By Public relations is a dying trade. Mainstream media has less influence than ever. Pitching for coverage is a thankless, fruitless task. Yeah, well, I think PR is poised for a massive comeback. Here’s why:
- Traditional media may have less influence, but diverse, distributed sources of influence have never, NEVER held more sway over opinions and buying behavior. The 2.5 hours on social media everyday, the 49 minutes on YouTube, the faily 6.5 total hours online, the 22% of Americans who subscribe to email news sources, the 565 million ConvertKit, 50 million Beehiiv, 35 million Substack, and 850K Medium subscribers, the 23% of Americans who listen to 10+ hours of podcasts a week, the 600 million people who use Google Discover every day… and all of these sources of influence are reachable via, you guessed it, public relations.
- Want to be atop Reddit? Google News? Apple News? Techmeme? Hacker News? Metafilter? Those Google Discover feeds? Well, you’d better be doing PR, because the visibility algorithms that govern all those places, and the people who create for them are, you guessed it, basing a huge amount of what they create, submit, and click on behind-the-scenes PR efforts.
- How about the AI tools and LLMs of the world? Yup, them too. Language models are governed by the “trusted sources,” they crawl, index, and use to build up their text corpora. Three guesses what influences change in those models. Yup, it’s PR-Influenced Content. The ability to influence how people write about, talk about, and publish about you on the web directly impact how AI tools respond to questions about your brand, your field, and whether they include you when prompters ask about the problems you solve.
This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard is the one to show to your boss, team, client, or c-suite next time they ask why you’re recommending more budget go to influencing and pitching the sources of media—ALL sources of media—that reach your target audience, and the algorithmic indices that index ’em.
Transcript
Okay friends, I wanna share with you where I think marketing is going long term, the next decade. And and this both data informed but also opinion informed. So you can have your own opinions, but but this one is mine, which is I believe that the discovery platforms, the way that information is picked up and conveyed to consumers and businesses is fundamentally different today than it was kinda the last twenty years, and that is mostly a result of places like Google, but not just Google, I’ll show you a bunch of others, choosing to do this.
So if ten years ago I performed a search for decking ideas for small book gardens, I would get a list like these of websites with information. I would click to them. I would explore my options in those places, but not anymore. Right now what is happening is Google is is suggesting surrounding your deck with plants and then they’re providing information, creating shaded areas over your decking and then they’re providing all this information.
Essentially, I’m I’m experiencing the content. I’m learning about my options and possibilities right in the results. Essentially, they’re competing with, can you give me some good ideas around decking for a small garden in my backyard from ChatGPT. They are competing with AI tools, and they are nervous. I I think, ChatGBT is now in the top ten most visited websites in the United States.
I’m sure that’s scaring the people at Google. Right? And so they’re trying to become this experience where you can solve your problems and get information more and more. And this is why, you know, all of our research shows that, essentially, you know, two thirds of Google searches stay in Google’s ecosystem.
Only one third go out to the open web. This is why all of this, you know, zero click phenomenon is happening. And and if I look through SparkToro at people who, you know, search for decking information, I can see that, you know, they’re visiting these different websites and, using these social networks, that they’re following these sources of social, social influence. Right?
So they’re subscribing to these YouTube channels like this one from Trex, which essentially competing for the same thing. They are creating the demand. They’re creating the information. Here’s the r home improvement, which is extremely well subscribed to tons of people as we can see from SparkToro’s data down here.
Right? This is the most, visited, most engaged with subreddit for folks who search for decking, and and no surprise. So what I believe is happening is we’re moving from a world where people search out information, go to a website, a small business website, and then, learn from there and and become your customer. And instead, it’s these few platforms that are dominating all of our time and attention, including places like Facebook even.
Right? Architect Magazine and and Builder. Like, they they have a lot of the attention here. ChatGPT, Google, advice that I would have given that content marketers and SEOs and social media marketers would have given given that content marketers and SEOs and social media marketers would have given you ten years ago is you should build lots of content on your website.
Content of all kinds that can help you with decking of all kinds. That’s not what I would say today. Today. What I would say based on the information is I would say your job is essentially to do PR and content marketing across all the platforms that you know your audience pays attention to.
PR is sort of the the, the future, in my opinion, of where a ton of marketing has to go, especially content placement. I I don’t necessarily need all my decking information to go on to my website, but I definitely want it to get up voted in our home improvement. I want it to be featured on YouTube so that appears in Google. I want it to appear, on Facebook in these communities where people pay attention to the pages that people pay attention to.
I want it on these podcasts and YouTube channels. I want it in these news sources. Right? I wanna get picked up by architect magazine because that’s what powers these things.
When you see in here choosing seating or build a race decking or build a custom deck or any of the advice that you get from ChatGPT, because of how large language models working, that is because text appears next to other text on the Internet. In the training model, right, the words floating deck and corner decking and vertical garden integration and small deck with fire pit, those words appear around decking and small gardens and backyard on the web. In PR is how you get into those models. It’s how you influence Google.
It’s how you influence all these other social channels. It’s how you influence what Reddit talks about. It’s how you influence what the YouTubers talk about. It’s how you influence what social media, influencers talk about.
That’s the future. I look. PR has kinda been I don’t wanna say ostracized, but it’s been minimized in value because people think, oh, nobody reads journalists or or the media anymore. But that’s not what PR is in the digital era. I think the digital era of PR is actually just starting, and I think it’s gonna be as big as the content marketing trend was in o seven. It’s gonna be as big as the SEO trend was the last twenty years.
It’s coming. That’s what’s coming for us.