Using AI For Public Relations Content Repurposing

Introduction

Content repurposing is the process of taking existing content and reusing it in new formats for different audiences and platforms. For public relations teams, repurposing content can be a highly effective way to extend the shelf life of press releases, thought leadership pieces, podcast interviews, and other media formats.

Rather than starting from scratch each time new content is needed, repurposing allows PR teams to optimize and expand on assets they have already created. This saves substantial time and effort while allowing for consistency across different content types.

Repurposing also enables PR teams to tailor messaging and formats for different stakeholders and channels. For example, a press release could be repurposed into a blog post, social media content, or video script. An interview transcript could become a short-form article or a series of pull quotes.

With the rise of new technologies like speech to text and large language models, repurposing content is easier than ever. As this guide will explore, these tools allow PR teams to efficiently turn audio and text content into optimized formats while maintaining quality.

Overall, thoughtful repurposing strategies empower PR teams to maximize their time and resources. By breathing new life into existing assets, they can reach wider audiences while upholding brand consistency across every touchpoint.

Speech to Text

Speech recognition, also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), is a technology that allows the conversion of spoken words into text. It works by using algorithms to analyze the acoustic features of speech and match them to phonetic linguistic components to transcribe speech into text.

Some key features of modern speech recognition technology include:

• Statistical modeling - Systems are "trained" on large amounts of recorded speech samples to build acoustic and language models. This allows them to recognize a wide vocabulary and grammars.
• Deep learning - Neural network architectures like recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks now power most speech recognition systems. They offer improved accuracy compared to earlier systems.
• Continuous speech - Can transcribe natural conversations without pauses, recognizing whole phrases and sentences rather than individual words.
• Speaker independence - Does not require training for individual speakers and works for most voices. Some systems allow speaker profiles to improve accuracy.
• Real-time capabilities - Can transcribe as you speak with minimal lag between speech and text output. Enables applications like live closed captioning.
• Support for multiple languages - Advanced multilingual models can transcribe speech in many major languages.
• Integration with other systems - APIs allow integration with other tools and workflows like computer-aided transcription, subtitling, product UIs, etc.
• High accuracy - With large datasets and deep learning, speech recognition can now achieve over 90% accuracy for conversations in optimal conditions. Accuracy varies based on vocabulary size, audio quality, speaker accents, etc.

Speech to text has enabled high productivity gains in transcription and accessibility. It empowers PR teams to efficiently repurpose recorded media into text assets.

Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 are a type of artificial intelligence system that are trained on massive amounts of text data. They can generate human-like text and have capabilities like summarization, translation, question answering, and content creation.

LLMs excel at text generation and can take prompts like "write a blog post about gardening" and produce long-form content. The AI analyzes the patterns in the dataset it was trained on to determine things like tone, style, and topic transitions to make the output seam like natural human writing.

Some key capabilities of large language models include:

• Text generation - LLMs can create coherent long-form text on a wide variety of topics when given a short prompt. They are adept at mimicking human writing styles.
• Summarization - LLMs can digest long articles or documents and produce concise summaries while retaining key information. This is useful for condensing information.
• Translation - LLMs trained on dual-language datasets can translate text between languages with accuracy approaching human levels.
• Question answering - LLMs can answer factual questions based on knowledge gleaned from their training data. They serve as a powerful reference tool.
• Classifying text - LLMs can categorize text by topic, sentiment, intent, and more. This assists in automatically tagging and organizing content.
• Content creation - Given prompts and guidelines, LLMs can generate entire unique articles, stories, and other text to assist human writers.

The scale of data and computational power used to build modern LLMs allow them to perform these tasks at a level not seen before in AI. Their capabilities will continue to grow alongside data and hardware improvements. LLMs are rapidly changing how we generate and interact with text.

Repurposing Recorded Media

PR teams frequently record audio and video content for events, interviews, presentations, and more. While this content has high production value, it can be difficult to repurpose and fully leverage across other formats. Transcribing the audio into text unlocks powerful opportunities.

With a text transcript generated by a speech to text service, you can easily create:

• Quotes and excerpts to share on social media
• An accompanying blog post expanding on key themes  
• A long-form article for your website or to pitch to publishers
• An eBook compiling interviews or panels on a topic
• A legacy archive of the content accessible via search

Rather than having the video or audio trapped in a silo, transcribing it into text makes it reusable. The text can then be edited and optimized for different formats.

This approach saves your team substantial time. You don't need to comb through hours of recordings to identify short clips or quotes. The transcript serves as an always up-to-date reference. It also reduces bias in excerpting, as the full context is preserved.

With a transcript, you can offer audiences text versions of content they may prefer reading over watching or listening. It also makes the content more accessible.

Transcription coupled with an LLM like GPT-3 unlocks even more possibilities:

• Automatically generate social media captions from excerpts  
• Produce a highlights summary of a long recording
• Create a FAQ doc from a common questions session
• Answer specific questions by searching the transcript

In short, transcription can transform the value you get from high-quality recorded content.

Repurposing Presentations

Presentations like slide decks contain a wealth of information that can often be expanded into long-form written content. While slides are meant to be concise bullet points for presenting, PR teams can repurpose this content into complete articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and more.

The key is to take the core ideas from the slide deck and greatly expand upon them. For example, a slide with three bullet points can likely be turned into a full paragraph or even multiple paragraphs of descriptive content. Data charts and graphs from slides can also be explained in detail in written form.

It's important to take what's on the slides and add significant original analysis, examples, expert opinions, explanations, research, and more. The finished long-form content should provide readers with a deep-dive into the topic, going well beyond what the slides contain on their own.  

Turning slides into long-form content takes skill, but today's LLMs can assist. By providing the AI with the slide deck and prompt explaining the assignment, it can generate an initial draft expanding each slide into detailed writing. The PR team can then edit this draft, ensuring it stays true to the source material while adding their own human insight and expertise.

With the right process, presentations and slide decks can become books, in-depth reports, detailed blog posts, and more. Repurposing this already created content saves time while allowing teams to maximize their intellectual property.

Repurposing Interviews

Interviews provide a treasure trove of information that PR teams can repurpose into multiple formats. With the power of speech to text and AI, transcribing interviews into long-form articles or blog posts is easier than ever.

Start by recording video or audio of the full interview. It's ideal if you can have the interviewee wear a microphone to ensure high audio quality. Then run the recording through a speech to text platform to get an initial transcript.

Review the transcript, cleaning up any errors and formatting it into readable paragraphs. You now have a full raw text version of the interview.

Next, analyze the key insights, quotes, and themes that emerged from the interview. Outline the structure into logical sections, similarly to how you would outline an article or blog post.

Leverage the interview transcript as your raw material for crafting the long-form piece. Pull the most insightful quotes and summarize the main points the interviewee discussed for each section.

Aim to tell a compelling story from the interview, keeping it focused on the most interesting and shareable highlights. Quote the interviewee liberally, while using your own words to transition between topics.

Proofread the finished draft carefully to polish the writing. Verify any key facts are accurate. With some strategic repurposing, one 30 minute interview can often provide enough content for a 1,500+ word blog post or magazine article!

Repurposing interviews in this way allows PR teams to maximize the value from their original interview content. The same interview that was published or aired as a short segment can have a much longer shelf life packaged as a long-form piece on your website or blog.

Expanding Briefs into Long-form

Many PR teams work from content briefs - essentially bullet pointed lists of key topics and messages that need to be communicated. While briefs make content direction clear, actually expanding them into finalized long-form content can be tedious and time consuming. This is where AI tools like large language models (LLMs) can help streamline the process.

LLMs are trained on massive text datasets and can generate human-like writing. By simply taking a brief's bullet points and inputting them into an LLM, PR professionals can quickly get draft long-form content generated. The AI examines the points, understands the broader context, and expands each into full paragraphs and sections.

For example, a brief may contain:

• Q3 financial results exceeded expectations
• Revenue grew 15% year-over-year
• New product drove customer acquisition

After entering these points into an LLM, you may swiftly get back well-written sections covering each bullet in detail. The AI generates complete sentences, smoothly transitions between ideas, spices up the language, and turns the brief into an advanced draft.

The human then simply needs to review, polish, and tweak the LLM's output where needed. This allows briefs to become long-form at scale while maintaining quality. The AI handles the heavy lifting of putting meat on the bones in an intelligent way.

Compared to manually writing everything from scratch, leveraging LLMs cuts down content expansion time immensely. Teams can devote their effort toward oversight and refinement, rather than starting with a blank page. Repurposing briefs into any format - articles, social posts, scripts, and more - can be done far faster.

So for PR professionals looking to scale content while optimizing human time, using AI to expand briefs into long-form drafts offers a major efficiency advantage. The combination of human strategic direction and AI content generation is powerful.

Optimizing for Different Formats

The beauty of repurposing content with speech to text is the ability to optimize it for different formats and audiences. The transcribed text from a video, audio or event can be tailored and expanded into various formats:  

• Blog Posts: Take key points from a presentation or interview and turn them into a blog post optimized with SEO best practices. Expand on the ideas with your own analysis.
• Social Media: Craft social posts with snappy summaries, quotes or insights from longer recorded content.
• Newsletters: Repurpose segments into newsletter articles focused on subscribers' interests. Link back to the full content.
• Multimedia: Enhance the transcript by embedding relevant images, charts, videos and audio clips. Create visual social posts.
• Long-form: Use speech to text as a starting point, then greatly expand the initial transcript into a long-form guide, ebook or white paper.
• Multiple Languages: Translate the English transcript into other languages to efficiently create multilingual content.

The optimized formats can then be distributed through the relevant marketing, public relations and editorial channels. With large language models, generate tailored content automatically for specific formats and audiences.

Repurposing content using speech to text provides a workflow efficiency for producing a wide variety of formats from the same initial source material. Optimize the output for your goals and channels to maximize the value.

Maintaining Quality

When repurposing large amounts of content across different formats, it can be challenging to ensure consistent quality. Here are some tips:

• Carefully review automatically generated transcripts and summaries. Speech to text services continue to improve, but errors still occur. Review transcripts against the original audio or video, and correct any mistakes.
• Use multiple Large Language Models when expanding content. Each LLM has slightly different strengths and weaknesses. Rotating between a few different models can help identify any curious gaps or inconsistencies to double-check.
• Establish a style guide early on. Define the tone, formatting, and stylistic preferences upfront so repurposed content has consistency.
• Spot check random samples. Repurposing at scale requires automating much of the process. But it's still important to manually review random samplings of the output to catch any errors.
• Limit cascading content repurposing. Be careful not to repurpose content that has already gone through multiple iterations of generation. Try to always go back to the original transcription or recording where possible.
• Compare key sections across repurposed content. Cross-check any important facts, statistics, quotes, or definitions to ensure accuracy across repurposed versions.
• Leverage professional editors and fact checkers when feasible. For high-stakes content, having an extra set of human eyes review and refine can be worthwhile.

With the right combination of automation and human oversight, PR teams can maintain quality standards even when repurposing content at scale. The key is finding the right balance.

Conclusion: The Benefits of Repurposing for PR Teams

Public relations teams can greatly benefit from repurposing existing content into new formats. Whether it's transcripts from interviews, recordings from presentations, or briefs turned into long-form articles, repurposing content saves time and effort while allowing teams to reach wider audiences.

With the help of artificial intelligence tools like speech-to-text and large language models, PR teams can turn audio and text content into optimized materials for any platform or format. This opens up new avenues for distributing key messages and expanding the life of high-quality content.

Repurposing via AI enables consistency across channels, reaches more diverse audiences, and positions organizations and individuals as thought leaders. It allows PR teams to deliver the right information through the right channels at the right time.

Overall, content repurposing is an essential strategy for modern PR teams looking to maximize their productivity and impact. By taking full advantage of powerful AI tools for transcription, summarization, and content creation, public relations professionals can elevate their content game to new levels. The time savings and increased visibility repurposing brings makes it a must for any PR toolkit.

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