the problem, not the solution. A lot of people are using AI as the solution and we're forgetting about the problems that our clients have. And Whether it's on LinkedIn or Instagram, on podcasts and YouTube videos, I'm seeing more and more of of people using this strategy. It makes sense. Again, it's safe and it's polished and it's fast. But if we're not being Smart.

It can really hurt your brand.

When I think about the contrast of that, I was trying to think of another story and in the story that came to mind, in the past 48 hours I've had three executive coaching opportunities in my business. Leads and executive coaching. You know, my normal six month business coaching package. You can look on my website, it's 795amonth for six months. Right. You can do the math. But business, I'm sorry but executive coaching is more than that. Depends on the scenario, the size of the organization, number of employees, am I working just with one leader or the team? But it's, you know, anywhere from 2x to 5x what I would charge for the more typical business coaching.

Right. I've had three of them in the past 48 hours. That's pretty uncommon. And I went there and I looked. Two of them were from people who have been in my network for a long time and we have a lot of values, affinity and they're super connectors as well. One of them is a previous client who circled back around. Right now I haven't talked to all of them about, you know, the scope of what it means for me financially. But the leads here, we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars of new business leads that came out in the past, that come to me in the past 48 hours.