What does 2025 hold for public relations pros? Guest Bill Byrne of Remedy Public Relations discusses trends practitioners should keep an eye on as we head into the new year with host Michelle Garrett, author and PR consultant.
Show summary: In this episode of ‘PR Explored,’ host Michelle Garrett, a public relations consultant and author, discusses current PR trends and strategies with guest Bill Byrne of Remedy PR.
They delve into current trends affecting the public relations industry, including the shrinking number of journalists, the rise of micro-journalists, and the impact of AI-based search on PR strategies.
They discuss the importance of visuals in media outreach, the continued influence of journalists as content creators, and the need for a cohesive approach to internal PR communication.
They also explore how companies can better engage with media by providing high-quality images and the significance of media literacy in the age of AI.
Key insights include the necessity of investing in PR to show up in AI-based search results and the value of integrating sales team insights into PR strategies.
They also emphasize leveraging the C-suite in media efforts and the necessity for continuous investment in PR to stay ahead in an evolving landscape.
00:00 Welcome to PR Explored!
00:22 Introducing Bill Byrne and Current Projects
02:25 Discussing PR Trends for the New Year
02:59 The Shrinking Number of Journalists
08:04 Trust in Media and the Rise of Advertorials
10:13 The Importance of Owned Media
15:17 AI-Based Search and PR
21:59 The Need for a Holistic Approach in PR
22:16 Importance of Internal Communication
24:16 Leveraging Social Media for PR
27:31 The Role of Visuals in PR
31:55 Engaging the C-Suite in PR Efforts
35:38 The Impact of AI on PR
39:20 Concluding Thoughts and Future Trends
Show notes:
Follow Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbyrne/
Remedy PR’s site: https://remedypr.com/
Full transcript: 2025 PR Trends with guest Bill Byrne
Michelle: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to PR Explored! So happy to be with you today. This is a PR video podcast where we delve into topics and trends related to public relations. I’m your host, Michelle Garrett. I’m a public relations consultant, an author and writer. And today my guest is my colleague and my good friend, Bill Byrne of Remedy PR.
Hi, Bill.
Bill: Hey, Michelle. Hello, everybody.
Michelle: Welcome. So glad to have you back again to talk about trends.
Bill: Super excited. This is going to be really fun. And I’ve got two cups of coffee. So everyone watching buckle in.
Michelle: What, before we get started, while everyone kind of joins us and gets settled, why don’t you tell us about what you’ve been up to?
What’s your latest and greatest?
Bill: Oh my gosh. So like many of the do a lot in the consumer and tech space, we’ve wrapped up. Holiday PR, which is always a [00:01:00] grind, always competitive. You’re always gonna say, oh, it can’t be as bad as last year. No, it’s always harder. And that’s how PR is. The CES show, Consumer Electronics Show, for those not in the space, is around the corner in January, so that adds to the mix.
I love that show is right after the holidays, because who wants to take vacation between Christmas and New Years? Not me. Active Outdoor is still a big focus on what we do. And we have a very interesting project going on with coral reef preservation. So that’s something I’m really looking forward to diving into.
doing the back end work now and we’re going to kick that project off in Q1 and it’s in collaboration with SDSU. So really exciting stuff there. Yay. You sounds like you’re busy. There’s no rest in PR, right?
Michelle: I’m looking forward to taking a little rest here. I don’t know. I remember the CES days.
I used to work at Silicon Graphics like years ago, and that was a [00:02:00] big event for them. And we, everybody hated it because we knew we were going to have Work between Christmas and New Year’s and oh man, I don’t miss that. It’s
Bill: pretty much as chaotic as you remember and when it’s done you just, okay, I can decompress.
Michelle: I am thrilled that you took a little bit of time before the holidays to wrap up. This is our, my last episode of the year. We’re going to talk all about PR trends and help people get their, mindset for the new year and get their arms around what they might be wanting to keep an eye on.
And I would love if anybody is, has a question or comment, they can certainly chat with us and we would be happy to answer questions and hear what you have to say too. So please feel free to weigh in. And I think we’ll just get started with our first We came up with a list of things that we wanted to cover.
[00:03:00] So the, one of the things that’s been a theme, not only this year, but and going into next year is just the shrinking number of journalists, right? Entire media outlets are closing up. Journalists are being laid off just in record numbers. And we, this trend is not really going to go away.
Do you think, it’s not, it’s here to stay.
Bill: Yeah, no, it’s so we, you and I have been doing this for a long time and we’ve both seen it go up and down. So at least for the short term, it’s a trend, but what we’re also seeing is the rise of microjournalists where, 10 years ago we had this rise of influencers and then micro influencers.
So a lot of journalists who are literally the original influencers, the original content creators are turning. Two places such as Substack to publish their own content. A great example locally is a gentleman by the name [00:04:00] of Fred Greer, who has worked for the San Diego business journal. He’s actually back there now, but in between he started his own Substack as he was getting his MBA called the business of San Diego or business San Diego, excuse me.
And that focuses on a lot in the tech community, biotech community here, a lot of entrepreneurship, So he’s basically self publishing now and really influential in San Diego. Now, does he have the reach that he used to? No, but he’s definitely got serious influence and he’s on the radar for a lot of people.
I’m going to see that trend going further and further, whether it’s consumer products, electronics. Outdoors, there’s going to be these microjournalists, for lack of a better word, and we have to target them, we have to reach out to them, and it’s going to take more effort than if it was [00:05:00] just, a handful of publications you wanted to go out to.
You’ve got to do more now.
Michelle: Yeah, and I think you have to think outside the box. It impacts me less in B2B with trade Publications they have very short small staffs anyway, and but they are always looking for content So I see it as less of a thing in trades which are also good for AI search, which we’re gonna talk about in just a few minutes, but But yeah, I think that you just have to think, I’ve even recommended and had some success with clients looking at newsletters, like industry association publications and newsletters, because that’s really where their audience is spending time.
So completely, and
Bill: you don’t know what that tier a journalist from whatever the home run publication that you want to be in is reading a lot of those journalists. Reading the trades to get their information. And that’s something that a lot of brands overlooked. Like I don’t want to be in this [00:06:00] publication that’s read by 30, 000 people.
I want to be in this publication. That’s read by whatever, 5 million people, the gatekeeper to those 5 million people is looking at that trade publication. So you need to be on both and you can’t just want that. Whatever it is, wall street, journal stories, CNN, men’s journal, you’ve got to look at the trades.
and build.
Michelle: Yeah, pick, just pick one, because it’s, there’s always one that people are after, and I’m like, oh my gosh, if I had a nickel for every time, and again you can’t, if no one’s ever heard of you, you’re not, I think your example is Apple. If you’re not Apple, you’re not going to be able to start out in the Wall Street Journal.
I’m sorry, it’s probably not going to happen. I’m not saying you can’t pitch them stories, but you don’t want to put all your eggs in that basket and be only focused on top tier Of course, because everybody
Bill: wants to be in that tier a [00:07:00] publication, right? Just because you hired a PR firm. doesn’t guarantee that.
It takes momentum. You can’t just show up at the bar and expect every single person there to want to give you their number. It takes a little bit of work.
Michelle: Yeah. I had somebody send me a note the other day, got in touch about potentially working together, and they started out with, I’d like to be in, publications like Forbes and Fast Company.
And I’m like, oh okay who are you? Has anyone ever heard not to be, I don’t want to be rude, but and I didn’t certainly, I didn’t say that to the person, but I’m thinking to myself what do you what do you what are you I don’t know. Everybody wants to be there.
So it’s going to be hard to get there, it’s not going to just be, in fact, with forms you could just pay and buy your way in, but we won’t get off on that tangent.
Bill: That was the last podcast. And unfortunately for whatever reason, my chat, so people know, I can’t leave comments.
It’s not syncing with my YouTube, apologies guys, I see you, but I can’t respond, and that’s fine. [00:08:00] Technology. Sorry. No big deal.
Michelle: So let’s go on to the second trend, which is I think it dovetails into this one because in my view, the trust in journalists and media outlets is shrinking in some sectors, right?
We saw a lot of this year. Publications yeah, being influenced too much, maybe by the, owners or just, I don’t know. They just didn’t seem to really grasp the story. And I think they lost a lot of people. And I think that’s a trend that’s been, again, it’s not new, but it’s going to continue to impact what we do working with our clients.
Bill: Oh, completely. And unfortunately, we’ve seen this happen before where there’s so many times that. media in the past, not until recently. A lot of people have forgotten about that, but they’ve how do I say this? Not been completely truthful with it. [00:09:00] And it is what it is because you want to get the clicks.
You want to get the views on TV. What’s hurting the legitimate media is truly what I would call like the veiled advertorial where, Hey, advertorials are great. You can control the message. You can guarantee it’s going to be in there, but There’s that fine print that tells the reader it’s advertorial.
Often it’s easy to miss. And that’s where some of the smarter consumers will get upset. To the point where when they believe legitimate editorial is advertorial. And that hurts the publication. And that hurts the industry. So being up front about what it is fine. If it’s an ad It’s cool.
Disclose that it’s an ad because an advertorial can provide value. But when you hide it, it’s bad. And often advertorials, I was shown one the other day from a partner. It was written [00:10:00] like a fourth grade book report. I’m like, Oh my gosh, this is not anything anybody wants to read and they’re going to see right through it.
It was not compelling. So I think that’s a big part too of it. Yeah.
Michelle: Yeah. They’ve, it’s been happening. And I think in some ways they’ve, it’s, the publications have hurt themselves with some of their policies and But I think what clients can do and what I’m hoping to coach them into leaning into is publishing their own content.
So that means on their side it means on LinkedIn and it maybe means leaning into the trade pubs. I know I talk a lot about that, but they are more trusted than a lot of more mainstream publications by their audience, which is the, usually what the client, who the client is after as far as reaching customers and being in front of potential customers.
Bill: You just hit on something really compelling right there. So we talked, I’m pointing up like I’m pointing at the last question that everyone wants to be in the Wall Street Journal. And we get those calls as [00:11:00] often as you do. Great. You have nothing on your website, nothing on your LinkedIn that makes you at all appealing.
You make a knife. And what makes you different than all the other knives out there? Okay, you’ve got this different kind of blade. Cool. What else? Do you have any sort of thought leadership? Do you have any sort of digital paper trail beyond ads? Do you have something compelling that you’ve written that’s Not just a fluff piece, but an opinion, especially in your world.
Take a stance on something, publish it and have it there. So that if I’m a journalist and I want to Google you later or whatever your favorite search engine is, I can find it because that matters. It really does. You can’t just come out of left field and. That’s where you take the owned media and leverage it.
You’ve got a website, you’ve got LinkedIn, you’ve got Instagram, use them.
Michelle: Yeah. I just, I, that’s [00:12:00] when I talked to a guy who had started a company and he, I don’t know if you’re ready, but one of the things that you could do to get ready is make sure that you have some content on your site, publish 10 blog posts, or, publish, I don’t know you don’t have a customer story probably to publish yet if you’re just starting out.
But, just put some content up there so that when a journalist does go and look at your social media or does go and look at your website, which is the first thing they’re probably going to do if you get their attention, right? You want to have something compelling up there that makes you look like you have momentum, that you’re doing stuff, that something is happening to make it, appear and probably, hopefully actually be something that, there’s stuff happening.
There’s momentum there.
Bill: You just hit on one of the biggest issues I’m seeing with brands is that I’ll get a call. They’re looking for a team and then they say, Hey, we had this PR firm and they did nothing [00:13:00] for us. And I’m like, okay, let me kick the tires and look at you. And you’ve said to people in the past, I don’t know if you’re ready for PR yet.
And the challenge that all of us face, whether it’s an 11 person agency or a solo practitioner is so many will not say that they’ll take the money. They’ll write a few press releases and show a case study, be like, look, we got these guys on X, Y, and Z trade pub and a billion impressions on good morning America.
But certain brands are not ready for PR. You can’t just show up at a marathon and hope to wing it. And it takes putting on shoes, tying the shoes, probably training a little bit for it, right? Can you run a mile? All of this matters. So a huge thing that we didn’t add to the agenda, but brands need to know sometimes they’re not ready for PR.
And it takes time
Michelle: to [00:14:00] get ready. Yeah. Yep. And I think it’s good to have those conversations and push back a little bit or at least have a back and forth about, what expectations are realistic if you’ve never done an EPR and maybe they have had a bad experience with an agency or a consultant that promised them the moon and didn’t deliver.
And of course that happens. I think, for them, they need to be, More ask more questions of who they’re working with. And then on the other side, we need to be asking more questions of them. What are you bringing to the table? So I think that is a big point. And it’s not really necessarily a trend, but I wish it would be a trend that we would have more transparency, more open conversations and not just take the money and run.
Bill: Like you said, transparency, a huge part of it. For anyone listening that’s considering hiring a PR firm, if they make you promises on delivering editorial, run. No [00:15:00] legitimate PR firm can do that. We can buy advertorial, and we can target people, but there’s no guarantees with what we do in terms of how quickly coverage can come around.
Michelle: You have to hang in there a little bit. So let’s talk about our next trend, which we can talk about AI all day because I know that’s what everybody wants to talk about. Or maybe people are sick of talking, hearing about, I don’t know, I might have a
Bill: PR problem. But
Michelle: the point that I’m honing in on, and you may have additional thoughts about AI and PR, but the one that I’m grabbing onto is AI based search.
And I’ve had a couple of people that I respect in the industry kind of convince me that, If companies are serious about showing up in AI based search, and we’re talking about like perplexity and other similar platforms, they need to be investing in PR so that they [00:16:00] show up online in earned media, in content, that whenever you have an opportunity to be on a podcast or contribute to an article or whatever it might be, you take that opportunity and you know that it could impact AI based search.
So when people are searching it, it also impacts Google search. Honestly, it works on both fronts. But I think that we need to make sure that companies understand that they need to be paying attention, investing in earned media in PR, positioning themselves for this whole era to come of AI based search.
Bill: You, this is such a loaded topic. AI, and you hit on so much of it right now. AI is, at its worst, garbage in, garbage out. It’s only as smart as what it’s being fed. And that’s why you can search the stories all you want for everyone watching. That’s why AI [00:17:00] hallucinates and sometimes makes up fake sources and comes up with content that is not at all factual.
But there’s all these deals being strike stricken. Let me dial it back. I didn’t tell that back. The major players in AI are striking deals with publishing companies so that AI can pull information from Condé Nast, from dot dash Meredith, from places like the New York times. And why does that matter?
It adds value to AI. It gives AI a resource to learn from, to pull data and facts from. And for those in marketing, who deals with the journalists that’s writing those contents, the PR people, it’s us. So we, and this always sounds. a little off when I say it, but I’ll say it anyway. PR people influence the journalists and the journalists are going to influence AI.[00:18:00]
So if you want to be featured, when someone is searching for you using AI, you start with the PR people.
Michelle: And to your point, journalists are influential also with their audiences. And to me, when I started, when influencer marketing became a thing, I was like, when I worked in an agency way back before I went out on my own, We had what we called an influencer like top 20 and it was journalists, industry analysts, other people in the industry.
So influencer marketing is not new. Journalists are very influential. Industry analysts, very influential. Of course that’s another thing that PR pros really understand. And I feel like that’s another area that we can really help clients get their arms around.
Bill: Completely. Journalists are the original content creators, and one of the biggest misses in the PR space is we didn’t own that earlier, and we let ad and marketing agencies come out with [00:19:00] specialties in that zone, whereas, no, we should own the content creators, whether they’re on the local news, at a top tier newspaper, or on Instagram.
That should be us, and if it comes into Hey, there’s advertorial involved. That should also be us. Because when advertorial is written by someone who doesn’t have a background in compelling content it becomes this, no one wants to read it. I’ll just say that.
Michelle: Yeah, no, I’ve seen a lot of back and forth about Influencers and influencer marketing.
And I’ve never understood how paying someone to say nice things about your product or solution is really how that is convincing anyone to buy what you are selling. Cause to me, you would look for people that were already raving about it and then bring them on, maybe you do end up paying them or giving them some product or something, but to me, that’s a much more influencer marketing.
And again, that, that wasn’t something we were necessarily going to [00:20:00] talk about, but it just. No, sure. And back to the AI based search. So I talked to Andy Cresedina a couple of weeks ago on PR explored and he was, we were talking about LinkedIn because LinkedIn has an option where you can turn off.
You can not, you can choose to opt out of allowing it to use what you post to train its AI engine, basically. And I’m, I may not be saying that exactly right, but I think that makes sense. And there was a whole bunch of, a bunch of stories about it in the news. People were turning off the option.
And he said, that is like the last thing that you really want to do, because if you want to show up in search, if you want your company, your business, your brand, whether it’s a personal brand or you are HP or Apple or Adobe or whoever you need, you want to be showing up in search. So you need to turn that setting back on.
If you care about that. Now, I know some people are going to be completely purists about it and not, I’ll want a I to look at anything they’re posting, but [00:21:00] it’s really it’s similar to Google. If you turned off, there are settings you can set on your website so it will crawl your site.
But why would you do that? I don’t know. So I thought that was a really good point.
Bill: It’s a super smart point. And I understand why people wouldn’t want it. But If you want to be in the game, you’ve got to play the game. And that’s where we’re at now with AI and social media.
Michelle: Yeah, it’s not going away.
And you have to make a decision. If you’re gonna participate or not, I don’t think that people saying I don’t want to use my stuff is going to keep it from happening. And it’s not going to change the fact that many other people are going to opt into that. So unfortunately, if you’re not, on board with that, it can probably impact you in a negative way.
So Just saying.
Bill: Super smart point. Let’s talk about silos.
Michelle: Yes, that’s always, again, it is a trend and I wish it would go away. I wish it would [00:22:00] be done. But, I don’t see it going away.
Bill: No, but we need the lack of a better word. We need a holistic approach to it. I think, and that requires communication literally between all the gatekeepers.
I don’t know about you, but I have found sometimes. On the client side, we’re missing out on certain conversations because we’re talking to one person and not someone else that really could add value or spark an idea on our end. And similarly, And this is one of the reasons why, with consumer PR, why we love to have a handle, or a hand, in the affiliate space, because sometimes what an e com person wants to have happen isn’t what the PR team wants to have happen.
And they don’t always Even though their desks are, 50 feet away from each other, they’re not always talking as much as we’d like. So it’s great if we can be in that conversation.
Michelle: And it just, there’s no cohesion to your [00:23:00] message. If you’re all, I don’t want to just use, cliches, but if you’re singing from different songbooks, you’re going to be delivering mixed messages.
And I think the last thing anybody needs, everybody is. Short on time. Their attention span is short. We need to be delivering a cohesive message across every department of the company that communicates with the public with any of your audiences internally. Also, sometimes your internal audience is also something to consider.
So I just feel like I don’t know. I know sometimes It can be territorial or it’s just not part of their process, but it’s not that hard to add in a meeting where you sit down with the other departments that you need to be collaborating with and get on the same page about what’s coming up, keep up Keep a spreadsheet or use a tool or whatever it takes.
There are ways to leverage and I get really frustrated when, a client brings me in to do PR and I’m, working with them. And usually it’s [00:24:00] smaller companies, 500 employees or less. So they’re not huge, giant enterprise sized companies most of the time. But they do, sometimes they’ll have a team during their social or a person doing their content or and they are not even.
Thinking that we ought to be talking to each other. And I just feel like when you get an intermediate hit, if you’re not in sync with social. You, they need to be sharing that. And if you don’t have control over that for the client, it’s not, what are you going to do? Like, how do you get it in the pipeline and make sure that it’s shared and you tag the journalist, you tag the public just PR one on one for us.
But for social media, they may not think of it. It may just not come up in their planning process.
Bill: We’re, I don’t want to diverge too much cause we’ve done that already, but you just nailed something that so many brands don’t do across the board is. Share their earned media hits on social media, in newsletters, wherever.
A lot of the D to C brands, when they got big, they would always [00:25:00] post at the, right on their homepage. We were featured in Esquire, or Elle, or Good Morning America, or, whatever trade publication. So many brands we’ve worked with, so many brands that I know have other PR teams, don’t share that.
Maybe it doesn’t fit their personal brand of social media. But it adds so much value because that’s what PR is. When someone’s looking for advice, they don’t look to an ad, they look to friends and family, look to trusted experts. And after that they start searching. Okay. You ask your parents about something or you’re a good friend of yours.
They don’t have an opinion or you ask your doctor, okay. And then you start searching, but you don’t search for ads. You search for a news source that you believe in that’s going to recommend to you the best three whatever and brands that don’t share Miss out on amplifying their content.
Michelle: Yeah, I know [00:26:00] a lot of times, in PR, we work so hard to get the story out there, get it published, get it across the finish line, and then it’s oh, yay, the story’s out, and then just nothing happens, and it’s You could, first of all, put it on your website, put it in your newsletter, share it on social.
There’s so many other things you can do with it. You could pull quotes and use those in your marketing or, and another thing that I know that you mentioned was sales, how we bring in sales to what we do in PR. Cause I know from my perspective, having a strong connection with the sales team helps me maybe find a customer that we can feature in some of our.
PR or, we can know which customers may be not so happy right now. Maybe they were happy. Maybe they’re not right now, that kind of thing. So having that close relationship there is another way that we need to be
Bill: collaborating. Sales teams have so much insight. And I understand that there might not always be alignment, but at the least hearing what they say to their customers helps and hearing about the challenges they see there, because [00:27:00] then we can borrow from that.
We’ve gotten so many good ideas from just watching sales teams in action at trade shows and be like, Oh, I wouldn’t have thought to mention that. That wasn’t any of the marketing materials we were given. That was not any of the briefs, but that is an amazing point. That we’re now going to leverage with journalists.
Michelle: Yeah. Yep. That is another thing to remember and I’m typing it in the chat so that people will know.
Bill: No problem. So this lives in your world a little bit more than mine, but I think visuals are a trend that, especially with shrinking newsrooms and shrinking budgets, that brands are going to need to.
really invest in, whether for editorial to be repurposed or just tell the story through PR.
Michelle: Yeah, media outlets need visuals. And if you can supply high [00:28:00] resolution, high quality visuals not stock images, we’re not talking about just pulling an image down from Unsplash or something. We’re talking about actually having a photographer, videographer, if you can.
I know not everyone has it in their budget, but if you can have them come in and you can even have them maybe visit a customer with you. One of my most successful efforts on this front was when a client had a videographer go to the customer and they did a whole like day, a shoot in there. And then they came out with a great video that we were able to repurpose as earned media.
We pulled the transcript and turn it into I wrote a customer story, and then we pitched that with images and the video and publications just immediately were like, yes, and publish it wasn’t even packaging it all up and sending it over that. It wasn’t. I’m not gonna say it was easy, but it was a great win, and it seemed like a win.
Yeah. Common sense to me in a way.
Bill: Oh, completely. Remember the days in your consumer tech days, you probably did a lot of [00:29:00] B roll shoots, too, to give to media because they often couldn’t come out. Brands that are going to invest in visuals, and this is what kills me often with content where we’re not talking to everybody inside, Oh, you’re doing a photo shoot?
Cool. These are the things we want. They’re like, no, we know better. No, we need it shot for editorial. And the same thing happens with your visuals. It can’t be completely logo driven. It’s got to look close enough that the media are publishing it and it doesn’t look like an ad. So not everything can have a logo on it.
Not everything can have a name drop. Provide the journalists with the tools they can use to tell you a story like getting back to we’re working on the coral reef project. Great. Let’s just assume most media outlets don’t have the budget to fly out and do underwater shoots of these reefs. So we need to give them schematics.
We need to give them video. We need to give them images, compelling images. Like you said, [00:30:00] not just from unsplash. We’re like, Hey, here’s some fish and coral looks great. No, we need to do better. And that was one of the first questions we asked when we were talking to them. Do we have things to show?
Because otherwise, we’ve just got a lot of great data and research that is not going to make for very strong mainstream appeal.
Michelle: It’s so important, and I’ve had journalists even tell me that, out of all the pitches that are in their inbox, if you’re sharing high quality, high resolution visuals with your pitches that can help you stand out above all of the other You know, folks competing for their time and attention and space in their publication.
So I think it’s really important. And I’m going to continue to talk about this. And we’re also seeing, there’s also going to be searching based on visuals as, and you can, I think there’s already something out there that’s doing this. So we’re going to see that growing too. Like you circle something in an image and it will search based on that.
So you really want to be showing up. And if you don’t have any visuals to send. How are you going to do that? [00:31:00] The other thing I was going to say is to make sure when you are asked to, say an editor contacts your, you about a client contributing to a story, always send over visuals, even if they didn’t ask and then send a caption so that the branding is in the caption.
So at least it’s going to say courtesy of. ABC company, but you can even write in the caption. This is ABC’s company, blah, blah, blah machine. I do a lot of manufacturing PR. So I would write it something like that. And so then there’s, even if they edit it out of the actual caption, it’s still, the name is still in the
Bill: yes.
And like you said, all at once, you don’t show up for the race and then put your shoes on. You don’t wait for the journalist to ask you say, Hey, here’s all the assets we have. Here’s the background info. And also leading us to our next topic. Do you need to speak with X, Y, and Z versus just a generic quote.
So let’s talk about maybe leveraging this, the C suite and [00:32:00] the VP level people are, at the brand to. Make that story more colorful.
Michelle: Yeah, I think that people want to hear from your C suite. And we, of course, we see examples all the time of CEOs and C, thought leaders putting their foot in their mouth.
Okay, so we’re not talking about going out there unprepared or posting on LinkedIn without your comms folks, your PR team weighing in on it. Maybe ghostwriting for them, which, I often do for my clients. It flows out of other things that we’re doing. So it makes sense.
I saw some firm was charging a thousand dollars or something for to write a LinkedIn post for a client. And I’m like, Oh, wow. Okay. Maybe I need to reconsider my rates. But anyway to me, it’s a natural fit for what we’re doing because hopefully we’re in touch with those folks anyway. And I think people want to hear from them.
It it. Increases trust and adds credibility. And I think that we don’t want to hide them. We want to put them out in the spotlight. And even if they’re reluctant, [00:33:00] we can do media training and things to prepare them to get them ready to go
Bill: completely. If you look at sports teams, it’s a reason why and sports teams are brands.
And it’s the reason why there’s certain people that are out there speaking and the ones that tend to do the most of it. Besides being the best players, they’ve got personality. If you look at it. One of the biggest brands in the world right now. And he’s a very polarizing guy, Elon Musk. And I know people that will not buy a Tesla because they don’t love him.
And there’s a lot of people out there that left Twitter or it’s called X now. For the same reason and that’s fine, but people love having a connection to a brand and the brands that can build that, whether it’s a B2B brand or a consumer brand and have some sort of face to it is it’s massive and for journalists too, we’ve got to [00:34:00] make the C suite available to them.
And that’s a pain in the butt. I understand. No one has the time. But it builds such an affinity for your brand. Yeah, you’re paying us, the PR people, to talk to the journalists, and that’s great. But they want to hear it from the inside. So once we make that connection, they’ve got to do it.
And like you said before, you can’t wing it. There have been so many times we’ve offered media training to a client. They don’t want to do it because they know exactly what they’re going to say. They’ve done this before. It’s amazing. And then a curve ball comes up or a, not even a curve ball, just a question that’s asked in a different way.
See silence. They didn’t see that coming. And as a PR person, there’s nothing we can do. That’s one of the worst feelings [00:35:00] ever.
Michelle: For me, when I have access to the C suite it makes a huge difference in our success in the PR efforts. And I really like to spend a little bit of time, at least every quarter.
With our, with my CEO of my client, and if they’re willing to do that, that they’re invested in what you’re doing, they’re going to support what you’re doing. They see the value in what you’re doing. It just helps overall. It helps you be successful. The client is successful. The audience responds well, it’s a win across the board.
So to me, that is a huge, it should be a trend. Again, some of these things. I don’t know if they’re trans, but I’m hoping fingers crossed that they’re gonna be trans.
Bill: Oh, I see a comment from Beth Watkins about search and AI. Google search is pulling from brand pages, but a lot of these now are pulling from publishers.
That’s where PR is incredibly important, because if you ask ChatGPT for, let’s say, the top five pocket [00:36:00] knives it’s, Pulling some of that information now from True Articles on the best pocket knives out there for this year. And it’s the PR people that influence that. So you’ve got to look at the sources, too.
That’s one of the things I think not everyone realizes on the consumer side And consumer side, meaning just general population. That not everything AI spits out at you is going to be correct, similar to the not everything on the internet is correct, and you’ve got to check the sources.
So we need to have, if we’re going to live. a more educated, more media literate population that can understand the difference between editorial, advertorial, and just looks around. Just because someone on the street hands you a pamphlet that says x, y, and z, Doesn’t mean it’s true, and just because you start a blog post that says the same [00:37:00] thing also doesn’t mean it’s true.
Media literacy is something we need to work on in the States.
Michelle: I agree with you, unfortunately. I feel like, I don’t know if that’s gonna happen! Because people want it passed, they want it now, they have no critical thinking, no thinking through, we just wanna, we’re just gonna pull it up and we’re gonna go and run with whatever it spits out at us.
That’s a huge problem. I don’t know what to say about it. My answer, which you stole to Beth’s question, is that it does show you sources. The search, the result, whether you’re using Google or Perplexity or whatever it is, it shows the sources. And so you want your company, your client showing up in those sources.
That’s what I would say. How That should be addressed. And that means we need more. We need, more content, more contributions, more, we need the clients to have more opportunities to get their name out there and get their content out [00:38:00] there.
Bill: You can look at it like this with advertising, right?
You can have the best ad in the world. But you don’t just put it in one place unless, it’s a billboard above your bagel shop. Then, yeah, we’re going to put the billboard right here. Bagels are sold below. Great. But when brands do an ad buy, they’re buying in multiple places because it takes multiple impressions to convince the customer to.
Move on it to even remember it, right? So with PR, it’s the same thing. You’ve got to be in more than one place usually to move the needle. If you’re not, you’re hoping that one media placement on that top trade publication or in The New York Times will do it. And again, that gets to your point, Michelle, of the social media teams need to share the big PR hits.
OK, we’re in The New York Times tomorrow. Awesome. Not everyone’s going to read it. Not everyone’s going to remember it, so [00:39:00] social needs to share that a day later, or three days later, or share it three times, because as much time as I unfortunately spend on Instagram, I miss a lot of content. So you’ve got to remind me.
Michelle: Is there anything else as we wrap up here that you want to touch on?
Bill: I think with PR, one of the trends that’s been happening for years now. Is it’s just going to take more to do more and that’s standard for any marketing. There was a short time where those that were very savvy on the ad space with performance based ads could spend a dollar and get X amount of impressions, but it was an area where a lot of brands weren’t playing now.
So that’s since changed. If you want to be in front [00:40:00] of your customer, whether it’s B2B or consumer, it’s just going to take more effort and more effort comes with a higher dollar cost investing in your PR program. If you’re spending the same on your ad campaign now as you were five years ago, it’s not working.
If you’re expecting to spend on a PR campaign next year, That’s the same as you had three years ago. You’re going to get, you’re not going to get the same results.
Michelle: I think PR is an afterthought for a lot of companies. I still see that. And I think that again, with the AI based search that we see happening, that trend, I think that is something to rethink.
If you’re not considering factoring PR into your marketing efforts, I think you really need to be Coming back around on that and thinking about it again and not waiting to let everyone else Jump on the train before you get on board,
Bill: Michelle to build on what you just said [00:41:00] PR is an afterthought until somebody in the c suite sees a Feature on their competitors and then they care about it So when it comes to PR, you’ve got to constantly be out there.
Otherwise someone else is going to take your slot.
Michelle: It’s true. Bill knows.
Bill: Stop. Stop.
Michelle: I do want to thank Bill Byrne, co founder of Remedy PR. And do you use any other titles or are there any other links that we should share for you?
Bill: Co founder’s fine. It’s. Managing director, I do everything.
I’m active in media outreach. I’m active in business development. Like yourself, it’s important that we should say when you’re interviewing a PR team, whether it’s someone who’s on their own or a small team like us. Is are the people that you’re meeting with? Are they in touch with what’s happening in the media?
Are they showing you case studies from five years ago? So
Michelle: anyway, [00:42:00] yeah, I do a lot
Bill: here.
Michelle: You do and I really value your opinions and your input and thank you so much for taking time to be with me today. And I am wishing everybody. The happiest of holidays. I hope people have a time to a chance to relax a little bit and maybe Get away from social media and everything online and enjoy Whatever they might enjoy over the holidays And i’m michelle garrett.
I’ll be back with more episodes of pr explored the video pr podcast In 2025 and I hope you’ll tune in and join me then. Thanks so much.
Bill: Take care everybody
