ChatGPT Prompts for Small but Common Comms Tasks (Intellicomms, 5/5)
The authority on mixternal communications
So far in this series on using prompt engineering with ChatGPT to make you more efficient and productive in your communications role, I’ve:
Argued that being proficient in prompt engineering is a sure way to level up in your comms role. (I also define prompt engineering.)
Showed you three kinds of prompt engineering to do just about all of your comms.
Provided 20 example prompts and 24 screenshots that show you how to use ChatGPT to do everyday comms.
Suggested ways to formalize prompt engineering for your comms style guide or handbook.
We have some fun in this conclusion to the five-part series. I show you how to use prompt engineering for miscellaneous tasks that we run into from time to time in our comms work, including:
Organizing data into tables
Putting information into context
Summarizing media (e.g., books, television)
Random tiny tasks, like humanizing numbers and generating emoji
This series has been done using the free version of ChatGPT-3.5. A couple of times in this article I talk about the difference in capabilities between ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4, the paid version of the chatbot.
Good news! Mister Editorial has access to ChatGPT-4. In future Intellicomms articles I’ll show you how to use the super-charged chatbot to boost your productivity and creativity in mindblowing ways 🤯.
Intellicomms is reserved for paid members.
Hey ho, let’s go.
Structuring Data
You can organize a string of data into tables, which can make some messages easier to read. For example, instead of your CFO reporting a paragraph of financial updates in an all-employee email, you can put the same info into a neat table. ChatGPT can speed up the task.
Here is a sample paragraph with a bunch of earnings information. The content isn’t scannable and reading the text is a drag, so I asked ChatGPT to put the data into a table.
Recent financial information from the company mentioned revenue of $117.2 billion down 5% from last year. Products revenue was $96.4 billion down 8% from last year. Services recorded $20.8 billion, up 6% over a year ago. Company gross margin was 43%, up 7%. Products gross margin was 37%, up 2.4%. Services gross margin was 70.8%, up 3%. Operating expenses were $14.3 billion. Net income was $30 billion. Earnings per share was $1.88.
Generate a table using this information.
Notice how I put the information in a specific order, a lesson learned when we examined the five parts of a prompt ($).
The Copy code button lets you copy the data so you can easily paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, presentation slide, a Word document, or—as shown here—into a blank .txt file:
Putting Things in Context
Use ChatGPT to help you wade through unfamiliar waters. The chatbot can help you understand industry and technical terms and jargon and can provide context for unfamiliar names and events.
Say, for example, you hear rumblings about your workforce wanting to unionize but you don’t know much about the history of unions. You do a little research and you come across a familiar term in an unfamiliar context. Ask ChatGPT for help.
And the answer:
No more googling and opening six tabs hoping the answer is on one of the pages. A simple Q&A with ChatGPT gets your answer quickly so you can go back to your research.
Or, you can keep going!
This is a basic Q&A exchange with ChatGPT. Much more sophisticated results can be derived when you use one of the three basic kinds of prompt engineering ($).
Summarizing Media
ChatGPT is an excellent tool for distilling long-form media of all kinds.
Film and television: Does your boss keep likening your team to the characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you have no idea what he’s talking about because you’ve only seen Iron Man, which was awesome, by the way, but that was back in 2008 when there wasn’t even a thing called the Marvel Cinematic Universe and aren’t there like 30 of them now and who can keep up let alone catch up and are they really all that good to begin with or is it all a bunch of pop culture hype? Anyway … your boss keeps referencing the characters and you’re tired of being lost, so ask ChatGPT!
This goes on for a total of 13 characters.
Books: So you’re in a mandatory office book club that you can’t keep up with because they’re having you read books—which takes a lot of time!—but not giving you the time to do it, you know, during the work week even though it’s a work thing, and who wants to read books about work in your “free” time when you’ve got Colleen Hoover, your children, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe waiting for you after dinner? Ask ChatGPT for help!
This goes on for a total of seven points.
ChatGPT-3.5 cannot parse information beyond January 2022. If you need a summary of new media, you’re out of luck.
ChatGPT-4 is up to date because it integrated with Bing, which allows it to search the internet for the latest information. For example, I had ChatGPT-4 summarize a book that was released two days ago.
New information: We know the best part of being a comms pro is that our skills transfer across industries without having to be experts in any one sector. But we also know that when you get to a new job half of the first six months is spent trying to figure out who’s who and what’s expected of you and the other half is spent trying to understand your new and exotic industry.
Say you just landed a comms role where your main audience is airplane engineers and the only thing you know about airplanes is that you prefer window seats. You’ve got to absorb as much as you can about aerospace engineering as quickly as possible, starting with a 2,500-word article that explains the basics of how an airplane stays in the air.
Copy/paste the article into ChatGPT and ask for a summary:
If you want to dumb it down, you can. Or, if you want to learn the lingo that your audience uses, well, just ask ChatGPT to speak down or up to your level:
In a matter of minutes ChatGPT can help you get the gist of any topic so you can more effectively communicate about the subject.
Here’s how you can effectively and efficiently use ChatGPT to write blog and intranet articles ($).
ChatGPT-3.5 is limited to capably analyzing 2,500 characters of pasted text (500-600 words), so for longer articles you need to paste the material in chunks and piece together the summaries.
ChatGPT-4 allows for more words to be pasted into the chatbot, but even better, it can analyze material on the web (so you don’t have to paste), up-to-date media (i.e., you’re not stuck examining pre-2022 content), and files (e.g., PDFs, DOCX, CSV).
Useful Miscellany
Sometimes you need to explain statistics in a way that people can grasp. To “scale” or “humanize” large data, like 10,000 gallons or six million tons, just ask ChatGPT.
Need a perfect emoji to convey an emotion?
Copy/paste the emoji into your communications.
And if you want to take your comms to a quirky level with emoji…
Emoji is as far as ChatGPT-3.5 goes in terms of image generation. In version 4, however, you can generate images (and do a lot more with image files).
Here are a few ways you can use image generators ($) to enhance your comms content.
Mister Editorial + ChatGPT-4 = 🤯 🚀
Your favorite comms newsletter guy has access to ChatGPT-4, the paid super version of this chatbot. This means that in future editions of Intellicomms we’ll see how this generative artificial intelligence can take your skills to the moon.
Mister Editorial’s paid members will learn:
Images: How to analyze and describe images, perform visual comparisons, edit or modify images, use images as references
Text: Read and summarize content in text files (e.g., PDF, DOCX), extract specific information based on prompts, perform language analysis (e.g., tone, sentiment), translate content into other languages, and more.
Data: Analyze and summarize data, create visual representations from data
What do you want to learn how to do with artificial intelligence? Email me at editorshaun@gmail.com with your requests or suggestions.
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Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I am the editor-in-chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research. The views in this newsletter are my own.
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