This is an unedited transcript created using Otter.Ai. As such, it may contain minor errors.

 

Chapter One: PR Industry Evolution

 

Paul Sutton 0:00

Hi. I’m Paul Sutton and this is digital download the show where I talk to topic experts on digital marketing social media and public relations, about the things that matter in today’s communications industry.

 

The public relations industry has been going through something of a turbulent time over the last 12 months. With a global economy being so unpredictable shifting online behaviour and the advent of generative AI, I put pressure on leaders to try and steady the ship during an erratic period. That’s not to say it’s been a wholly negative view, and there are opportunities out there for those willing to explore and embrace industry changes. But it has been and continues to be a pretty tough time for many agencies and independent practitioners.

 

Among the many ways the communications industry is evolving. The media in the broad sense of the word has both expanded and contracted at the same time, the creator economy is booming. And this has opened up a whole world of opportunity to brands and organisations wishing to collaborate in new and inventive ways in order to reach their target audiences. But on the flip side, conventional media has continued its decline, with outlets converging, and journalists becoming increasingly difficult to reach and influence.

 

Competition in the media is arguably higher than ever before. And that’s putting pressure on PR people to be more insightful when it comes to data driven storytelling and proving their worth. The value of public relations has probably never been as important to define as it is now, especially in a world where AI threatens to pull the rug from under us. And that AI threat is not an idle one. Yes, inevitably, we’ll see clients churning out terrible content created by chat GPT and badly written news releases. But the fact remains that PR will come under greater scrutiny when at least some of that work can be done by a robot. The key for the communications industry is understanding this and adapting to it.

 

Technology has a big role to play in PR in the next couple of years. That’s the fulcrum around which today’s show revolves. I want you to get the insight of someone who’s really ahead of the curve. And that person is Gini Dietrich, CEO of Armand Dietrich, and the founder of spin sucks. Judy has been a regular guest on this show, since it was launched five years ago. And on this occasion, I asked her how business has been over the last 12 months.

 

Chapter Two: Economic Trends and Supply Chain Issues

 

Gini Dietrich 2:55
It’s been pretty volatile. And I would say it has been for the last two years because we came out of the pandemic. You know, in 2020, and 2021. Everybody was like, Okay, we’re ready to go. But then, you know, we had we had supply chain issues, we have inflation, there’s all this stuff that’s happening, that is affecting it. So it’s been pretty volatile. But I think now people are like, okay, maybe this is our new normal. Okay, it’s not as bad as we thought it was going to be. We haven’t had a crash, like we did in 2008 2009. And so we can actually manage through this.

 

So I’m actually look, I think I’m pretty optimistic about going into next year, just with budgets increasing. And I was just saying this to my husband the other night, like normally right after Labour Day here, which is like September 5 ish, fourth, or fifth. We see everybody rushing to hire agencies between that time and Thanksgiving here in the US, which is the third Thursday of November. This year, it has September was incredibly slow. And I was like, Okay, maybe it’s, you know, the economy and everything. And then all of a sudden it just fam so it was about a month delayed, but okay, that we started to see, I mean, massive increase in the last three weeks.

 

Paul Sutton 4:09
My impression. Again, this is only my impression of people I’ve talked to is that the economy here or or the the, the uptick, if you like that you’re talking about, I think that’s more delayed than in the States. Interesting, I think, certainly is what I’ve seen anyway. Yeah, is that I’m getting projects being delayed and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. And this has happened before. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, but projects that are just being kicked down the road a bit. You know, they’re not they’re not saying no, we can’t do this. They’re wanting to do stuff. But for whatever reason, not releasing the money or saying it’ll be next month and then it’ll be in the month after that. And I’m seeing that a lot.

 

Gini Dietrich 4:51
I wonder how far you trail? Typically, is it three to six months?

 

Paul Sutton 4:56
Yeah, I’ve always wondered this because whenever I talk to you He does seem to be a bit of a trail of the UK behind the US. And I’ve never figured out how far that is or whether there is.

 

Gini Dietrich 5:09
Let’s mark this. So let’s October, let’s see where you are in April and see if it’s starting to turn around by April or even sooner, and then we’ll be able to know. And then we’ll become famous because we can predict famous economists in the PR space.

 

Paul Sutton 5:21
Now, it’s interesting, it’d be interesting to see what happens. I think, like you said, normally, I see a big uptick in late August, September, suddenly it goes really busy. And September to normally mid December, in my case, and normally my busiest time of year, this year.

 

Gini Dietrich 5:44
It’s been the same. Yeah, but I would say in the last, so we’re recording this the last of October, I would say the last two weeks has been crazy, like normal. So it’s six weeks behind what it would normally be. I’m gonna keep

 

Paul Sutton 5:56
my fingers crossed in that. Yeah, by the New Year or comes around again, them. Yeah, that’s all good. Okay, well, going back to the main thing, then, let’s start talking about Twitter and X. I still can’t call it x. Let’s talk about Twitter. I mean, that’s that’s nuts in itself. What’s happened this year is is? I don’t know, are you still using Twitter? I’m

 

Chapter Three: Twitter’s Decline and Google Algorithm Changes

 

Gini Dietrich 6:18
not no. Okay. I mean, I haven’t closed my account, like a lot of people have. And I still, we’re just on the outside of Matthew Perry dying. And so when that happened, I immediately went to Twitter to see what what if the news reports were correct. But that’s the first time I used it in months, just for something practical. I don’t check it. You know, I used to check it multiple times a day and don’t even go there anymore.

 

Paul Sutton 6:43
No, I’m the same. Absolutely. I think I stopped using it. middle of July. Basically, for ethical reasons. I just I cannot support this thing anymore. But having said that, I do have I have a Twitter list, which is my sports team. Sure, yeah. And so that’s where I get my sports news. And every time I click on it, I feel a bit guilty.

 

Gini Dietrich 7:10
Have you seen there’s a bumper sticker that people here are using on their Tesla’s that say, I bought it before he became a crazy like a maniac, essentially. So they put that on their cars on their Tesla. That’s hilarious.

 

Paul Sutton 7:25
Yeah, haven’t seen the hair yet. But there’s a trail on. You’ll see it. Yeah, I mean, from from a business perspective, it’s not just people I know, who have been heavy Twitter users. I mean, we would have met originally on Twitter. Yeah. And a lot of my business used to come through Twitter. Yeah. You know, a couple of years ago, I’ll scaled it back. And then eventually, mid July, decided I’d had enough. From a business perspective, it just seems to hold no weight anymore. It doesn’t.

 

Gini Dietrich 7:56
Yeah, I think if you do heavy media relations, there’s probably still, because reporters are still using it a bit. But LinkedIn has completely replaced, at least for us in terms of bizdev.

 

Paul Sutton 8:07
Yeah, I totally agree. Do you talk to clients about Twitter at all? And what are you saying to them? Because I find this delicate balance there. Were people come to me saying, how do we improve our Twitter profile? And my advice? What I want to say to them is get off it. And sometimes I have, yep. But sometimes it doesn’t feel appropriate to give that because that is a very personal response from my disbelief in what is happening there.

 

Gini Dietrich 8:36
Interesting. But you it’s, I think it’s less part, you can make it less personal by just looking at the data, right? I mean, it’s not working. We a year ago, exactly a year ago, we brought on a new client, and he was the CEO, we launched a podcast and the CEO wanted to do it through Twitter. And we tried the first two episodes that way, and it was such a disaster that we were like an end. And that showed to him that we didn’t need to spend any time on Twitter. And we don’t yeah, like we completely changed tactic. Because of that, because it was it was a disaster.

 

Paul Sutton 9:11
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. I mean, how are you finding things from a media perspective? And because again, you go back a few years. And Twitter was kind of the big place where all your journalists, were you kept in touch with them, you followed what they were talking about? How’s that impacted the PR side of things, the media side effects?

 

Gini Dietrich 9:30
I think it’s slowed down a bit, but there are, there’s still activity there, which is part part of the reason we haven’t I haven’t completely shut my account down. But yeah, I mean, I think there’s still you’re still able to use it for that. But there has to be really specific reasons, right? You can’t, I wouldn’t use I would never bring on a new client and use it for brand building anymore ever. No.

 

Paul Sutton 9:52
No, I tend to agree. It’s a shame. It really is a shame. You know, like I said years ago, it was the central place for me anyway, for a lot of people

 

Gini Dietrich 10:02
well, and we all met that way. And we all like, right. I mean, yep, it was it was such a great place to find to find new people and to build relationships. And

 

Paul Sutton 10:13
yeah. Okay, well, moving on from Twitter, then one of the things that, again, I have seen this year, and I think you’ll probably agree with this is, is all around Google and the way Google’s algorithm has changed, or is changing. It’s becoming I mean, semantic search has been on the cards for years. I mean, literally years. Again, have you seen a big impact on what’s changing there to PR?

 

Gini Dietrich 10:38
We haven’t seen it yet. Okay, but we anticipate it coming. And the only reason I don’t think we’ve seen it yet is because the big changes that they’re making are only available via Android, Android and Google users right now. So you know, if I’m on an iPhone, so I haven’t seen the changes yet. Okay, but we anticipate it and based on what Android users are telling us and showing me, you know, every time I’m with my girlfriend of mine, who has an Android, I’m like, Okay, look up this and show me this. And so I can see like, I can see it. But I think we’re gonna see a big shift from, you know, the kinds of content we’re creating right now, which is, you know, everybody has always said, create, how to endless and things like that, which are good. But what’s going to happen is Google’s now going to give you the answer to your question directly in your search. So to your point, it’s going to be more semantic. But it’ll say, like, how do I execute the PESO model, and it’ll say, Do this, this, this and this, and it might pull the content from a blog post I’ve written, but it won’t necessarily give somebody the reason or the link to go to my site. So now you have to think about how are you going to create content that’s so robust that Google can’t just take the snippet and not give the link? As essentially what it is?

 

Chapter Four: Optimising Content for Google Snippets

 

Paul Sutton 12:01
That’s an interesting way of thinking about it, actually. Because the way I’ve thought about it is almost opposite in terms of, you’ve got to try and optimise your content to be that snippet, which is agreed, for sure. Yeah. But Google’s going to show that snippet, and there’s the answer. So you, I guess what I’m getting at is no one has to visit your website. But you’re saying what you want to be is top of the result. But with kind of almost a call to action in that snippet that someone’s got. Actually, I do need to get to this web. Yes,

 

Gini Dietrich 12:29
yeah. So one of the things that we’re implementing right now that we’re testing our content hubs. So you’ve got a page. So we have a page that what is the PESO model? And at the top, it has the snippet, and then it has, we break it down? Like what is it here, all the blog posts, we’ve written on it, here’s page, here’s your shared here’s own, here’s thought, leadership, here’s how you measure it. And oh, by the way, here’s some links about the PESO model that aren’t ours around the web. So it’s this really big page, we have a website page full of links that come to our content that has the snippet at the top so that when, so we get both, we get the snippet, and we get the oh my gosh, I have to actually know more. They come to this page they need they get everything they need. So Google’s going to place that up top, because it doesn’t have to send you to five different places.

 

Paul Sutton 13:19
Yeah. And the benefit of these things, like you said, firstly, you’re giving answers and all sorts of information. You’re increasing your dwell time on that page by God knows, how’s that? Because people, even if they don’t read it, they’re gonna skim down the whole thing. Yep. So I agree with your pillar content is what I’m redeveloping my website at the moment. And I’ve got it on the plan, I need to be writing three, four or five bits of really in depth pillar content. But to your point, that’s where years of blogging actually really helps. That’s right. And podcasts and all sorts of stuff, which is on your site. Yes. The people who don’t have that I’ve got right. From scratch. Yes. So it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Yeah. And

 

Gini Dietrich 14:00
some of it, we have to update, right? Like some of it. Some of it, some of the content is two or three years old. So we’re gonna go now that we have the content hub created, we’re gonna go through and update all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, we’re not creating new

 

Paul Sutton 14:12
now, I was gonna say, with regard to updating, are you going back to say a blog post? It’s three years old, and editing that post. So it’s still in Google’s eyes. It’s still three years old, but it’s just got slightly different content. Yep.

 

Gini Dietrich 14:27
Updating the date, but we’re not publishing. We’re using the same URL so that Google understands that it’s still three years old.

 

Paul Sutton 14:35
Yeah. Okay. Interesting. The example you gave there, because I looked this up. What is the Pacer model? Okay. Your result doesn’t come top. Obviously. I’m from the UK.

 

Gini Dietrich 14:48
Does it come second?

 

Paul Sutton 14:49
It didn’t look that far.

 

Gini Dietrich 14:52
I think we’re a second right now.

 

Paul Sutton 14:54
Yeah. So we I have a a website, which gives that snippet and talks about the pace and more Well, I did click through to the website, because I wanted wanted to see what it was. Huge, huge piece of content.

 

Gini Dietrich 15:07
Is it? Is it? Mike Roberts? It is yes. Yeah.

 

Paul Sutton 15:11
And it does, it does link back to you. So it’s not a bad piece of content. I’m aware. Oh, he’s obviously done an amazing job of putting together a an incredible piece of pillar content, which, I mean, I didn’t go through it in any great detail. I would, I would guess it’s several 1000 words. Yeah. It’s

 

Gini Dietrich 15:34
4000 words. Yeah. Yeah, I agree, which is what these

 

Paul Sutton 15:38
things have to be. Yep. So yeah, I was just curious as to whether that was a geographic thing. But obviously not, you

 

Gini Dietrich 15:46
know, it’s comes up for us first to where we’re second. But the content hub that we that I just talked about, we just published, so it won’t show up for a little bit. Yeah.

 

Chapter Five: Creating Pillar Content

 

Paul Sutton 15:56
Okay. I see these, these pieces of pillar content as a real opportunity for PR people for writers. And I’m not even talking SEO p because SEO people are gonna be all over this, obviously. But for PR specifically to get in front of, again, have you seen or do you? Are you aware of PR people talking about this? No. Me neither. Which is why I asked the question. Yeah.

 

Gini Dietrich 16:21
I mean, no, and, and I keep bringing it up, because I’m like, this is so important. And actually, I wrote an article on it probably in September, and an a professor who’s in Toronto, emailed me and was like, This is so good, I need more. I need you to explain this to me. So I can teach my students and I’m like, Okay, so for teaching the students this is but like, you’re it’s a real grassroots thing, because I have to get to the students who will then go out into the world who will then write so it’s, it’s happening, and that’s a longer tail effect. So we need people who are already in the field, our professionals, our colleagues to start doing and thinking about this. Yeah,

 

Paul Sutton 17:06
that the pieces that you’ve put together, how long has it taken you to put a piece of pillar and this is this is where in mind that you already have the stuff there a

 

Gini Dietrich 17:15
long time. I chip away at one piece every day until it’s finished. It’s usually taking me two or three weeks to do one. Yeah, but you know, I mean, some days, I can spend 15 minutes on it, and sometimes I could spend an hour. So it’s sort of like writing writing a book, like, I want to get this quote unquote, chapter done, and get it published, get it out, and then I’m gonna move on to the next. So

 

Paul Sutton 17:40
I mean, you have to say, what is that a full day’s work time you think? It’s probably to two days for one piece of pillar content. But then you look at it the other way, what a great piece of chargeable work, that would be, you know, exactly.

 

Gini Dietrich 17:56
And we’re doing the work for clients. Yeah, we’re doing we’re doing loads for clients, and they’re working incredibly well.

 

Paul Sutton 18:03
And you’re seeing results on those already. There we are. Yeah, because we started

 

Gini Dietrich 18:06
with them over the summer. We didn’t start our own until because you know, shoemakers? Yeah.

 

Paul Sutton 18:13
So what’s the sort of amount of time you’re seeing an impact? Let’s say you, you finished this piece of pillar content on a website. And assuming you’ve picked your search term, your title correctly, you know, picked a good term? Have you got any idea of roughly how long you would expect a result to appear? That’s

 

Gini Dietrich 18:34
a good question. Let me think about this for a minute. So we launched the very first one for a client, probably two months ago. So I would say it took five ish weeks, four and a half, five weeks. That’s

 

Paul Sutton 18:49
quite quick.

 

Gini Dietrich 18:50
It’s it’s fast. Yeah, it’s not

 

Paul Sutton 18:51
I will not expecting that. You would have said two to three months.

 

Gini Dietrich 18:55
No, we saw we saw results. Now. We’re the he, they’re in an industry where nobody’s doing content. So they already have a leg up from that perspective. We built a brand really fast for them, because no one else in their industry is doing this. So we have that advantage. But I would say, you know, two months is probably the right amount of time to start seeing results. For

 

Paul Sutton 19:18
still, though, is pretty good, though, isn’t it? Yeah. If you think about typical SEO efforts, it takes a while. So yeah, two months. Not bad at all, a lot of work, but you’re getting quite a quick result and a good result, which is a really good result. Right? How have you gone about funding the right, the right titles for your pieces, which are obviously linked to questions that are being asked I would assume Yeah,

 

Chapter Six: Using AI for Content Generation

 

Gini Dietrich 19:39
so it depends for sure. Like we did one for a client on change management because their audience or HR professionals and they’re going through like all of the changes, you know, are we hybrid remote fully in person. Are we doing what are we doing for mental health and wellness? What are we doing for EI. So they’re going through all of this change internally. And that was one of the things that continued to come up consistently. So we did the ultimate guide for change management for each of change management for HR pros. And so we made sure that, you know, it was all about that. But then I have a really good writer on my team, and she kicked out maybe eight blog posts on the topic, but then the pillar content and then in the pillar content, we linked to the blog posts. And we also linked to podcast episodes. Yeah, that talked about it. And when you’ve

 

Paul Sutton 20:32
done the podcast episodes, have you literally put a link in or if you linked to a transcription or How has that worked? We,

 

Gini Dietrich 20:40
we put all of the podcasts episodes on the home or on the website? And so we’re linking to that versus

 

Paul Sutton 20:47
to the page, which has Yeah, versus Apple or Spotify or fun. Okay, his question then have you? Obviously, you’ve got a good writer, so the answer is going to be no. But have you ever been tempted? Or have you used AI to write Yeah, okay, yeah. We’ve got a really good copywriter. All right. Well, they don’t do this, then.

 

Gini Dietrich 21:13
Oh, she does? Yeah, yeah, we all use it as a first draft or use it as a first draft. Yeah.

 

Paul Sutton 21:17
Okay. Oh, wait, because there’s a theory that if you if you’ve got a right, say, three or 4000 words as a piece of public content, and you need to generate, I don’t know, 1520 blog posts, because you want to link to those, you know, you could use AI, in theory, at least in theory to generate 20 blog posts on specific topics that you want to link to then write your 3000 word piece, also using AI. And whereas you’ve taken two working days to do this could be done in an hour.

 

Gini Dietrich 21:51
I think it would still take more time than that. Because what what AI, in my experience, what AI pumps out is a good first draft, but it’s not, you know, what, what the semantic search or the I think he’s, I can’t remember exactly the term that Google’s using, but it’s something about generative search. What they’re what it’s looking for now is is true thought leadership and true, your like work so and so instead of taking what what AI pumps out and doing that, you would take what ai ai has pumped out, which is great. And then you add in your case studies, your best practices, your how this has worked for us, we’ve done this, and it worked this way, that kind of stuff. So it shows that you’re a true expert on the topic. So and then it probably goes through two or three rounds of edits after that. But take that first draft. It’s still gonna take you more than an hour, but you take that first draft and then add in your expertise and thought leadership and then you have something that can be used. I’m

 

Paul Sutton 22:56
quite surprised you said yeah. Oh, heck yeah.

 

Gini Dietrich 22:57
I frickin love it. I love it. It’s my favourite. I mean, it saves us so much time. Yeah, we have a client who does a one hour webinar every week. And a year ago, we had to, we would use Revver Tammy to transcribe it. But then we had to go through and clean it up. And then we had to write three or four blog posts from it. And I mean, it took us two weeks. Now. We get it transcribed immediately. We throw it into chat GPT we say write four blog posts from this transcript. It prompts out for blog posts. Are they great? No, but they give us a starting point. And then we can give the everything to the client the next day and he thinks were wonderful. Two weeks and I’m like I know

 

Paul Sutton 23:44
Yeah, okay. I love it. Yeah. Because I and again, I see a lot of people say you should never do this but it’s copywriters. That’s who says you shouldn’t do this. Even my copywriters use it. Yeah, I mean, that to me, to me. That’s right. If I were a copywriter, I’d be all over this

 

Gini Dietrich 24:03
would save you time. And instead of staring at a blank sheet of paper, now, you could even just say, I need to write an article on the PESO model, write an outline, and it gives you an outline. So now you have something to start with. Right instead of staring at your blank blank sheet of paper. Yeah,

 

Paul Sutton 24:21
the other sort of clique of people who I see talking very anti AI or AI copywriting is people who work with tone of voice and that sort of stuff. And brand personas, which I kind of get because you can still add that in. Yeah, that’s what I think as well. So to let it do the tweaking, absolutely. I totally agree with you.

 

Gini Dietrich 24:47
I always throw stuff in. And I like I even for for brand personas. I just I just talked about this on our on my podcast, but I prompted it with create a brand persona And that, like I gave it all of these stipulations, I want to know goals, roles, pain points, strengths, all of that. And it pumps out and it even says, Jessica Roberts, HR manager, here’s everything. And is it fully accurate? No. But it gives you a great place to start. So that you can get then go, okay, I can take this and tweak it and make sure that it works over here. And then then you can say to it in your same chat, you can say, Here’s their website, copy for our homepage, and you copy and paste it in there. Does it fit Jessica Roberts, pain points and challenges? And it says yes or no. It says, Yes, you hit these points, but here are opportunities to tweak. And now you have an opportunity to start to tweak your website copy to I don’t know why when people don’t use it. It’s, it’s not cheating. It’s not illegal. It’s not unethical. It’s just a great starting point.

 

Paul Sutton 25:53
Yeah, well, I mean, I produced a website, wrote a website a couple of months ago, three months ago, maybe. And I kind of did it the other way around, sort of. So what I ended up doing was, was asking for some copy on a specific topic. Okay. So I don’t know, let’s say 300 Words on wherever it was. And then I would get that and tweak it to more to add in things take out things. Like, say, tweaking it, and then I put it back in again. And saying, Can you I asked it to liven it up in a in a certain way. Yep. And it did that for me, because I’ve thought my own writing was a bit dry. And I couldn’t think of a way of live in it. So I almost added the brand persona using love it the AI love it, which, you know, and again, it is a different use of it, maybe but it just goes to show it does help so much it helps so much.

 

Gini Dietrich 26:51
Like, why wouldn’t you want to be more efficient? I know. Yeah, it’s kind of like when I this this ages me. But you know, we used to have the big huge green bacon’s books that had all the journalists listed in it. And then everything went online. So it’s much easier to type in decision or mark rack or, you know, propeller, whatever, what you’re looking for, and it pumps out a tonne of people for you, right? Or do you want to go back to the big green bacon’s book and go through and find and highlight and like, stop it, stop using the big green, bacon’s books and go online? Like it just makes you more efficient.

 

Paul Sutton 27:26
Yeah. What other ways? Are you using AI? So obviously, there’s the copywriting. Yep. which I assume is the major

 

Gini Dietrich 27:34
what’s the major way? Yeah.

 

Paul Sutton 27:35
Are there any other ways you were using it for in in terms of practice for yourselves or for clients?

 

Gini Dietrich 27:41
We’re doing, we did a competitive analysis for a couple of clients using it, which was really great, because it came up with some some things that we did not, when

 

Paul Sutton 27:49
you say in terms of what so you what

 

Gini Dietrich 27:52
we did is we copied homepage copy for our client and then for their, for their competitors, and then put all that in there and said, create a graphic that shows strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, essentially. And it does it it builds you like a whole model. And it shows you here are the strengths for each here are the weaknesses for each. And there were a couple of things. So because because this particular client we’ve been working with for a couple of years, we already had done a SWOT analysis for them. So we just compared it. And there were a couple of things that got that we just didn’t get. And I was like, Okay, this is really good. And it just helps you keep things fresh, right? I understand why people are scared people don’t like change, you know, some people are afraid it’s going to take their job. But from a content perspective, it’s not going to take your job because you still have to prep provide the thought leadership and the expertise. You can’t just there will there will be organisations for sure, that don’t hire copywriters, and just pump stuff out of chat GPT, which is going to be gross and boring and dry. And it’ll sound the same as everybody else. But there are also the companies who would never pay 150 or $200 an hour for a copywriter anyway. So yeah, they’re not going to read, it’s not going to replace you. It’s making you more efficient, for sure. But you still have to do what you do. It’s kind of like having an intern write the first draft and you helping it. Learn how helping the intern learn how to improve it.

 

Chapter Seven: The Impact of AI on Efficiency and Revenue

 

Paul Sutton 29:21
But I mean, you’ve been banging the drum for AI for I want to say five years, easily, maybe? Yeah, I mean, over here we see IPR did a study that was five years ago, where they they predicted they modelled out all different areas, different tasks that a typical PR person would do typical roles, all sorts of stuff. And they mapped this all out and then they did a study and to try and work out what AI was capable of then and looking forward five years what it would be capable of in the future. Interesting. Then Interesting thing is, so this would have been lit about five years ago, summer of 2018, I guess sometime around, okay. Up until the back end of last year, probably up until Christmas this year. It looks so as if they got this wrong, because AI kind of didn’t do a lot for four years. Yeah. And then suddenly, yes, in nine months, it’s just bang, and they’re their predictions look absolutely spot on. It’s quite interesting. That’s all down to chat. GPT I’m sure Yeah. But yeah, I mean, yeah, like I said, I remember you bang the drum on this. Five or six years ago,

 

Gini Dietrich 30:38
I remember a company called Narrative Science. I think they’ve been purchased since then, since in since this happened, but probably 10 years ago, I remember they were talking about how AI was going to write articles for newspapers. And I remember at the time thinking, like, at the time, I’m thinking what most people are thinking now, like, there’s no way it’s gonna replace us. They it can’t be creative. Like, I remember thinking that, and the CEO from and I wrote a blog post about it, and the CEO from Narrative Science who happen to be in Chicago, who happens to be in Chicago called me and was like, Can I show this to you? And I said, Sure. And so he did. And I was like, Okay, it’s actually really cool. But the way he explained it was the AI at the time was only writing things that humans either didn’t want to or couldn’t do, like, kids baseball team, commentary and scores, and, you know, stock holdings in financial reporting for anybody that’s fortune 2000. and higher, like that kind of stuff that they’re just never going to have humans do. But now, with AI, we can create this stuff. And I was like, okay, that’s actually really interesting. So that changed my mind. And as we’ve gone along, you know, you’ve seen these things. And do I think it’s as creative as as a human is? No, do I think it’s going to be absolutely. So you just have to change, you have to evolve with the times you have to understand how it works now, what kinds of things it’s going to provide you now. And then be prepared, be prepared to evolve with it. So like I said, you know, we stopped billing our time to go through the big bacon’s books, which took us five hours to create a media list. Now we can do it in 30 seconds online, it’s just making you more efficient. And you’re going to replace those four and a half hours with something else. Yeah,

 

Paul Sutton 32:30
so that was going to be my next question. So let’s say in that example, so something that would have taken you five hours now takes you 30 minutes, whatever. Do you still charge the five hours work? No. So he’s not stealing your your revenue?

 

Gini Dietrich 32:45
That’s a good question. So the way that we are approaching it is like the client, I mentioned that we do the one hour webinar or transcripts for where it would take us two weeks. Now we have all of this time available. So we have we have a list of things we’ve always wanted to do for this particular client. But we have either time or budget haven’t been able to do it. Now we can take those things off the backburner and say, Okay, let’s do this. Or let’s try that or, and he’s the CEO of that company is like, this is the best thing ever. Because any still, our budgets hasn’t haven’t changed this just the way that we are. Attributing our time has changed.

 

Chapter Eight: The Shifting Media Landscape

 

Paul Sutton 33:19
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you’re actually saying, Okay, we’re getting the same amount of we’re getting paid the same amount or more. But we’re doing different work. We’re doing higher level work, because all of the standard stuff is already taken care of. Yes. And it’s not that he’s doing that you’re still doing it for him. Right. So you’ve got control of the whole thing. But you’re now able to do work at a much higher level. Yes. Which is interesting. And

 

Gini Dietrich 33:43
it’s more enjoyable, because nobody likes to take a transcript and try to write a blog post from it. No one. Yeah. So terrible. It’s terrible work. Yeah.

 

Paul Sutton 33:52
I find the data analysis side of things, which is quite interesting. Yes. Because I mean, a lot of my work is is strategy work. Yep. Which would involve it does involve comparing and contrasting, you know, my client with competitors and stuff. And it’s not a use case. I have you used it for you actually, oh, it’s always making me feel a bit stupid. Because having sad looking at websites, or I don’t know, to to Facebook pages, which I’ve got a compare. That’s taken me quite a lot. Yeah. Which I needn’t have spent maybe. Let’s see

 

Gini Dietrich 34:30
that. The the challenge right now with it is you have to have the actual words. So you have to go to the homepage, and copy and paste. It’s a little bit harder with a Facebook page because you would Yeah, eventually it’ll be able to analyse links, and then it’s gonna be life changing. I mean, yeah, absolutely.

 

Paul Sutton 34:47
Yeah. I totally agree. How was media coverage changed or not changed in the last 12 months? Do you are you still finding as much value in A media coverage? No, no, there’s two ways of answering that. Because you can look at it from an SEO angle and links and that sort of stuff. So you can look at it from a reputation length. Sure. What’s your feeling on how on the value of that sort of stuff?

 

Gini Dietrich 35:13
So I’m going to answer this from a b2b perspective, because that’s the kind of work that we do. So b2c is going to be a little bit different. But from a b2b perspective, what we have seen the biggest shift in is people going to review sites versus looking up in media. So instead of Googling, you know, what does Company X do? Or, you know, like, they’re going to actual review sites and looking up the product or service there. Yep. Instead of doing a Google search and finding media stories, actually. So we’ve seen a massive shift to that this year. And when you think about your own, like I, my husband’s much better at this than I am, but even still, like, I’ll see an ad for something, or I’ll see an influencer talking about something or I’ll hear about something. And the first thing I do is go to a review site to see what other people are saying. And or I’ll search product reviews for x. And it’ll give me all the reviews. Like if the Today Show has done something great. But that’s paid for play, right? That’s not That’s not traditional earn. But you like I, from my own consumer habits, those have changed to wood, that’s that’s the first thing I do is go to a review site before I buy something.

 

Paul Sutton 36:29
So has that changed the nature of the work that you’re doing? Because you’ve seen that shift? So does that mean your your PR work in inverted commas? Is, is focused on getting reviews? I mean, you

 

Gini Dietrich 36:43
you know this already, we’ve we haven’t focused on earned media Solian in a long, long time. Yeah, always implement the PESO model. One of the things, I strongly believe that owned media comes first, because without owned media, you don’t have anything that provides the credibility that a journalist needs to understand who you are, you don’t have anything to share on social, you don’t have anything to boost some hate. So you have to have the content first. And then you have one of three new paths, right? You go to search shared next, or you go to earn next or you go to paid next, we are almost exclusively going shared, paid and then earned. And part of the earned where it used to be owned and then earned. But we it’s almost last now. And almost always, part of the earned is working with Glassdoor and you know, all Trustpilot, and all the review sites, and then doing influencer relations as well, to help boost that. So we almost always do those two things first, before we even do traditional media relations. Yeah,

 

Paul Sutton 37:47
I’m really surprised that you would say and is third, on that list. That that’s I don’t know, maybe it’s because, you know, as I’ve grown up through my career in agencies and stuff earned has always been the Holy Grail, you know, that’s what we want. But

 

Chapter Nine: PR Strategies for Success

 

Gini Dietrich 38:06
think about what’s changed. Like nobody trusts media anymore. Yeah, there’s like 12 PR people, for every journalist today, journalists are worn out, because they’re doing the job of three or four people like, everything has changed. And now like to get the attention of a journalist today, unless you have a standing relationship is almost impossible. Yeah.

 

Paul Sutton 38:29
I’m also surprised. Well, no, actually, I’m not surprised. I’m the fact that you put paid so high, I’m not surprised, because a lot of my work now has switched to paid as it. So I do a lot of strategy. I do a lot of training. But out of the more sort of tactical stuff I do. It’s paid. And that can be simple things like post boosting, or can be I do a lot of Google ads. Nowadays, lots of Google ads, Google ads, and my mindset over the last, it’s been coming for several years, but is now that you can’t do anything without paid and that I firmly believe that. And I tell clients this, you know, if I’m doing a social media strategy, I’m going to talk to them about paid because I don’t think you can do it without it. Well, rarely anyway. And

 

Gini Dietrich 39:18
you almost cannot do earned media without paid media anymore. Because so many places are our pay for place. So many, you know, there are still the big top top tier publications that are not but how often are you going to get in the guardian or the New York Times or on BBC or the Today Show? Right? Like, once once a year, maybe. So you have to be thinking about all this other stuff that goes along with it. I mean, even going back to our Twitter conversation in the beginning, like you used to be able to just tweet a link to whatever you’ve created. And yeah, we’re click on it and read it right or listen to it or watch it. And now you have to be incredibly strategic about it like you Can’t just you can’t share a link in a post on Facebook? Because it will kill it. Yeah, like meta will not show it to anybody. So there’s all the stuff that has changed that we just, we just you have to keep just keep up. Unfortunately, you still

 

Paul Sutton 40:14
obviously you’re still blogging? I am, is that now a lot less important than it used to be? It’s not

 

Gini Dietrich 40:20
actually it’s Oh, okay. It’s still is our number one driver of revenue still. And I repurpose a lot of content on LinkedIn. And that’s driving a tonne as well, but it’s still the the blog content. So

 

Paul Sutton 40:34
is that going to existing subscribers primarily.

 

Gini Dietrich 40:39
So the blog goes to existing subscribers, LinkedIn, LinkedIn has I mean, it’s exploded, I have almost 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is astonishing to me. But it’s people that would never subscribe to the blog. So the blog almost speaks to well, not almost the blog speaks to industry and talks to other PR and communications professionals, I take that content, and I tweak it, to speak to a business owner or business leader on LinkedIn. So it’s the same content, but it’s changed, the audience has changed. So I tweak it because like, on the blog, I might say, you know, as a comms pro, you should do this, this, this and this. And then on LinkedIn, I’ll say, as a business leader, these are the things that your comms team should be doing. These are the things that you can use to hold your team accountable. Like I’m educating them on PR and communications so that they understand, I understand what this is, I understand how to hire, and that is driving a tonne of requests for proposal tonnes.

 

Paul Sutton 41:41
So your LinkedIn content isn’t you’re not trying to drive people back to your website, then. So you’re not you’re not for example, I accept what you’re saying you’re tweaking the copy, are you so you’re writing a post, which is tweaked in terms of the audience? Are you then putting a link in it or a leak in the comments or something to try and drive people?

 

Gini Dietrich 41:59
So this is a I’m grinning, because this is a big source of contention internally. Because I’m using the the way that I’m using that is through the spin sucks newsletter feature on LinkedIn. So it’s an actual newsletter, there are links to content on the on our website, for sure. But I’m not using it to build subscribers or to bring people to the website because I don’t care. Because what I’ve seen is that people will read it, and direct message me on LinkedIn and say, we are actually hiring or I’m interested in talking to you, I had one person say to me, I read everything that you write because I’m I’m not a PR person. But I’m in charge of PR. And then he’s like, I need to hire you. And so it has just created, you know, top of mind for sure. But also the thought leadership and brand awareness to actually drive people to take action. So I don’t care if they come to the website. But like I said, it’s a big source of contention.

 

Chapter Ten: PR Trends and the PESO Model

 

Paul Sutton 42:58
But then like I said, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because if you’re getting contacted, who cares whether

it’s because your people are being measured on people. Oh, my God.

 

Gini Dietrich 43:18
All I care about is whether or not we’re driving revenue, and that’s driving revenue. Absolutely.

 

Paul Sutton 43:23
How often are you writing? Once a week? Once a week? So that must be down quite a bit, then it’s down?

 

Gini Dietrich 43:30
I mean, we used to do every day. Yeah, I thought you did. Yeah. But I spent more time on it. Wait a lot more time on it.

 

Paul Sutton 43:35
So you writing longer posts? Yes.

 

Gini Dietrich 43:38
And more research than all of that? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So

 

Paul Sutton 43:42
they’re more in depth. And then also you’re you’re rewriting them effectively, or tweaking them anyway, for for LinkedIn. And how often are you posting on LinkedIn once a week? Okay, so that’s quite minimal once a week on LinkedIn. But yeah, again, to your point, it doesn’t matter if you get results is what works. Okay, when it comes to the Pacer model, then do you need to? I was gonna say rip it up. Don’t mean rip it up. God, no. Do you need to tweak it and turn it around and move? It’ll because it must have idea. All right. I’m gonna reword this. Do you think the Pacer model is out of date? What’s given what’s happened this year?

 

Gini Dietrich 44:19
Yes. And we’re launching a new version in January. So thanks for riding on my parade. Yeah, and you know, it’s funny because we we launched version two in February of 2020, which the timing of that was impeccable. But when we did that, it was funny because we looked at it. And we had things like Google Plus on there and fine. And there were all these tools. So at the time, I was like, let’s not do tools, let’s talk about it strategically. And even still talking about it strategically, so much has changed just this year. That yeah, we’re working on a new model right now.

 

Paul Sutton 44:59
Okay, and a sneak preview. Now it’ll be interesting to see, because since the last version, I mean, it’s totally different is it’s three years, basically, I’ll be interested to see, you’re gonna have to come back in, in January then when it launches. And tell me about it, I think happily. Okay, is there anything else you can think of that has had? Or is having a big impact on, on what you’re doing? Or in PR in? In a in a more generic sense at the moment?

 

Gini Dietrich 45:43
The only thing that I would say is, you know, and we touched this a little bit, but so many PR people focus on media relations. And I think, because things have changed so much. And because that alone is so difficult to measure. It’s 2024 is the time to stretch your wings and really start to think about, can I add in? Or where can we add in shared? Are we already doing shared, but we need to add in paid and own like, really stretch your wings and start to think about how do we implement a full PESO model so that we can measure our efforts, and we have some consistency. We don’t have peaks and valleys like every time a news article runs, we have a peak, and then we have valleys while we’re waiting, you know, so we have more consistency across the top, but really stretch your wings and say, Okay, what is it that we should be adding? Should we add services? Should we add tactics to our comms plans, whatever it happens to be, but really think about it from a PESO model perspective, because I think that that, I mean, certainly I’ve been banging that drum for a decade as well. But we continue to see that internally comms teams are being measured on the same types of things that marketers are so this aligns you more closely with Mark with marketing, and externally as an agency, same thing, like no client wants to hire a PR firm anymore, and wait for results. So how do you find ways to deliver results immediately and keep those results consistent?