Three Kinds of Prompt Engineering To Do Just About All Your Comms (Intellicomms: 2/5)

The authority on mixternal comms

Futuro (1923) by Giacomo Balla

In part one of this five-part series I introduced the concept of prompt engineering for for chatbots as a tactic to become more effective, creative, efficient, and productive in your role as a communications professional.

• Reminder: Prompt engineering involves designing and crafting effective instructions to achieve desired responses from chatbots. It's critical for fine-tuning and controlling the tool’s behavior and output.

Here in part two I use practical comms examples to explain three basic types of prompt engineering that you can put into practice today.

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Let’s Prompt Together

Learn alongside me.¹ Open another tab and access ChatGPT. (If you haven’t done so already, create a free account—super easy and fast.) You can do the prompts alongside me, so you can see the tool in action.

• FYI: All examples in this series are done using ChatGPT.

• Note: Your outputs will differ from mine because ChatGPT parses different materials in different orders every time it is prompted. (That’s why if you don’t like an output you can hit the “regenerate” button repeatedly until you get something you like.)

Let’s begin with simple prompting before moving on to two more sophisticated—but super easy—methods of prompt engineering.

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Simple Prompting

Say your company is launching a new product called SmartCart and your CEO wants to let employees know about it. Ask ChatGPT to introduce SmartCart:

It’s not bad, but it’s wrong. It’s not ChatGPT’s fault, though. It doesn’t know that, in our fictional scenario, SmartCart is actually a small robotic vehicle that autonomously delivers groceries and meals to your home. So for the next prompt, let’s include that information.

Much better. But there are a couple of things wrong with this intro. It’s written as if it were a tweet because it has hashtags and emojis. We want an email intro.

• You also know that your CEO is a bit conservative in the way he presents himself, like, say, Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Would Pichai (or your CEO) use an exclamation point?

We need to provide a little more context for ChatGPT to get a suitable medium and tone.

Look at that! No hashtags or emoji…or exclamation points. And now you have something to work with, a draft to shape into the message you need to share with employees. And it took only seconds to complete.

Congratulations! This process of refining the prompt to get the output you need is… prompt engineering!

• Rarely will you write the perfect prompt on your first attempt.

• With practice and by employing different tactics, you will become very good at prompt engineering, and therefore more efficient and productive in your role.

Next, let’s learn how to get ChatGPT to do the boring, annoying tasks we all get bogged down with on a daily basis.