Digital PR For AI Search With Austin Holmes

AI watermarking and AI search make third-party trust the new battleground for SEO and brand visibility. Host, Matthew Bertram, talks with Austin Holmes about how digital PR, reviews, and consistent profiles can turn your business into the default recommendation.

• why off-page SEO and third-party citations carry outsized weight in AI-driven search
• how Claude watermarking and AI content detection push brands toward real human signals
• building entity authority with uniform bios, consistent messaging, and credible media mentions
• the truth about PR ROI, backlink quality, and why cheap link volume can hurt
• earned media basics that get missed, including speed to lead and showing up prepared
• real outcomes from PR consistency, from investor leads to acquisitions to recurring TV spots

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: publicityforgood.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/aaustinholmes

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With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. 

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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Transcript

Show Setup And Welcome Back

SPEAKER_00 0:02

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.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Howdy, welcome back to another Funfold episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, or the best SEO podcast since we bought that domain a long, long time ago. Um, welcome back, everybody. It summer just ended for me. I was gone most of the summer, uh, 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 uh uh sales and marketing podcast, though. So if you go search those, you can check those out. Uh 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 gonna be a Herculean task. You got to raise some money. Like he was talking about his burn rate uh on servers and token use. It was it was pretty insane, but it was a really cool meeting. Um, everyone, hopefully the world is progressing for you.

AI Watermarks Change Content Trust

SPEAKER_02 1:21

And you know, one of the things that a lot of SEOs are not focused on and should be focused on is the important offs 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, I think it was 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 GDDPR in the EU, and that's just gonna spread. Uh, also the NASC framework for using AI is coming online shortly. So there's a lot happening in the 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.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah, uh awesome. I dude, the cloud watermark was uh that was a fun one to find out about.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Yeah, yeah. Um, here's the

Third-Party Citations Decide Visibility

SPEAKER_02 2:38

craziest thing, right? So, like you, you know, you got roundups, and there's all these kind of things that are happening out there right now in the knowledge graph. Uh, I mean, I have a couple properties that we manage. AI, Google's like, yeah, that's you. So we are not gonna trust that. We're gonna actually use a third-party site to canicalize who you are. Like 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 canicalize, 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 gonna show publicly.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

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 gonna 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 OpenAI had all of the bias, they changed tune rather quickly 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's 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 gonna do that is dominating every aspect of it, and and the complexity actually gives us an advantage right now because it is a complicated task. Like mom and pop is they're not gonna go and figure out all of the trust factors for all 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.

SPEAKER_02 5:21

Yeah, yeah. I 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 Glassdoor or it's something somebody said on Reddit or whatever, you're you're having to realize you have to be optimizing everywhere 360 of what's going on, and the thing that carries more weight, which 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 gonna have the most strength. And so I'm even seeing this

Avoid AI Slop With Humans

SPEAKER_02 6:22

with social media getting indexed, right? So social media is getting, yeah. 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've 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 builds, 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 the 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 a 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 an AI bot, so there's this whole economy now that and and we have team members now that are agents, like, 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.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah, I think you still there's the agentics side and then there's the content side. Um, and and I would treat them differently because it's so easy for anybody to spot on the tech side, the agentix 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 it 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 gonna prevent some of that.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

Um AI slop. Yeah, AI slop.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

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 sentence the structure that's actually gonna 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 and for us structuring in a way where as soon as it's done and recorded, it's already gonna hit all of the other um elements that we want it to hit from the technical side, that's gonna help it actually get spread that much more. Uh, and of course, structuring for virality.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

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 gonna 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, we're putting 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 it honestly, if you still have that content and you just post that on social media, you're not gonna 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 Tordian 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 gonna be coming out uh towards the end and beginning of next year, and and I'm really fascinated with with what's happening uh in that space, and also some of this agenc behavior of of the AIs, 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.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Um, but with watermarking, like that that makes it very easy to track, and they're doing that obviously for uh governmental reasons. But the other thing is, you know, for these third party things, whether you're paying somebody to create record the video for for you so that you're not spending your time on it, yeah, 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? The there's options for all of this third-party validation in all of those different ways, some of it's better than others, uh, but it's really pick your poison as far as what you want to spend um in order to get that credibility, uh, because you're gonna be spending one of the three of them.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

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 uh curve of listeners, once you get married, once you have kids, uh, 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 gonna be time has to be spent to create what it is that we're doing.

Regulation And Platform Choke Points

SPEAKER_02 16:04

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.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Um the 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 gonna be harder for them to convince. But uh for a lot of these providers, it does trace back to Cloudflare or AWS, and and there is absolute control um at that level, and that that's where you run into it's gonna 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.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

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 AIs 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 very like what I've seen in kind of some of the testing is is quite quite scary, you know.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

I I think I also have a different opinion than a lot of people. I think it will be 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 SaaS 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 systems side it does become way more distributed. Uh, and so that does eliminate choke points, but I think it it becomes you wanna you wanna hear like my okay.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

So so I no, I 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 if you like where the conversation is going, please leave a comment and like let us know. We are 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 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

Media Fragmentation And Attention Wars

SPEAKER_02 20:42

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?

SPEAKER_01 21:03

I I think the music industry is a good example. 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 because they got shut down because they were talking about everything and not niche, like you were bringing 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 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 gonna 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, will still be biased, but it's kind of hard to deny somebody who's getting 300,000 views a night.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

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 gonna trust and who they're gonna listen to, uh 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 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 cloud, I'm like, great, people are scraping our stuff, like you know, or 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 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 evolving really, really rapidly, and I mean, I don't know, like again, um 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 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.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Um there was something there's a class action. Uh I think it's against Facebook. I did 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.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

But 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 uh 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 I thought I was gonna do that, and then I I'm gonna do this instead of like like I'm like following it. I don't know. That's been my personal experience. I I guess my data's 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?

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah, I I think the hotels is a good correlation here. Um, you know, it used to be you 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, yeah. So it it depends on, and then there's the whole reward system, whether you logging in with your bank or it it gets distributed by people's buying behavior, yeah. Um, and 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 and so that probably becomes a rideshare 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 you get different levels of buyer engaging in different ways. Uh the there'll be the buyer in the store one day, I imagine, that asks their meta glasses, hey, which one of these pasta sauces tastes better? Um 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 think that 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. Yeah, and 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.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

Yeah, the network effects, uh, which I I saw a lot in crypto, um, is like, and you saw it with Twitter. You saw 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, it is becoming so big. So I want to again try to pull it back to digital PR.

PR ROI And Link Quality Reality

SPEAKER_02 28:18

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 placement, $7,000. Like, how are you gonna quantify the ROI for that? Like, what what is like is there a is there a calculator or a math formula, like like how are you communicating that the the biggest thing for us um on the PR side is what are they gonna do with it?

SPEAKER_01 28:50

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. No, um, and so knowing where your audience is, knowing the demographics of who's actually gonna buy, uh, all 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? Because they all look at different ones too. So it I think that will come to be more standardized in the future, but right now, uh every media site out there is factored in.

SPEAKER_02 30:46

Yeah, so on publicityforgood.com, like you have your packages on there, which I I really like that it's it's uh fanned out, it's spread out. You're you're you know, you have different packages, press releases, okay, some 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 will will sell just uh backlinks and they'll you know they're like, hey, you're gonna get this many backlinks for this price per month, and you can't really control what those are gonna be. And you know, based on like how to measure what you think's good, um, I have 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 certain amount of links in 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, they 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 I think it was an SEM rush trainer, shitty church links. Um, like this is what they were calling them, which is not uh like a 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 weighting 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 gonna weight it differently. And if they link to you, then that that's gonna 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 gonna get? But then like you're also weighting quality. Um, and like how do you how do you explain that to your clients, whether they be direct or agencies?

SPEAKER_01 33:39

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 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 gonna damage your 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.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

We're actually doing that for for a client right now, and that uh that 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 to put out there carry a lot of weight, right? And um, and so it it it also is about building up social equity now, right? Because if you don't have any and then a bunch of negative hits you, like uh it you're gonna have to come that much farther out of the hole, and it's not gonna like a bad review now and then, like I mean, if you're doing business, that can happen, like, but it's not gonna weigh you down, but you gotta be you gotta be active 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 I 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 gonna get you. It we're just you know, you're gonna buy this many hours, we're gonna 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.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Yeah, the the traditional model for PR agencies is the lawyer model of we're gonna charge you hours and hopefully the outcome's good. Um, we we've gone away from that, uh, partly because uh

Earned Media Execution And Speed

SPEAKER_01 38:07

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 gonna get better and better features by being consistently in the media because more of those media members are gonna 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'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 gonna reach 50,000 people in this segment, might end up reaching five million. So it can scale pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

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 gonna get, but that those are like really nice bonuses, and and like you said, you need to be prepared for that.

SPEAKER_01 40:03

Yeah, uh, 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 and like this can be anything, it's oh, they checked out your LinkedIn and it's non-existent. You have five connections. Like you need to have those other pieces prepared before you show the world that you're not ready.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

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

Media Training And Profile Uniformity

SPEAKER_02 41:36

people need to look out for? Like, maybe what are some actionable things that people could take away?

SPEAKER_01 41:41

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 gonna talk about why you're qualified and what your certifications are and all those different things and the different companies you 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 a 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 you they will forget you in a week. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

So I love that piece on like entity uniformity. I 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 got somebody like you you kind of hented 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.

SPEAKER_01 43:52

Um gosh, got several.

Unexpected Wins And Final CTA

SPEAKER_01 43:55

I'll bring up two. The first is guy did a podcast relatively small reach, got an investor from that. Second one, uh, 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 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 the a fairly short period of time. And and a huge win of that was she started getting recurring segments on a local news station.

SPEAKER_02 44:42

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, Austin, 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 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?

SPEAKER_01 46:10

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.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

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 y'all so much for listening. Until next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.