Digital PR For AI Search With Austin Holmes

This is The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business' full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-fold episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, or the best SEO podcast since we bought that domain a long, long time ago. Welcome back, everybody. Summer just ended for me. I was gone most of the summer, but luckily I was able to take my coding agent with me and was able to work really hard. So apologies for any episodes that you were hoping to hear. I was recording episodes on the sales and marketing podcast, though. So if you go search those, you can check those out. A lot of great stuff's going on. I actually had a really interesting meeting today with someone that's built their own model with their own weights. And I'm like, man, like this is going to be a Herculean task. You got to raise some money. Like he was talking about his burn rate on servers and token use. It was pretty insane, but it was a really cool meeting. Um, everyone, hopefully the world is progressing for you. And, you know, one of the things that a lot of SEOs are not focused on and should be focused on is the important off page. So, you know, everybody's doing everything with content creation and, you know, now, uh, Claude now has a watermark. If you didn't know that on August 2nd, and then they let everybody know about it. Anything that Claude touches, it's tracked. I always thought it had a watermark. There was just kind of signs, but now they legit have a watermark. I believe it's, uh, complying with GDPR in the EU. And that's just going to spread. Uh, also the NASC framework for using AI is coming online shortly. So there's a lot happening in this space, but something I don't want people to forget about is the important, uh, importance of PR and how you need to be

showing up everywhere and third party, um, support and verification. So I wanted to bring on Austin Holmes with, uh, publicity for good to kind of talk about that change that's happening. Here's the crazy thing, Austin. Welcome to the show, by the way. Yeah. Awesome. Dude, the Claude watermark was, uh, that was a fun one to find out about. Yeah. Yeah. Um, here's the craziest thing, right? So like, you know, you got roundups and there's all these kinds of things that are happening out there right now in the knowledge graph. Uh, I mean, I have a couple of properties that we manage AI Google's like, yeah, that's you. So we are not going to trust that we're going to actually use a third party site to canonicalize who you are. Right. That really puts like an exclamation on point for me that how important third party verification is. So it's not even using the own content that I produce to canonicalize. Hey, this is what I want to say about myself. It's looking at another third party site saying, this is what they're saying about you. And that's what we're going to show publicly. Yeah. Uh, depending on who you ask, it's over 80% is third party citation on the platforms. And obviously each platform is different, but, uh, it's still that trust factor and it's going to take into account reviews because that's still third party it's Quora Reddit. Um, but the media piece is still massive because they have that trust factor and that's how AI wants to show up because they don't want to lose the trust that they've been building. We saw what happened when open AI had all of the bias, they changed tune rather quickly, um, because it was losing user base. And so their goal is to make their users happy. And for our side, if we're trying to show up in that search, whether it's in the store, as somebody is looking at your product or on the digital side, where you're trying to dominate the landscape and,

you know, there isn't a page two anymore. That's the important thing to remember. You are lucky if you show up in the top five that it shows you, but really you want to be that sole recommendation. That's where you see people making huge strides and these huge success stories because people are searching for it. It's like, Oh, what do I use after open claw? Okay. Hermes. And it just takes off. Um, so you want to be that sole recommendation and the way you're going to do that is dominating every aspect of it. And the, and the complexity actually gives us an advantage right now because it is a complicated task. Like mom and pop is, they're not going to go and figure out all of the trust factors for all of the different platforms. Um, but an easy way that's kind of in the middle is, Hey, let's get our name out there in the traditional way. It's been cool for us because we've seen PR budgets double. Yeah. Yeah. I think that attribution has always been the difficult thing with age when you're looking at paid ads, right? Like to the, that measurement factor. And I think that there's still a lot of education, uh, around that, but you know, when you, when you type in something and reviews come up about the company, whether it be glass door or it's something somebody said on Reddit or whatever you're, you're having to realize you have to be optimizing everywhere, three 60 of what's going on. And the thing that carries more weight, which there, there is a decay factor of course, too, like with reviews, there's this factor that like, if you're not constantly getting reviews, the strength of those reviews and you see it in social posts as well, the math, right? Like we're really getting into the math of like the post, the most recent post is going to have the most strength. And so I'm even seeing this with social media getting indexed, right? So social media is getting, you're talking

about on social media, like Facebook might be really noisy. And so the Facebook accounts that I've seen taken off is they have clearly niched down. They focused on a certain area and, um, they're building authority in that space because you can't truly be an expert in everything, or you have to have so much authority to be able to fan out that authority. And it needs to kind of be adjacent. And so some of these SEO strategies that I've seen people employ with like, let's say quote unquote doorway pages and such are not really working. And also AI can sniff out pretty quickly templated, uh, page build. So it's funny. It's still this kind of cat and mask game with spam and people that create, uh, and okay. So I did hire a new social media guy, not too long ago. And I did use the word in the interview, AI slop. And you know, that was like, I don't know what dictionary it was that, that, that was like the word of the, uh, the year or something like that. AI slop was like actually the word of the year. And, and he, he actually got like offended, you know? And so I had to, I had to walk that back, but we had a lot of conversation about when you're generating stuff with AI based on the inputs that you give it and the personalization on how important that is. And also, um, I mean, so I don't know what the percentage is. You probably have a better handle on it than me. How much content today is being generated by AI. And I have publishers that will push back and be like, this was AI generated. And you know, it was AI generated with like a human reviewing it, but it was sent by, uh, and that's where I think they caught, they, they, they identified it, but it was sent by AI bot. So there's this whole economy now that, and we have team members now that are agents, right. And they're

doing stuff and they take out some basic functionality of pushing paper back and forth. But they had sent that article and it was like sent from an AI. And so I don't know, what are you seeing from publishers as it relates to AI generated content and, you know, AI in general, I don't know. Yeah. I think you still, there's the agentic side and then there's the content side. Um, and I would treat them differently because it's so easy for anybody to spot on the tech side, the agentic stuff. And, you know, there's an entire economy being created around agents creating their own stuff, which is cool to see a little scary, but on the content side, uh, if you can place into your workflow, whatever you're creating, whether it's videos or articles or whatever it is, if you place that human element, it doesn't have the same AI feel. Um, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. Uh, we like doing it of the baseline content coming from a human, but everything after that, we're generating snippets and video from that initial, uh, read. Now the, uh, content itself is AI generated. Um, so every step of the process, except for the person sitting in front of the camera, but that's the part that sets its part, sets it completely apart from everything else is somebody actually sitting, reading in front of the camera. Um, and, and you can replace that and handwrite it with an avatar. Um, but if you're adding that human element that it's known, Hey, this had to have human intervention, you're going to prevent some of that. Um, AI slop. Yeah. AI slop. Uh, and I mean, for us, it's all like, we're on our AEO specific stuff. We're trying to read verbatim because we're trying to hit the keywords. We're trying to hit the, the structure that's actually going to index. Um, and we'll convert that on the article side. We'll make newsletters from it. There's so many, if you have that one step along the process

that is human generated and it can be quick, like for one of our processes, it's like an hour of recording a month, but that generates enough to populate everything. Um, and that that's a baseline. Obviously you can do more. Uh, but I I'd say if you're going for a content approach, whether it's to generate articles or newsletters, uh, whatever, um, start with that core. And for us structuring in a way where as soon as it's done and recorded, it's already going to hit all of the other, um, elements that we want it to hit from the technical side, that's going to help it actually get spread that much more. Uh, and of course structuring for virality. So, yeah, I mean, I, and, and again, there's, um, what is it called? The, the jagged way forward. Like basically there's certain areas that are going to advance, uh, faster than, than other areas. For example, we have a client and, uh, we're, we're bringing in actors and then we're having them say, sign name, image, and likeness deals. Okay. Yeah. That's a great way to do it. And then we're putting them in a gen and then we're using 11 labs and we're making like not traditional content pieces. Like we're, we're trying to do like pattern interrupt, like the crazy videos that, that people see. And we've been successful in doing that. Um, but honestly, if you still have that content and you just post that on social media, you're not going to get the distribution. And so I feel like that's the piece that people don't understand and miss that even if it's all AI, okay. Whether, I mean, okay, you're, you need to go after eat everybody expertise, authority, trust, add that experience layer in there. Like there's some differentiation that, that really needs to happen to make it uniquely you. But if we know that AI's fingerprints are going to touch everything, whether it be, you know, automation, content planning, the actual production of it, even distribution, someone has to vote. Okay. And

that's what we saw in one of the, like the most recent updates that hit like directory sites, someone's name authorship needs to vote. So when you're, when you're using publishers, essentially they're putting their stamp of approval, I feel like on the content distribution. And so they have to like agree with what you're sending them and like what, what, whatever, whatever you're putting in there, the images, the links, the content, whatever you're saying. And based on the authority and trust, they're voting for you in that. And there's a human in that process. Someone's like reviewing that. And, you know, we are not to an agent economy yet, which I'm starting to actually see some of it with like crypto and, and e-commerce. I think that there's some laws and things that are going to be coming out towards the end and beginning of next year. And I, I'm really fascinated with, with what's happening in that space. And also some of this agentic behavior of, of the AI, some of it might be a bit scary. Some of it, I think the agentic side's a lot easier to, easier to regulate. And so that probably will become quicker than the content side. But with watermarking, like that, that makes it very easy to track. And they're doing that obviously for governmental reasons. But the other thing is, you know, for these third-party things, whether you're paying somebody to record the video for, for you so that you're not spending your time on it, there are opportunities at every level. It's, do you want to spend your time? Do you want to spend time building relationships? Or do you want to spend your money? There's options for all of this third-party validation in all of those different ways. Some of it's better than others. But it's really pick your poison as far as what you want to spend in order to get that credibility. Cause you're going to be spending one of the three of them. I love that. Like, how are, how are you spending like

your most valuable resource time? And if you're listening to this, because I know the distribution curve of listeners, once you get married, once you have kids, once you have a lot of other responsibilities or parents to take care of, or just other responsibilities, time is the most valuable asset. And you have to start making decisions on what to do with time. And if you can create time leverage in any of these areas, I mean, whether it be delegation or automation or like agentic, like even thinking through the, those structures, there's time put in everything, there's effort put in everything. And, and I love that you, you have to really figure out how you want to spend your time and you're going to be, time has to be spent to create what it is that we're doing. Um, I hope they can regulate AI to be honest. Like I, you're, you seem a lot more confident in that than, than, than, than I am. The reason I am is there, there's only like five or six different platforms out there that everybody's building on in any of the given areas. And so all it takes, and I've seen this happen in other areas, both tech wise and industry wise of all they have to do is go to that company. Um, just like we saw in social media, there is a tremendous amount of influence as these, uh, platform companies grow. Um, now some of them are open source and that's going to be harder for them to convince, but, uh, for a lot of these providers, it does trace back to cloud flare or AWS and there is absolute control, um, at that level. And that that's where you run into, it's going to get regulated. It's just how they're doing it. They have to figure out. And luckily they're not quite as savvy as some of us. So. Interesting. So this conversation, I'll, I'll, I'll tease everybody with the offshoots of where we could take this conversation. So, so one of the offshoots could

be that I know a lot of people like, okay, we say the open claw community, whatever that, you know, they are building systems on prem that are complete. Like you can use a llama or whatever. Like you can, you can take some of these harnesses. You can take some of these models and, and you can run the open source where you're not burning tokens and it's got, they've gotten pretty good. And then they're, when you talk about memory and self-learning. So, but to your point, the major, there's major artery choke points that you can like shut down. And I don't think that decentralized stuff in like crypto or whatever are there, but okay. And, and for any other technology, I would probably agree with you that there's like fringe, but if the fringe are intelligent AI's self-regulating, okay. Um, they can operate in that environment and, and, and that could be really quite scary. Um, so I do agree with you for the most part, but like, we're not, we're not talking about a deterministic technology anymore. I feel like, or if we're not there, we're like what I've seen in kind of some of the testing is, is quite, quite scary. You know, I, I think I also have a different opinion than a lot of people. I think it will be the industry will see the benefit, especially from a data security and privacy standpoint of building themselves. We're seeing this on the software front where a lot of SAS companies are in trouble, uh, who, who just, uh, somebody just took a big hit. Um, and you know, people are now able to build it themselves. And I think that there will be a sub business of everybody getting Oracle level software designed specifically for their business, because a lot of my friends are doing it themselves. Um, and so I think every company eventually ends up with its own native software and the next logical step to that is their own hardware systems to support that because then they have full

control. And so while we have the modeling that is a separate conversation, I think on the system side, it does become way more distributed. Uh, and so that does eliminate choke points, but I think it becomes, you want to, you want to hear like, by, okay. So, so I, no, I've, we're, we're, we're, we're on the same page. Uh, I would tell you a tip to anybody listening. If we're starting, if you like where the conversation is going, please leave a comment and like, let us know. We're, we're deviating a little bit from digital PR. Um, but what I would, what I would tell you, uh, is on the SAP systems or like whatever you're developing, okay. If you're trying to go to market with software, make it look like Excel. Okay. Like, like that is like my tip because everybody wants to still look at a spreadsheet. Okay. Like that, that's like, um, but, um, no, I think, I think that if we go back to, uh, you know, the, like, tell me about the ecosystem of like all the different kind of, kind of publishers and their viewpoints on like kind of what they're doing. And I've seen some kind of shifts, uh, in the market of what's working and, and, and I've seen with our clients, what, what's working. And I'm just curious, like, what are the things that people need to be focused on? Uh, or is this as some people in the community are saying, this is just really good SEO? I, I think the music industry is a good example. You used to have a couple main music houses and now there are hundreds that put out really good music. Um, and, and now of course the AI thing is a whole new issue in that industry, but I think there are so many media platforms being developed that it too is more or less going to be owned by the people doing it. Uh, HubSpot tried this and then failed on the SEO side, but, uh, cause they

got shut down because they were talking about everything and not niche. Like you were bringing it up earlier. Um, but I think all of those niche publications will be owned. You kind of see it on YouTube, even though YouTube owns the platform, but you have entire channels that have more reach than the big three CBS, ABC, NBC. Um, you, you have YouTube shows that have larger footprints than those guys on primetime. And so it's still a battle for attention, but it is going to become whether you want to call it personality or niche based for your reporting. Um, and those sources are still going to have the same credibility that a Walter Cronkite had because it's based on their views. Now, how the LLMs treat that and serve it in their search, we know, of course, we'll still be biased, but it's kind of hard to deny somebody who's getting 300,000 views a night. Yeah. I mean, I think that as the model, the, the model cut off, like the long-term data updates, they, they start to kind of build a spine of like who they trust and who they believe. And it seemed like there was kind of like leaning on Google, kind of switching the algorithm, kind of finding, finding their own, uh, weights, I guess on, on who they're going to trust and who they're going to listen to as far as like citations go. And it, it seems like perplexity is really good at providing those citations to get a better idea. And there's a lot of, even, uh, one of, one of our guys launched a, a tool, uh, to, to get AI visibility, right. To understand what these AIs are doing. And it's very different across these different platforms. And that's what I'm at least seeing. And, and people on my team are using different platforms for kind of different things. And also when we look at the data, where is the data coming in? Right. Like if I see, Oh, we're showing up a lot in Claude, I'm

like, great. People are scraping our stuff. Like, you know, like, right. Like, like, or if we, if we, you know, if we show up in chat GBT, we're like, yes, like maybe we're reaching the right kind of client. Now we've started to run the chat GBT ads. Um, and we've had mixed results based on industry. So, um, uh, I don't have enough data to, to really share anything yet. As far as like quantifiable data, there's probably better people citing stuff out there, but I mean, the ecosystem is involving really, really rapidly. And I mean, I don't know, like, again, I'm like, so there's two, again, two ways that I could go here. So I'm seeing what's happening with the social media platforms. Like I think a couple of days ago, I, I, I actually need to check on it, but there was, wasn't like a couple billion dollars they were suing Facebook for, um, there was something. There's a class action. Uh, I think it's against Facebook. I was reading something, uh, on that as well. The, the social one is interesting because it's the second layer that people go to. Um, if, if we can control our pipeline from start to finish. Awesome. That's really hard to do with current AI search and how it works, but, but Google, but Google, like the big apps, like I feel like Uber, Amazon, you know, Facebook, like they're all collapsing the buying funnel so that you do, you do it all on one platform, like go through every cycle, but human behavior is starting to like, go like disperse out, like fan out. And then agents, like, I'm not even sure exactly how they're making their buying recommendations, uh, totally. And every model that gets updated, like, I feel like at least with Claude, it doesn't even listen to me all the time. Like it's starting to act like a junior developer with some agency. It's like, Oh, I thought I was going to do that. And then I, I'm going to do this instead of

like, like I'm like falling. I don't know. That's been my personal experience. I, I guess my data is not clean enough or something, but, um, I don't know what, what are, what are you seeing or what, what are some thoughts related to that? Yeah. I think the hotels is a good correlation here. Um, you know, it used to be called the hotel and booked a room, uh, that went into online booking platforms that went into booking.com and all of the other ones. And now we have booking platforms for the booking platforms. So it depends on, and then there's the whole reward system, whether you're logging in with your bank or it, it gets distributed by people's buying behavior. Um, and you know, for Uber and Lyft, there is the ongoing battle and people switching back and forth and now you got Waymo trying to get in there. And so that probably becomes a ride share app that talks to all three of them. Um, and you know, this stuff is cyclical because eventually there is a powerhouse. Okay. Everybody just goes to Google to find their flights. Um, and that's still not entirely true, but you get different levels of buyer engaging in different ways. Uh, there'll be the buyer in the store one day. I imagine that ask their meta glasses, Hey, which one of these pasta sauces tastes better? Um, it, because we will have a whole lot more data, real-time feedback, and that's going to be a different decision-making cycle than somebody who's online on Amazon deciding what kind of pasta to order. Uh, so I, I think that it goes to different consumer trends that will continue to develop as technology moves forward. Uh, but the most successful companies are hitting it on every single one of those fronts and they're staying on top, like you going with chat GPT ads, which we need to get into, uh, making sure that you're there first gives you a huge advantage. Yeah. The network effects, uh, which I, I saw a lot in

crypto, um, is like, and you saw it with Twitter, you saw it because you can, you can vibe code all these things up, but like where the community is, where people are using it, like what people are comfortable with is becoming so big. So I want to, again, try to pull it back to digital PR. Like, how are you explaining to clients or agencies that need to explain it to their clients? Um, on, you know, okay, like this Forbes placements, $7,000, like, how are you going to quantify the ROI for that? Like what, what, like, is there a, is there a calculator or a math formula or like, like how are you communicating? The, the biggest thing for us, um, on the PR side is what are they going to do with it? Making sure that the strategy is there to execute. Um, PR is really more of a leverage tool as opposed to a multiplier. Um, so whether you're doing paid placements or earned media or owned media, um, it's, how do you use that? Because you're getting attention. Okay. You still got to take it through the funnel. Um, and are you reaching the right people? Uh, earned media tends to have the broader reach than the paid segments. Uh, the, but it's also relationship based for the most part and it's very competitive. So is your story better? Are you framing it in the right way? Do you have the social media presence to back it up? Because media companies are concerned with them gaining audience just as much as everybody else. Um, and so are you able to take that attention and convert it is a massive part of the ROI and I wish we could control it? I, I wish working on it. Uh, but the, um, the attention itself is, are you getting the right features? That's a bigger impact on somebody's, uh, ROI than anything else. And you know, everybody wants to be on Rogan. Not everybody would do well on Rogan. Um, and so knowing where your

audience is, knowing demographics of who's actually going to buy, uh, all of these things are important when you're looking at a media strategy. Uh, and on the paid side, you know, most of them do have paid options, but you want to make sure that it is actually backlinked, um, and is indexed. Uh, and now additionally, Hey, is this a site that's recommended by the different LLMs? Cause they all look at different ones too. So I think that will come to be more standardized in the future, but right now, uh, every media site out there is factored in. Yeah. So on publicity for good.com, like you have your packages on there, which I, I really like that. It's, it's a fanned out. It's spread out your, your, you know, you have different packages, press releases. Okay. So media training, podcast bookings, um, you know, blogs, like you're, you're spreading it out. Right. And a lot of, uh, like digital PR vendors, um, or backlink, whatever we'll, we'll sell just, uh, backlinks and the, you know, they're like, Hey, you're going to get this many backlinks for this price per month. And you can't really control what those are going to be. And, you know, based on like how to measure what you think's good. Um, I've seen consistently actually over the years, a lot of links that have actually hurt clients because they're not high quality links and they're trying to get a link. They're trying to get a certain number of links in a certain price, right? You're trying to get a certain, a certain amount of links and a certain amount of price. And they're based on whatever inventory they're looking at. Well, this is what you got. Right. And so I've seen bad links happen and I've seen them tank sites. And so, so I, I think like even having a range is important, you know, also buying, building, uh, like legit outreach. Like there's, there's a combination and there's value associated. Like, you know, the, these AIs are pretty smart. They can

figure out where you're buying links from. They can fit. They, and they down, they downgrade the value I've seen. I've seen buying expensive links and nothing happens like measured it. Nothing happens. Right. Like, and then like, like what are they called? Someone, I think it was an SEM restaurant, shitty church links. Um, like this is what they were calling them, which is not, uh, like, uh, appropriate name, but like what they're saying is a local business that hasn't done all the SEO, but is a legitimate company. And essentially what that is doing is it's saying Google's adding, waiting to that, right? Google's saying, Hey, this is actually a legitimate business. It's been around. We understand what the entity is. We know it's not doing everything right. It's a local business. We're going to wait it differently. And if they link to you, then that that's going to help you on one metric for local, for example. But like, how do you deal with that when either clients are asking, well, what am I going to get? But then like, you're also waiting quality. Um, and like, how do you, how do you explain that to your clients, whether they be direct or agencies? Yeah. When you're looking at opportunities, whether it's paid or earned, um, we always want to factor in where the business is, how is this going to affect? Um, so we don't recommend a whole lot of paid, uh, placements to any of our clients. Most of them are beyond that stage. When you're just starting out and you created your website last week and you need some logos on there, go and get one of those, uh, $50 an article is not a bad starting price point. Um, definitely make sure to check where it's landing. The press releases is a whole nother world. Um, there are different levels to that, uh, and use press releases as a way to then engage with the media. Like your goal shouldn't be sales from a press release. It's just written in a format

that the media knows what to look for and what to expect. And Hey, is this story a fit for what they're covering? Um, when, when you're dealing with the media side, as our packages escalate, it becomes non like the number matters very little and it's purely about the quality. So as your business moves forward and goes through seven, eight, nine figures, um, quality should be your only concern. Now being everywhere still has its advantage, but you don't want to be featured in something that is going to damage your reputation. Um, and there's PR firms out there dedicated purely to reputation repair and they're much more expensive than us. So it's a lot better to get it right and make sure your reputation is maintained, uh, than to try and go back and fix it because that's very, very expensive. We're actually doing that for, for a client right now that, uh, we're having to, we're having to fix some stuff. Um, yeah. And, and also that's the thing. One disgruntled employee can really wreck your business today if they want to. And those negative reviews or posts or scam reports or whatever you want to put out there carry a lot of weight. Right. And, um, and so it, it, it, it, it also is about building up social equity now. Right. Uh, because if you don't have any, and then a bunch of negative hits you, like, uh, you're going to have to come that much further out of the hole and it's not going to like a bad review now. And then, like, I mean, if you're doing business that can happen, like, but it's not going to weigh you down, but you gotta be, you gotta be active in, in, in what you're doing. You, you were saying something about, um, so when, so I have a question for you. So I've, I've got a couple people that are like, I'm on a committee with and they're like a legit, not a digital PR, like a legit old school PR. Right. And

basically, um, I had them pitch to our team because they, it's all, it's about relationships, right? Like you gotta, you know, what they're, what's important to them. It's same thing for anybody listening podcast, or even like getting featured in LinkedIn. If you know what's on their content calendar and what they're trying to push and you, you, you kind of tune your, your articles or, or what you're publishing to that, you can get some acceleration and some uplift or some, uh, showcasing or highlighting. Right. Um, but it's just purely ours, right? It's like, we have these relationships. We have these hours. We can't guarantee what we're going to get you. It, we're just, you know, you're going to buy this many hours. We're going to give you, you know, a six year person that's been doing this and we're, and it depends because these are earned on how good your story is. Right. So we can't really guarantee that. And, um, I was just curious how you were handling that question because, um, that answer wasn't satisfactory to some people that were on the call. And I'm just curious your thoughts. Yeah. The, the traditional model for PR agencies is the lawyer model of we're going to charge you hours and hopefully the outcome's good. Um, we, we've gone away from that, uh, partly because, uh, Heather, my wife is incredible at that relationship piece and she's also willing to work way harder than a lot of people are. Um, and it takes time. It absolutely takes time. Uh, we've focused on the results, but that's still is limited when you're talking about earned media, because it comes down to how does this person show up on camera? And that's where the quality piece comes in. You're going to get better and better features by being consistently in the media because more, more of those media members are going to see you and you have to show up. That's the, uh, media training piece. Make sure you're prepared. Make sure you know your answers, whether they

give you the questions ahead of time or not, you better know your stuff and showing up each way, whether it it's normal to start on wherever you live, going on one of the local news stations, doing a three minute segment and three minutes goes really fast. Uh, but you know, sometimes those segments get picked up and nationally syndicated. So what you might start thinking is, Oh, I'm going to reach 50,000 people in the segment might end up reaching 5 million. So it can scale pretty quickly. You never, you never know in that virality. I, I, one of the tips that I would provide, at least that I've seen consistently is the follow on PR that you get when other like publishers or, uh, publicists or, uh, you know, news anchors, whatever, reach out to you, getting back to them really quickly because they're trying to like, they have something that they think you're a fit for, and they're trying to get a quote or something like that. Like be looking out for that follow on. And that's, that's, you don't always know what you're going to get, but that those are like really nice bonuses. And, and like you said, you need to be prepared for that. Yeah. And on that front PR reach outs on the organic or on the earned side are very much like sales, like speed to lead matters. It's a fast industry. That's why a lot of people choose to have somebody that's dedicated because our publicists sit there all day and are ready for the response with an assistant to back them up. Um, and that speed to lead or speed back to the media, making sure that it's as easy as possible for them, make sure you're providing value. Um, make sure you're, you know, looking at what they've done recently and seeing why they would be interested in talking to you. Um, all of those are factors like you want to be ready. Um, the other part on the earned media side is if you don't show

up that can burn a relationship very easily and it's a small community. Um, and so if you don't have it and like, this can be anything it's, Oh, they checked out your LinkedIn and it's not existing. You have five connections. It's like, you need to have those other pieces prepared before you show the world that you're not ready. So, so let's keep going down that line and, and we're getting close to kind of time here is like, what are some things that in the media training, like you said, like, what are the things that are those unknown secrets that, that, that just get missed that you see consistently that, that people need to look out for? Like maybe what are some actionable things that people could take away? Yeah. And make sure the basics are uniform across the board. Uh, make sure that in your bios, you're talking about what you provide, not your resume. Like, yes, your bio is going to be somewhere and it's going to talk about why you're qualified and what your certifications are and all those different things and the different companies you've worked for. But like that has very little to do with why they want to talk to you. They want to talk to you because you can provide this value. So having that, whether it's on the client side or on the media side and having it, uh, the same across all of the different platforms, making sure that your website lines up with what you're talking about on social. So just uniformity is, is a huge basic that we often, when we're, uh, going through strategic planning with the client, we'll have to clean up a lot of that stuff. Um, and going back to the niche thing, knowing what you can talk about really, really well. Now, the other side of that is say yes to everything. Um, figure out how to talk about it, even if it's something you barely know about, like that opportunity can spawn all of the other opportunities. So be

there, provide value, uh, in our data. We have about 40,000 media opportunities since 2020. And in that the clients who have won the most, both business wise and in the media, absolutely consistency is the biggest thing. Um, so consistently getting in front of the media because everybody knows they will forget you in a week. Um, so yeah. Yeah. So I love that piece on like entity uniformity. I think that that could deserve a whole podcast. Um, can you give me like one really good, like testimonial or use case of like, you've got somebody like you, you kind of hinted at it. Like you don't know what this opportunity is going to lead to, but maybe there's an example. Uh, you can disambiguate who it is, but like this happened and then like, this is what happened from it. And it was unexpected. Um, gosh, got several, I'll bring up to the first is guided a podcast, relatively small reach, got an investor from that second one, a company worked with us, uh, dominated the share of voice, which meaning how much are they talking about them versus competitors in the media and, uh, ended up getting acquired, uh, by one of their competitors, which was a very good exit. Um, uh, I'll hit on the third one. So on a personal branding side, somebody started with us, uh, hadn't done a whole lot, ended up tripling her business over a fairly short period of time. And a huge win of that was, she started getting recurring segments on a local news station. I love that. I think that that that's phenomenal. And, and I've, I've seen some of those as well. Um, awesome. So awesome. Thank you so much. Like, I think people took away with some things to think about here about AI and where it's going, but also having to remember that digital PR and third party validation is so important. And it does seem to be this kind of roll up aggregation of certain big media houses that are now starting to

see what's happening online. And I feel like there's some consolidation, uh, because I think a lot of these YouTube channels are looking very much like, uh, you know, mainstay survivor shows or like, I mean, there's full on shows that are now, uh, dominating YouTube. And, and I think that there's, there's money back in these things. And, and so, you know, there's trusted institutions and there's always been trusted institutions. And I think that, uh, that that's very, and very important to remember and consider. And, and that's how, um, you know, you're leveraging trust that has been built or has been built over a number of years. So I think digital important digital PR, excuse me, is extremely important. Austin, um, how do people get in touch with you, follow you, find out more about what you're doing? Yeah. I'm a Austin Holmes, uh, pretty much everywhere. Yes. There's two A's in the beginning and our, uh, main website is publicityforgood.com. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Austin, for coming on everyone. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, which I would have said was the internet. Now it's probably LLMs. Um, keep listening to this podcast and, uh, leave us a review. Uh, and I promise you that I will get more guests on this to talk about things that you want to continue to hear about. Thank you all so much for listening until next time. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.