Long Form Written To Short Form Video

Our agency is making a bet that the best service-based companies are going to be doing three things as levers for their marketing in the age of AI:

1. Delivering more value than what their scope of work has promised

2. Celebrating the stories of their customers

3. Associating the business with the humans behind it

At K&J, we’ve been terrible at associating my face (the founder) with the brand visually.

So, we’ve started converting my long-form content from LinkedIn to short-form content on Instagram using AI to create the scripts.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Copy any long-form content and paste it into ChatGPT 4.5

2. Enter the following prompt underneath the pasted long-form content:
   
   “You are a social media creator who needs to turn this long-form content into a short-form piece of content that is less than 45 seconds.
   
   You need to write a script for someone to film the content.
   
   The script will be used for social media on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
   
   Remember, people are NOT on social media to watch ads, so the hook (first 1-3 seconds) needs to be engaging enough to stop people from scrolling through their feed.
   
   Please include all shots that need to be produced from A and B-roll, and the content will be shot on an iPhone.
   
   Please include a line-by-line script for the person to say and how they should say it.”

3. Here is the output:

   

   Example script from the prompt above

Once you’ve filmed, you’ll need to get an editor (we’re paying $20 per piece of content), and I’ll discuss those details next week.

Here are the results:

• We’ve got 96 followers and have already generated one lead (Prescient Health) from the content with < 10,000 views.

  

  Last 30 days of content

• The total cost to date for labour and editing hours outside of my time sits at $780

• The hardest part has been getting over myself and just filming content

Lastly, can you give us a follow and critique our content - we’re trying to improve every time we post.

Tone

I upset a staff member this week – and had to apologise.

I just don't take "business" that seriously. The only thing I really care about is my health and my family. So I don't get too emotionally invested in conversations I have with my team about business.

When I have business conversations about meaningless stuff like our website's wording or the breakfast budget, I'm laid-back and matter-of-fact.

"How much can we spend on the breakfast?" – "As much as makes sense"

But when the conversations are a little more serious (for the other person) — say about work attitudes or expectations — that style comes off as being "condescending, patronising and generally unkind".

"Hey, what's happening with those extra responsibilities I asked for?" "We offered you one and you turned it down, so I've moved on."

That was the conversation that upset them. I've summarised, but it roughly represents what was said.

Am I in the wrong? Well, it took me a while to get here, but I believe I am.

Call me a dummy, but I've only just realised something: when you're flippant about stuff that can only affect you — like overspending on a team event — no one cares. But when you're flippant about stuff that affects someone else, tone really matters.

I really dropped the ball here by matching my staff member’s tone and delivery. I wasn't trying to talk down to them, but clearly it landed that way.

As wanky as it sounds, I understand that as a person other people look to, my words carry more weight — so I need to place them more carefully. And this is especially true in conversations where the other person has skin in the game, so to speak.

When it comes down to it, I missed my standard for empathy — and that's on me.