The Ryan Hanley Show - How to Get Famous (The Hidden Art of PR) | Mickie Kennedy

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyWhat if you could get famous without anyone knowing you're marketing? It's not magic; it's the hidden art of Public Relations.In this episode of Finding Peak, Ryan Hanley sits down with Mickie Kennedy, the founder of eReleases and a 25-year veteran of the PR industry, to pull back the curtain on "credibility engineering." Mickie reveals why press releases—a tool many have written off as dead—are more powerful than ever for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and content creators looking to build massive brand authority.Forget what you think you know about PR. Mickie shares the counter-intuitive strategies that get results, from the psychological power of a contrarian take to the "Pill in the Cheese" method for getting media coverage without anyone realizing you're pitching.In this episode, you will learn:The Hidden Art of PR: How to generate buzz and media attention that feels organic and earned, not paid for.Credibility Engineering: Actionable steps to build unshakeable authority in your industry, even if you're just starting out.Viral Storytelling Secrets: The truth about eBay's fabricated origin story and how you can craft narratives that journalists can't ignore.The 17% Sales Bump: How a simple "brag book" of press clippings led to a 17% increase in sales for a local carpet company.AI-Powered PR: How to use AI the right way to craft compelling press releases, and the one prompt you should never use.Contrarian Authority: Why taking an opposing viewpoint can instantly make you appear smarter and more credible to your audience.If you're ready to stop shouting into the void and start getting the attention your business deserves, this episode is your roadmap.This is the way.Connect with Mickie Kennedy:Free PR Masterclass: https://ereleases.com/planWebsite: https://eReleases.comThis show is sponsored by:Roam: The #1 Remote Office Software in the World: https://ro.am/ryan-hanley/OpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opusRiverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riversideWhisperFlow: Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflowCaptionsApp: One app for all your social media video creation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/captionsappPerspective.co: The #1 funnel builder for lead generation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/perspectiveThis show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Credibility is a great way to increase your conversions, as well as bring new customers, as well as keep more of your existing customers. Churn is a predictable number for a lot of people. If they see you, you know, by you sharing these links with them on social media and your newsletters, they're going to say, oh, these people are killing it. There's no need to consider working with someone else. Mickey, appreciate your time today, man. Thanks for stopping by to show. Glad to be here.

Great. Well, I thought press releases were dead and they didn't work anymore. I've been hearing that for like 25 years. The truth is, press releases have probably never been more effective than they are today. There's been consolidation in the U.S. so we're basically a duopoly of newswires. So, you know, if you're looking to get a press release out, you know, you want to make sure that you hit either business wire or PR Newswire. All of our releases go out through PR Newswire, which charges a little over $1,800 to move a 600-word press release nationally. And through us, it's about a quarter of the price. The caveat is you have to be a small business or entrepreneur or startup, basically someone that the corporate sales team at P. PR Newswire would not be interested in working with, and we certainly help those people

and onboard them through press releases. I think a lot of small business owners in particular, they don't even think about press releases. They don't think about PR in general. And one of the things that I talk to a lot of my clients about is oftentimes marketing is the nonsense and PR is what actually moves the needle, done right, done with a strategy, not just blasting out random news or thoughts, but press releases with a purpose. One, is that, though a broad stroke, an accurate statement, and two, how do you, like, what is a moment where a small business, a mainstream business, a startup, what is a moment

that warrants a press release? What is the trigger in their brain to go, you know, this is something that we could put out into the world that would help move our business forward? So I like to tell people that everyone should try to do PR. And, you know, a PR campaign is not one press release, but it's a series of six to eight. And they should be strategic. And, you know, by that, I mean, it should be, it should basically solve the problem of a journalist, which is they are looking to. to basically entertain or educate their audience. And you are coming through very selfishly

trying to promote just yourself. And so I always tell people it's sort of like putting the pill in the cheese that you feed a dog, is how can you accomplish your announcement, hopefully sell, attract attention, but also be entertaining or educational for, you know, an audience. and therefore a journalist would want to share your story. A lot of the press releases that we get at e-releases are product launches or service launches.

And usually it's just here's the product or service and here's a list of features. For a journalist, there's not a lot of meat there for them to write an article. If you look at articles in most papers and blogs and trade journals, they follow a story arc, even if they're small articles. You know, the story arc is something that's ingrained to us from, you know, telling kids stories, uh, reading stories to them, sitting around fires and share, you know, sharing ghost tales or, or just, uh, interesting jokes. Um, and yet we don't give journalists enough information to build a story arc.

So one of the easiest things you can do with a service announcement or a new product announcement is incorporate elements that would make a great story. These products and services come out after being beta tested. So take someone who had an amazing outcome and share that story. Like if you have a new logistics software solution, you know, point out that, you know, 63% of new transportation companies fell in their first five years because they don't achieve profitability. Take a publicly available data point like that and use it. That shows the and then say, here was a company that was losing money for three years. They're three years old.

They started using your software, and at the end of a six-month trial, they're projected to have a 12% net increase for the first time a profit at the end of the year. And that's something that you can put a data point to, have an outcome for this company that would otherwise be perhaps a casualty in your industry, and show a rapid turnaround you know, rapid by being months long, but, you know, that really shows the value of your product and service. And a journalist knows that that's going to be a much more compelling story of a way explaining what your product does.

Also have quotes by them saying, hey, we always thought we just needed to win more bids, but we could win all the bids in the world. But if they're not profitable, we're going to continue to lose money. And by using this software, it allowed us to be able to know when we needed a drop out of bidding and it was no longer profitable for us. And so these are all the ingredients of a story. And those are the things that I think a lot of people who come to press releases selfishly

don't realize that they're missing. And it's easy to put those stories back in there, inject a little personality into press releases. There's a reason that the people who go on Shark Tank, one of the first things they do is they don't open with their numbers. And I mentioned Shark Tank's because about a third of the people who appear on there do a press release before their episode airs because the producers recommend that. And, you know, they share usually human interest thing. Like, I was laid off or, you know,

I had just gotten a divorce and all of a sudden I had this idea and I wanted to implement or I used to have this thing that me and my dad made. And after he died, you know, I was sitting there thinking, could I turn that into a business? And it's these things that make us want to care, because they're the little building blocks of a story of humanity. And, you know, those are the things that anybody can go back and put into a press release and make it what I call strategic. There's also, you know, there's this thing that came out, I guess, over 15, maybe 20 years ago called news jacking.

And it worked for like 10 minutes then and hasn't since, but it still gets a lot of mileage is when there's something trending in your industry, join the conversation. Well, the thing is everyone's doing that. But if you're the one person willing to poke your head up and say, I disagree with everybody else, that's where you could really get a lot of mileage out of news jacking. And, you know, everybody who, you know, generally talks about news jacking things are just agreeing with everyone else. Like, oh, electric cars are great. They're good for the environment.

They're going to save us. You know, they're the future. and all this stuff, but if you're the person saying, hey, not so fast, you know, what are we going to do with the batteries at the end of their life? What about the environmental toll of mining these minerals and, you know, political wars at play regarding that? Not to mention, sometimes it takes eight fire trucks to put out a car fire that involves a lithium battery. So it's a way in which you can rationally join the conversation, but be counter to everybody else. And why is a contrarian viewpoint so valuable? Believe it or not, journey. journalist outside of politics like to be fair and balanced. And if they're writing articles about this and nobody's raised their hand to discuss the other side, they often just go to print with all the favorable pro-environment stuff. But if you're the one person raising your hand, you stand in likelihood you can be sort of put into every one of those articles as saying, not so fast says this person. And here's their reasoning for it. And so, you know, you need to be

strategic with PR, you need to be creative and think about it. But the great thing is, if you're a small business or an entrepreneur or a startup, you are really at a great advantage over well-funded, well-known companies. Journalists don't get accolades and they don't get a lot of shares for articles when they write about the Microsofts and Googles of the world. They have to. They have to cover the big companies in every industry, but they often get the most accolades, the most article shares, which is a measurement that a lot of them use, for, you know, covering an unknown company, a new company, a mom and pop, a new product, a new service, a side business, putting the spotlight on something that most people in your industry don't know about.

It makes the journalist seem like a curator, makes him seem really good, and it can really make a huge difference for a fairly new company, a company just starting out, a company that's not extremely well-funded. PR is not one of these things that you have to wait until you've reached a level of success to embrace or, you know, you've had $20,000, $30,000 to fund a PR firm. It's something that I tell people, get in there, be creative, be strategic, and think your way into, you know, reverse engineer what you want to announce to solve also the journalist quandary of I'm looking for content that's going to, you know, tantalize, educate, entertain my audience.

And if you can sort of figure that out and reverse engineer that, you can really, you know, get a lot of success. And by success, I mean, you know, three or four articles from a press release. You know, not every press release you do in a PR campaign is going to get pickup, but if you do strategic series of press releases and you do a campaign of six to eight, there's no reason that two or three of those can't result in considerable earned media. I have one idea that always generates usually between six and 14 articles, and that's to do an industry survey. Survey your industry, take their temperature today right now on a series of topics. If there's things that you can't wait to go to a trade show or conference to say, have you noticed this or is it just me? Those are perhaps

the types of questions you could ask. You could also ask other questions that are going on in your industry, things that are concerns. Is AI affecting your industry? You could ask questions around that. You could ask questions about, you know, whether people are hiring or laying off, you know, what's the economic situation across your industry. But, you know, just be creative and spend a little bit of time there. And the great thing about it is you being the author of the survey, you're going to get a lot of recognition every time an article is published about this data. And you're going to have a quote that you put in the press release that's going to get replicated in a lot of different articles out there about why you felt the numbers skewed in a particular way on one of those

hot button issues. And the great thing about it is you don't even need a giant rolydecks of people in your industry. I always tell people to seek out the small and independent trade associations in your industry. Everybody knows the big ones. You know, the ones you see at the big giant trade shows, often putting them on. They don't see the benefit of working with you, but, you know, do a little bit of homework. There's a lot of them out there. In the PR world, I had, you know, someone say, well, Mickey, ours is different. There's only PRSA, Public Relations Society of America. I had to break it to it. There was over 700 other trade associations for PR in the United States alone. Some of them are very small, like Florida PR firms, Atlantic PR firms, African-American-owned PR firms.

But there's also ones like, you know, independent PR firms of 50 employees or less, which probably represents more than 80% of the market. And it also is a really nice size. You know, by taking your link to your survey, I use survey monkey, reach out to them and say, hey, could you send this to your members in exchange? I will put your organization in a press release. I'll be issuing over PR Newswire in the coming weeks. About two-thirds of the time, these independent and small trade associations will say yes. And so that's a great way to tap that audience

and to get the responses that you need and then sort of look through the questions and figure out what are the two or three they're going to be the most shocking and make that the focus of the press release. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, but I thought that was brilliant. No, I've loved it.

I mean that in no, no disrespect. I think the point you made around being contrarian is, I think one that I'd like to spend just a little more time on because I was reading a, I'm reading this book, Hacking the Human Mind, it just came out, and I'm going to butcher the authors, but I'll go back and look at them. And one of the things that that's in that book

was talking about the psychological study, the psychology study that was done around the fact that when you have a contrarian viewpoint, Even if the person reading that viewpoint doesn't agree with your take at all, they immediately apply like an intelligence indicator to you or like they, it gives you authority even if you disagree just by taking a different viewpoint or having or arguing a different viewpoint even if you don't agree with it, right? Your article could be here's the contrarian take and why it's wrong. But by by presenting a counter argument to what someone sees, you know, 90. percent of the time, it immediately applies a level of authority to you from a psychology standpoint.

Like immediately the person reading it goes, ooh, this guy or this gal, they think differently. They may, you know, I don't agree with what they're doing. Their take is here. But man, they're thinking about this differently and it elevates you from an authority place by having that contrarian take. And I actually, not to plug my own work on my own podcast, but guys, if you go to findingpeak.com, I just, I have been fighting this myself because. I don't want to fall into that, like, you know, yes and, yes and, yes, and kind of loop.

And I created a chat GBT prompt, which I just posted that actually checks to see how consensus my viewpoint, like, so I'll have an article, and then I'll run that article through this chat GBT prompt that I created, which actually checks and scores it to say, like, this is 90% consensus, like, this is what everyone else is saying. Or, you know, this part's a little different, but the rest is all the same. and to try to force myself to say, like, is this really what I think about this? Or am I just kind of parroting something? You know, like to try to catch myself to make sure I'm not, like, falling into that loop.

Guys, you can check that out at Finding Peak. I'll have the article in the show notes. But I wanted to ask you about surveys particularly because I've gotten this question before where someone will say, like, I'm interested in doing a survey, maybe I see the value. But, like, I can't pay for one of those professional services. that's $30,000. Like, can you use a survey monkey survey, I think, to present your, like, is that good enough? Is that data worthy of a press release?

Or like, are we, is those days gone where it has to be done by some professional survey firm? It does not have to be, you know, a professional, you know, questionnaire survey firm. I see a lot of my clients get pick up again and again. Usually the barometer is you mentioned the population that you surveyed and the number of responses. Generally, the media is okay with 100 or more responses. They know that it may not have the best statistical relevance, but it's a barometer, indicator of this population, that, hey, we ask this population, and this, this

group responded and this is what they're seeing it could be like we asked graphic designers if they thought a i was going to replace them and 67% said they believe it will over the next five years and then you go in and you you have a quote where you say you know you don't have to agree with the quote with what the numbers say you could say hey while i believe that's a bit alarmist i do think that those graphic designers who don't know how to use AI as a tool to help them with their design efforts are going to be at a huge disadvantage in the coming years. But I do believe that, you know, not two-thirds of the designers are going to lose their job because of AI.

Yeah. I'm glad. I had a feeling that that would be your take, but I have definitely gotten that question where people are like, you know, well, survey monkey or whatever tool you're using, it's, you know, that's not like official. And it's like people create these narratives in their head around why they can't do certain things that they see other people do. And it's like, it's really, if you're just.

open and honest about hey i sent this to a thousand people 600 responded here's what they are here's what the demographics why i chose those thousand people that's all people want to know like they just want to know that you know what was your thought process to get to this group of people right really really what people are trying to make sure is you didn't like bias this in who you chose as long as it's a general pool of people and that pool is reasonably like you said a hundred that's i mean everybody knows a hundred you know quasi random people that you can send something to in a contingency to get something back from i mean particularly if you have clients right i mean if you have a business with a thousand clients right you could survey them it's a natural

built-in audience and you know you could get some insights out of them um i love that because it it shows authority it shows uh insights and not to mention if you actually take it seriously and think about the questions, you can actually learn some things that can help you grow your business, too, not just better PR, right? Right. And when I construct my surveys and SurveyMonkey, I usually do multi-pages with like four questions per page. The thing is, if someone leaves after doing three pages, you've got like 12 responses and maybe they didn't finish the last page. So you didn't get the last four questions. But you still have, you know, that information on, you know, from them. And, you know, on that last page, I always tell people, people put something in there that's strange or left field question or something a little weird. You never know when sometimes, you know, you might be able to put together something there that's even more interesting than a survey. We had a one that we did for an auto repair shop in Pennsylvania that was looking for links for SEO from automotive trade publications. And so they did a survey

with an association that they belong to of independent repair shops of America. And, you know, the question we had on the last page was not even, you know, multiple choice or anything. It was just, what's the strangest thing? A customer's left in their car and we left information, you know, those fields so they could write something. And so none of it was statistically relevant, but it was very entertaining. It was so entertaining that we put, I think in the press release,

we put, I think it was 15 of the strangest ideas, but we linked to both the survey, all the questions and answers, but also that included the roundup of, I think there was a total of 80 responses we got from that. So we didn't even bother to put, have a hundred for that. But it did really well. I think over 10 automotive trade publications wrote about it. Six of them actually included the link because it had all the other crazy things that people left. And people really liked it. And it had sort of a viral component. And that's one where there's not even, you know, data in numbers that are material in that survey. But the numbers we got back from the survey, I felt were overall lackluster, not surprising or shocking, that I felt like we would do better

by focusing on the more viral human interest element of what are some strange things people left in their car and everything from a boa constrictor to, I think a grandmother was left in an earned that had to be retrieved after hours for memorial and stuff like that. So there were just quirky fun stories and the type of things that a lot of people respond to. So sometimes you can use the survey, but, you know, maybe it's not heavy on data. Maybe it's heavy on, you know, either outside of the box experiences that people had or maybe you know ask people for out of the box ways to solve things that are going on your industry and maybe you get some ideas that you haven't thought of and maybe others

in the industry haven't thought of yeah i love that and the other thing too is you can you can kind of open loop that where it's like you know answer this 10 uh question survey and the 11th question you're going to have so much fun with or you know the 11th question you're really going to have to think or something like that kind of like click baity open loop kind of thing that gets them to go through because they they want to find out what that last question is to kind of put in their crazy answer and and honestly it's it's the it's the quirky stuff that that you know I think some people would would could potentially hear that maybe someone who's more cynical or scarcity mindset and be a little like well you know what does

anybody really care about who left and the truth is that's the interesting stuff, right? The 10 data points before that might just validate things they already knew, already thought, like you said, but it gets to reaff-you get to reaffirm those statistics because they're going to have to read through those to get to the fun stuff. Like, hey, someone left their grandmother in the back seat in an earned, right? And, you know, we didn't tell them that we had used it to do, you know, chug contest. that, you know, but, you know, the, the, it's, like, we're still human.

Like, I feel like sometimes with things, particularly like PR, which I think to a lot of small businesses feels like magic, right? I think we, we see services like, like, e-releases or, or PR news, whatever, it feels like, oh, you know, that, there's some magic to how you get picked up. If I just put my, if I just put my, my, my news release out on one of these services, yeah, it goes out and it gets picked up by Yahoo News, whatever, I get some backlinks, but it doesn't it doesn't like no one's really going to write a story and what I hear you saying is well yeah if your press release is boring and doesn't provide any reason for someone to write about it

but but journalists are actually tapping into the wire they are actually getting like they are actually looking at these stories and potentially using them as inspiration to write about right it's not just um like a friend of a friend or a PR firm push I guess is what I'm trying to say Correct. And what we're seeing even more now is that these newswires are more important than they've ever been, which is unfortunate from the standpoint of the power they have and the prices that they charge. You know, over the last 25 years or so, the big thing that we've seen is these media databases, you know, you can get them for as little as $5,000 to $10,000 a year and all of a sudden you have access to quarter of a million. to 600,000 journalist. And you get a golf club company that just, you know, spent 10 grand a license to that. They blast the 2,400 people that are indicated to cover the golf industry.

And all of a sudden, the owner's like, well, you know what? You know who likes to play golf? Bankers and financial people and Wall Street people. So send it to bankers, financial analysts. There's probably like 70,000 more people we can send it to. They will never, ever write an article on golf clubs. but they get all these off-targeted emails and that's happening in every industry

and it's made it so that the way of pitching which used to be done by a lot of PR professionals by email has become really, really hard and difficult requiring a lot of phone calls to say, hey, I pitched you and then you explain how they can try to find your pitch in their inbox because it's so much spam and you're not whitelisted.

And so it's made it very difficult for people to pitch through email or even by phone. A lot of people are having a hard time, you know, getting through. But the great thing about being a duopoly in the U.S. is journalists can just go to two places. And because journalists are expected to write more articles than they ever had before, and they're, you know, making as much as they used to, you know, they're, they like the fact that they could just have to hop on two places and look at their industry feed. And so they'll log in with the journalist access.

They might cover, let's say, fashion. But they can actually customize that feed so that keywords that are mentioned aren't, you know, they won't show those releases in the feed. So maybe they cover high fashion, but they don't cover stuff that's like ready to wear at JCPenney and other places. So they said keywords to be blocked or whatever. So it's the opposite of their inbox. It's like everything of this feed is potentially relevant to them and their beat and what they write about.

And so, you know, that's why I think that, you know, getting a release on the wire is so important. And, you know, there's also having to educate people out there. They're like, well, I went over X, Y, Z wire. If it's not PR Newswire or Business Wire, it didn't reach journalists. There are a lot of wires out there where the goal is to syndicate, so the release appears on a bunch of places. It happens with Business Wire and Peer Newswire 2, but these other places, that's all that happens. It doesn't reach journalists.

Journalists aren't going to these other wires. They know that if they go to Business Wire and Peer Newswire, 98% of the people, you know, the businesses that send out releases are covered there. And so they're not out there hunting for other places. And so that's the real value of it. And, you know, there's other wires that people probably heard of, like AP Associated Press, lawyers and things like that. They don't issue press releases.

They might accept press releases. They often pull them from Business Wire and PR Newswire, but everything that they run is written by them. Those are articles written by them, and they license them to newspapers and other places. And so in the U.S., the wires to watch out for, you know, running press releases for fee are business wire and PR Newswire. So one of the things that you've kind of, I'll say, danced around but not in a bad way, I just mean we haven't specifically addressed it. But I've seen in your content you use this term credibility engineering, like this idea of, of, or, like you've talked a little bit about six to eight telling a story, maybe using surveys.

What are, what are some other ways that we can really dig in if I'm sitting here and let's say I run a, let's say I run a local marketing firm, right? I run a local marketing firm. And I'm not one of the, one of the BS, like I'll make your website for 150 bucks and forget that you exist kind of places. But like, hey, I'm in the community. I have hundreds of clients. I'm helping them.

I'm helping them grow. and you know I feel like I know this but marketing's my thing not PR but I want to start to really separate myself from all these kind of gimmicky AI marketing firms that have come out of nowhere right and I've seen that a lot with some of my friends that have marketing firms etc you know their big thing is not like there's almost more business than ever before but there's also way more noise than there was before and they want to stand out and be the signal okay so they want to they want to do some credibility engineering versus, you know, some of these upstart places, which they would call kind of lowbrow.

How would you recommend they approach maybe brainstorming this six to eight news release campaign that they're going to put together? Like, is it start story? Then should it be one narrative? Is it a series of six to eight different stories that all kind of. to lead to the same thing. Like, how do you start to structure this if you're thinking through putting a real PR campaign together?

Right. So I always say six to eight different press releases. And the goals should not be the same other than you're trying to get recognition for your company or your product or services, you know, one of which could be, you know, talking about, you know, pick a milestone that you're facing, you know, maybe you've been in business for 20 years. It's pretty soft news, but one of the things that you could do is really, you know, mine your origin story. You know, what was it that made you want to go in business? What was it that made you create that product or that service? And, you know, generally, you know, it may be

talking to other people that were there early on and get their perspective on it. You know, these are the things that they lead with on Shark Tank, you know, these origin stories. And I always tell people, think carefully, brainstorm, what were the things that you were going through? And, you know, and sometimes you can just get these out of people. I was talking to a woman once, and she's like, I don't really have anything. I just wanted to create my business and blah, blah.

And it's like, well, what'd your family think of it? And it was all my mother was my biggest cheerleader. She always told me, I hated just being a housewife and not having any value. And I was like, oh, what a gut punch, you know. And she goes, she goes, I loved my mother. I loved that she was always there and available for me. And I was like, well, maybe there's a conversation that you can have, not with your mother per se, but maybe you should. But a conversation about I grew up with a mother who always felt that she was less than.

And she empowered me to be able to go out there and build something on my own. And now that I have a successful business, I look back as not just, I did this for myself. I did this for my mom who always felt disenfranchised because she never went out there. That makes you care a little bit. You know, and it sort of shows one of the things about expectations put on women and some women feeling like its career or being a mother or stay at home and how over the last 40, 50 years, that's changed considerably. But there's still a bit of, you know, I'm ashamed with people who choose to stay at home as opposed to, you know, go out and either work for themselves or build a business and what that

looks like. You know, so do a big inventory, you know, brainstorm around, talk about it. Yeah, I'm not saying lie. But during the early, well, late 1990s, early 2000s, you know, every eBay article talked about how the founder created it to solve the problem of, I think, his girlfriend who was wanting to sell her Pez collection. Turns out it was completely made up story by a PR firm who just said, eh, online auctions and development and having all these features, it's hard for people to grasp that. So we're just going to say, you need to. a marketplace to sell pest dispensers. It just breaks it down like, oh, that makes sense. She had a collection. She wanted to get maximized sales, so she sold them individually and this was allowed

them to do it. It was something that every article, red herring, wired, all of them ran with that story because it was something that took a complicated idea and made it very understandable. And also kind of cute and a geeksy way where you're like, oh, this is how an engineer boyfriend solves a problem of like rather than go to the yard sell let's create an online marketplace to sell your pez dispensers but you know i think that when you look back at your origin story your why these are great things to mine and start build that you know and and craft that story maybe use story brand telling to sort of own it and get an elevator pitch where you can say in one or two sentences this is why i created this company

And make it uniquely yours. And, you know, also mind stories that happen throughout your company. I walked away from the day-to-day operations of my company in 2015, and I realized I lost a lot of stories because we work with a lot of different characters. So I encourage my staff to share the strange stories, the empowering stories, the beautiful stories. and, you know, give them gift cards. And it allows me to take that and make that part of our story and make sure that when I'm telling conversations

and sharing things with people, I talk about, you know, the guy who tried to do a press release with quotes from celebrities that weren't celebrities. He had found a Tom Cruise in Ohio and paid him $100 to be quoted as Tom Cruise said this. You know, that guy thought he had solved, you know, using celebrity likenesses as quotes by actual getting people. And that's kind of fun.

And, you know, all these other different customers that we've had over the years who've done really interesting things and, you know, preserving that. And so make sure that you're doing that and you're sharing that. Because these are the human interest elements that I think that people latch on when you do PR and press releases. Did that work? Did that, we'll call it celebrity jacking? Did that work? No, it didn't.

We had to break it to them that that would not work because there's the assumption of, you didn't mention Tom Cruise of whatever, Ohio, you want people to assume it's a celebrity. And so that did not fly. But, you know, we've had lots of interesting clients over the years. We had one who had come up with the idea of basically, I think, dumping things. basically what would be like soap into a hurricane and it would lose its ability to grow. Believe it or not, he got tapped that hurricane season by the military to test it and they dumped his soap product over three or four hurricanes and it did not seem to work. But, you know, by doing a press release, he got asked to be on Good Morning America.

He got asked to be on a lot of places. and the military saw it and said, let's test it. And it turns out it didn't work. But man, what an interesting story. We did press releases for a company called Alerca, which was a genetically engineered cat to be allergen-free. And they, at one time, I was at Midway Airport, and I looked at the newsstand, and they were on the cover of Discover magazine. They were on the cover of Time magazine. it would be another week or two before they were on the cover of Newsweek.

But they were on the cover at that time, eight or nine magazines. And they did phenomenal media pickup. Turns out the company failed. It turns out that the allergen that they had blocked, you know, they say nature finds a way. It turns out people are generally allergic to several different factors. and they had only solved one. And some people had favorable results, but the majority of people,

they still had some allergic reactions. And so it didn't really work or anything from a standpoint of solving the problem. But, you know, it just showed, you know, what a huge response they could get. Now, much of their coverage wasn't great. I think the Newsweek and Discover were mostly like, should we be playing God and had a picture of a cat on the cover

and stuff like that. But, you know, they sold millions of dollars of deposits for people wanting these cats. So, you know, that showed the real success of what PR can do as far as, like, driving sales. We have a case study on our website where the Dining Bond Initiative was set up sort of a grassroots effort to help restaurants that were closed early in the pandemic. And basically, if you called and nominated your favorite local restaurant and you wanted to. to give them money, they would, you know, if the volunteers got a hold of the restaurant, you could give money that went directly to them to help keep the lights on, maybe help keep some the staff employed. It was a very uncertain time. We were sent home for two weeks to flatten

the curve and we saw how that ended. But it raised over $10 million, got picked up in over 100 places, you know, all the big places, Wall Street Journal and stuff like that. But even more importantly, it got picked up, I think over 100 daily newspapers picked it up. And I think the reason it did so well, it was positive news and, you know, it was actionable at a time where we were very passive and felt powerless. And so, you know, when there's moments like that, journalists are liking, like to plug it in with empowering things. Like, hey, we're sent home, we're powerless. What could we talk about that would be like empowering? And so this was sort of solved that vacuum and probably why it did so well.

A lot of particularly small business owners that I run into and I create a lot of content. It's a big part of what I do and what I help people do. I'll get this like, you know, I'm not a storyteller. You know, that sounds great, but I don't know how to create that. I don't have the money to pay a PR firm to create that for me. And chat, GPT or AI, to me, it feels like, you know, it can help you become a storyteller, you know. And what I've done for some of my clients is basically create a set of prompts that I'll maybe use a certain storytelling framework where they talk to text the story into the prompt, right? So they can be like, you know, my mom, you know, was always the most, you know, my biggest fan.

And even when I was crying after year two, when I was back to zero clients, you know, she was right there for me and blah, blah, blah. And then enter and it can, you know, okay, here we're going to do this and here's the pivot and here's the open loop. and then we build tension in them, and it can start to do that for you, right? So it's almost like the excuses to be able to craft these has gone away. However, and this is where I'm interested in your opinion, is done improperly or without the right thought. AI can genericize and like preamble and, you know, m-dash your content into being as forgettable as possible. So, you know, obviously AI is on everyone's mind. It's a topic that everyone talks about constantly.

And I use it a lot. I'm an advocate in its proper usage, we can say, I think. Where are you seeing the impact? You know, is it increasing the velocity? Is it increasing the slop? Like, how do you leverage some of these tools to get the power out of them without sounding like everyone else or, you know, coming up with a very, like, kind of dull, genericized AI?

sounding content. So I always tell people you don't need to hire and spend a lot of money. You know, PR press releases is something that you should be able to do if you don't feel writing is your strong suit. Lean on AI. The one thing I tell people never to do is go to AI and say write a press release on this company. AI has been trained on the bulk of the press releases that are out there, most of which

probably did not generate earned media. And so it will end up with a press release that feels like a solid press release, but it's probably not going to generate earned media for you. So I always say, come to AI with the strategy, knowing exactly what you want to be covered, and then you can use it to write the press release. Now, don't ask it to write a 600-word press release on this subject. I always go to it and say,

here's my company, here's what I want you to write a press release about, write a press release about, don't write the press release. Give me a outline of how you would structure such a press release. 90% of the time it still writes the press release. I just disregard it and say, okay, how about an outline? And then I disregard what it wrote. And then I go like, okay, let's start with the headline. Give me 10 headline options for this. And then if I'm happy with them, I'll say, hey, I picked this headline. Now give me three opening paragraphs using this headline. And I go paragraph by paragraph through it. It takes 10 minutes as opposed to like 30 seconds.

But at the end of it, I think you're going to end up, if you were to look at what you end up with and that initial press release that spit out at the beginning, it's going to be by far so much stronger. I usually lean on the quote and say, hey, in that paragraph, that quote is weak. I want a quote, very strong active verbs, says something with a lot of conviction. is there something contrarian on this subject, I could say? You know, ask me some questions to figure out if there's a contrarian viewpoint I'm comfortable with. And, you know, play with a little bit. A quote is going to be probably the biggest hidden thing that people don't realize can save a press release. When a journalist is looking at two soft news press releases and they're like, I could go with either one of them to write an article.

two things will greatly improve your chances of getting picked up. The quote's the most important. The second one being, did you upload a couple of images or photos that would do well online? Because a lot of the content is getting posted online, and they know that a good image is going to create more engagement with people. And the best photos are ones that are more candid. The professional shots and the well-lit stuff and the realtor photographs, that people have that are perfect, you do not need that.

What you take on your iPhone or Android is more than sufficient. And, you know, candid shots of the product or service being used or people using it, a real messy desk, those work well. People engage with that better. Now, back to the quote, if a journalist is looking at this and says, hey, I could write a really good article on either of these two soft press releases. But they also know at the end of it, this amazing quote is going to be in there. And over here, this really soft quote is going to be in there.

They know that the article is going to stand out probably better by a factor of two or three by having an amazing quote. So that is a great way to make sure that they pick you because you have an amazing quote. And like I said, active verbs. Basically, you said that one sentence, and I will allow a second sentence if you must, to really just nail in that you've said something. that if the journalist was to paraphrase it, people who had read the quote previously had said, ooh, he said it so much better in that sentence. Go back to that sentence. That had more conviction, had more strength. It was tighter. You know, just a really polished quote. So many quotes

come across as soft, weak verbs. They look like they've been written by committee. They don't say anything conviction. I mean, one of the reasons to put a quote on something is you said something controversial or something that people may not agree with. You know, that's why they always, if you have something contrarian, you put it up in a quote. But, you know, the other reasons that people quote is because you said something eloquently or very succinctly or powerfully. It just smacks.

So make sure that your quote does that and it doesn't look like something that was written by committee. Yeah, I couldn't agree more than the number. I mean, I've put out the number of like, having been a chief marketing officer for a bunch of corporations in my career, um, the number of like, like just I want to like this makes me want to like just crawl under my desk and die quotes

that like get approved by corporate lawyers and stuff where it's just like the CEO says that this company will probably be good because of this new product line that they think will probably do well with their concern. You're like, oh my, this is, it says nothing. Like literally, these are just words. Like these words in this. No one gets fired for super safe quotes, just like they used to say no one gets fired for picking AT&T is the long distance things. Yes.

No one sticks their head out to suggest anything else. But the thing about it is no one's going to be fired, but no one's also going to get a lot of pats on their backs for saying, wow, that was a great press release, guys, a lot of coverage, you know. Well, what happens is the attorneys don't get fired, nor does the CEO. But then when it doesn't get picked up, the chief marketing officer gets. called in to go, how come the five press releases we did didn't get picked up? And you're like, because they said nothing. Yeah. Like, people could have Googled us and known we exist.

And that's all these press releases basically were saying. So I want to do something very selfish for a second and ask you a question about, say, like this podcast. Okay, let's say I wanted to put a PR campaign around a media entity like this podcast. and I work with a lot of podcasters. I have a project coming up. They're going to be launching with a very good friend of mine. More news on that coming guys around helping creators turn their podcasts into a business, right?

So let's say I wanted to start promoting this show through PR. How would we go about that? Would it be highlighting certain guests? Would it be acknowledging maybe we hit a certain ranking? Like, what are some of the things? out of, say, a media property or a media business like this that you think could be newsworthy and how would you start to position them to develop a campaign? So one of the things is you had mentioned about, you know, showing creators how to turn

podcasts into businesses. Yes. You know, help mentor a couple of people and show, hey, this is what we did for them. and now we're offering as a product or service. You know, so having that, you know, start building that out, the beta testing of that and then having that you can turn to and then having quotes by them of saying, you know, this has been our experience, it's been phenomenal. And, you know, we, you know, I thought this and it was this.

You know, those type of things do very well. It's like, because it sort of overcomes one of the objections of people is that just seems too messy. That seems like too, you know, I thought it would take 10 hours a week, but it really turns out I show up, you know, they handle the production or whatever it is or they've helped me hire people. And it's really just a small commitment and it's opened up so many avenues for me. I'm making deals. I'm making connections and networking with my ideal customer. and you know you can sort of talk about that you can build around milestones i've had one person who did really well where they were a new podcast and they didn't so much write a press release from the

standpoint of their podcasts but more from the standpoint of them talking about a top 10 list of podcast in their vertical and they put themselves as like number seven and they surrounded themselves with really great podcasts in that specific industry and it just looked like you know a busy place USA Today does this a lot they'll see something like this and go oh top 10 history podcast copy and paste and put it you know as content on in their newspaper and so you know that's one of the ways in which you achieve legitimacy by appearing around so many others that it legitimizes you even though you're sort of new. I call that sort of like a feature article approach to a press release. But, you know, other things that you can do is you can certainly showcase if you have

somebody amazing on there. But I also think like, you know, do something a little bit special. like, hey, one of the things I've always asked people or, you know, people that I've asked recently in my podcast is a secret question in the green room before we go on the air. And now I'm releasing this, you know, resource page or a download of, you know, what's the top three tools that you use in your business that you feel makes the biggest difference to your company or something? something like that and just something like that that's like oh that sounds really cool and it's not something that everybody who listens to the podcast is going to get so it's a little bit of an extra and it's something that you can focus on yeah i i i like that you know there's um the guys at my first million uh do that where they have essentially they have someone on their team do uh like a wrap up one pager where they any tools they listed any resources they talked to if they

had a guest like their guest information and essentially they drive you to get email subscribers and then they push that out and you can see that and I'm like that's a really good strategy and then the way I think about it is and I I'm always trying to look at what other people are doing not always just in the context of say okay that's what podcasts you should do but you know I think business owners as well right content is such an important part about you know creating you know inbound traffic building credibility authority brand value et cetera, like thinking of these little ways that you can take one piece of content like an hour-long interview that you do with someone and chop it up into a few different segments

and then also pairing that down into text content, which could be, hey, you know, founder of e-releases comes on show and announces that contrarian takes are the number one way to get credibility in the press release space, right? Something like that. Obviously, you have to get the person's approval. But now your guests, you know, you can drive them back to your show. your guest is getting, you know, getting some play on a thought that they had. And you're, you know, now you're kind of raising everybody up.

And you could do that same exact thing with your clients. Say if you're an insurance agency or that marketing agency that we talked about, right? You go to one of your big clients and say, hey, what's your biggest contrarian idea around growing your business and then put something together in that space and try these kinds of things where it's like a, like you don't have to announce just that you're doing business together. Like there can be, there really needs to be more for anyone to care unless you're like Microsoft investing a billion dollars into open AI, right? So outside of something like that, you know, the Johnson marketing agency partnering with the Stevenson Insurance Agency, you know, no one cares. But if the Stevenson Insurance Agency says their key is that, you know, they're, you know, they're, they're, they're woman owned and they've cracked this market of female business owners and they've developed a community around that. that's how they've been successful and by partnering with this marketing firm and

it allowed them to reach even more women. Now you have something where you're like, oh, there's like a real, they're there around that story. And it's nothing more than you guys just working together to find an angle to build attention. So it's not like, I feel like sometimes people get caught. And again, I'm throwing these ideas out there. I want you to push back on the legitimacy of them. But it feels to me like sometimes people get caught in.

There has to be like this specific event to have a press release or, or there's nothing there and it doesn't necessarily have to be that no i think that oh sometimes if you can highlight the value of something and show the the value being delivered often you can have the media come and push that to people um you know white papers and survey results and things like that are often uh the types of things that we feel like people don't care about, but yet, you know, in the case of the person who did the automotive press release, they had out of the 10 plus automotive trade publications, six of them linked to the resource page that listed all of the experiences that people had. And, you know,

the New York Times, just like Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and others, they have a no-link policy that if they write an article about you, they're not going to put a link in there. That being said, I've had the New York Times online link to a resource page where it showed all the questions and answers and resources of a survey. It was just the value of it was so tremendous that they made an exception to their rule to actually link to you. And so, you know, there's a thing about delivering a lot of value, putting it together, making it easy for people to digest, feel like you're giving value where the media feels like, hey, we're willing to put a spotlight on that and to push people there. And, you know, how can you accomplish that?

And so you may not know this, and not that I would expect you to, but I have been a client of e-releases in the past. I find it to be a very clean, easy, understandable service. And I think it's incredible. And certainly it allows, as you said, smaller or organizations that are just getting into using press release is an avenue, both from an ease of business as well as a price point to do that. You know, just I would love for you to give people the pitch because not so much just the sales, if you're uncomfortable with it or whatever, but like I do think that this is something that so many businesses could leverage as another tool in their tool belt to

drive business in, to build credibility. That credibility engineering is that you've talked about, like, what is it about e-releases that you should be thinking where a light goes on and says, okay, this is the company that I want to go work with because this is going to be the avenue that's going to allow me to be successful. Right. I think that, you know, for the big thing is it's the price point. You know, we're about a quarter of what it would cost to go out through PR Newswire. So it's a huge cost savings. We are doing 10,000 plus press releases a year on behalf of small businesses and entrepreneurs. So we have a lot of leverage there with the Newswire, basically allowing

them to profit from clients they normally would consider too small to find value in. And that being said, even though you have access to the newswire, you got to make sure that you're coming to it with strategy and taking advantage of it. I see a lot of PR firms issuing the same types of releases that I think AI would write if you asked to just pick a topic. And so I feel like, you know, really focus on strategy. I have a free masterclass that I put together for my customers. It's open to anyone who wants to take it less than an hour-long video with accompanying materials. But I guarantee that anybody that goes through that is going to come out the other side with probably at least six to ten ideas that they could do that are strategic

for their company. And it isn't so much something that you have to be doing state-of-the-art things. This is the type of thing that if you are a carpet company in New Jersey, this applies to you. This is a way to stand out. And that can be found at e-releases.com slash plan, pl-A-N. And I mentioned a carpet company in New Jersey because we had one of those as a client who was doing a press release a month and wanted to work with me directly. And I felt terrible taking their money and nothing happening. And we did a brainstorm of trying to figure out, you know, what's an angle we could do?

Because they're not doing anything, you know, they're kind of in a commodity business. installing carpet. And when I asked them, you know, who their biggest enemy was, it came up that their biggest enemy was the big box home improvement stores. And they shared with me why they're so bad in the carpet industry. And what people end up with is not ideal or a good product or service. And so we did that. They got picked up by, I think, over a dozen floor trade publications immediately. We continued to work different angles of that throughout the next few months. And at the end of the year, they had over 30 articles so they got published. They got in their local newspaper. They also got in New Jersey Magazine, which is a good high-end consumer

magazine that was really ideal for them. But even more importantly, they put all the clippings together. They printed them out, and they put them in what they called a brag book. And every time they went to write a quote, they'd say, we may not come in the cheapest, but we're recognized throughout the industry and, you know, leading conversations around the carpet industry and making sure that we're, you know, doing things right. And as a result of adding that to the conversation and to the quote, they started closing 17% more of these consultations just by having that. And I said, oh, they must be spending like half an hour looking through a clip.

And he said, no. Often we just open it and scroll through it. And they might look, you know, close at a couple of headlines. But they just see floor trade weekly. They see, you know, the New Jersey magazine. They see the local newspaper. And they just feel like, hey, these people might be three or four hundred dollars more, but I feel comfortable with them. They're not going to do something that's going to require the carpet being restretched again every couple of years or have seams that just don't go. away, even though they say, oh, I don't wear over time and things like that. So it's very valuable. Credibility is a great way to increase your conversions, as well as bring new customers, as well as keep more of your existing customers. You know, churn is a predictable number for a lot of people. They lose a certain amount. And often it's just someone feeling like I've stepped into the shoes. Now I've got to, you know, switch it up the vendors that we have or make sure we're using the right ones or it's been two years maybe we should shop around and if they see you you know by you sharing these links with them on social media and your newsletters they're going to say oh these people are

killing it they're getting industry recognition there's no need to consider you know working with someone else let's just continue to work with them yeah and when you think about it a couple hundred bucks a month one press release a month with a little bit of strategy time behind it and your 30 article I mean, if someone said to you, hey, for a couple hundred bucks a month and five hours of strategy time, 10 hours of strategy, I'm tops, you could have a 17% increase in your conversion of clients. Would you, I think every single business owner in the world would take that bet, right? It's not like we're talking about $100,000 in hiring some intense, you know, PR firm. Like, it really doesn't have to be that. I will make sure everyone who's listening that the link to your masterclass,

is in the show notes. So whether you're watching on YouTube, listening, wherever you listen, just scroll down. We'll have the link there or obviously you can just go direct. If someone wants to get into your world, are you creating content, LinkedIn,

Instagram? Like, is there any place where people can go and connect with you? All my social media is on our website, e-releases.com. LinkedIn's a great place to reach out to me directly. But feel free to call, email or chat with the office.

I only have editors, no salespeople or anything like that. There's no quotas or anything like that. And we're pretty much straight. shooters, and we help a lot of people who have either never done PR, they've never done PR correctly. And so we're great at holding people's hands and walking them through the process. Well, I appreciate you, man. This has been a master class in and of itself, the amount of highly tactical stuff that we've gone through. And, you know, I could talk to you for another

hour because I would love to talk about your entrepreneur story and all that kind of stuff. So maybe we'll have you come back on in a few months because I'd love to get into, you know, 25 years in this business and all the changes you've seen. I want to be respectful of your time and of the audiences, so we're going to close down today. But I think we've set it up for a really nice second visit to the show. And I just appreciate your time and all the really highly tactical information that you share with us today. Thank you.