Authenticity is about being genuine, real, and true to one’s character or brand.
At its heart, it’s about radical honesty and transparency.
When a person or a company manages to share their true selves, that authenticity goes a long way to connecting with their audience in a way that builds trust and a deep sense of rapport.
Authenticity is a profoundly human and emotional quality.
It’s hard to achieve at the best of times.
It’s impossible to achieve if you rely too much on AI for your marketing communications.
Think about it… authenticity relies on a deep self-knowledge. To be transparent and to reveal yourself, you have to know yourself at a level way beyond what ChatGPT can achieve.
Step one to achieving authenticity is through self knowledge.
This is where we encounter the core domains of Emotional Intelligence.
The first domain is Self Awareness. If you want to be authentic, you need to know yourself. And that includes being aware of the emotions you are feeling.
The second domain is Self Management. To be your authentic self, you’ll want to be able to manage and control your emotions when communicating with colleagues, prospects, and customers.
The third domain is Social Awareness. This is about being mindful of the emotions of the people around you, and showing empathy. To be authentic in your communications, you need understand the feelings of the people you are trying to connect with. You need to empathize with your audience.
The fourth and final domain is Relationship Management. This is where everything comes together, enabling a state of high Emotional Intelligence.
The point here is that if you want to communicate effectively as your authentic self, you need to start from a place of self-knowledge, and connect with your audience with empathy.
So where does AI come into our journey to authentic communication?
Empathy is core to any truly authentic communication. But you can’t feel empathy for people without knowing them… and understanding their fears and desires.
And you can’t know your audience intimately unless you first LISTEN to them.
This is where AI can help, simply because it is so good at crunching, analyzing and summarizing huge piles of data.
Here’s something that I now do on a regular basis…
When researching an audience, I will find a place where those people have been expressing their feelings about a particular product or service.
I might gather this data from product reviews on Amazon, or from customer service logs, or chat logs.
I then copy the text, paste it into GPT-4, and write this prompt:
“Conduct a sentiment analysis on this information.”
30 seconds later, I have a clear summary of the feels people have about that product or service. I have found this to be a wonderful way to “listen’ to my audience, before I start writing.
With the analysis in place, I’m now able to empathize with my audience, which allows me to write in a more open and authentic way.
There’s no need to choose either AI or Emotional Intelligence. Use both.
Many writers see a huge divide between AI and EI.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Identify their respective strengths, and combine them.
In this case, working with both AI and EI allows us to communicate in a more authentic way, addressing the emotions of our readers with empathy and understanding.
If you want more instruction on how to combine AI with EI, take my Futureproof Copywriting course. Details here…
