Mind Readings: PR is the Secret to Winning With AI

How do we influence AI models? If you care about AI, understanding your business and recommending you, then your biggest investment should be in public relations. What? PR. This is a topic that came up uh recently in discussion with my friend and colleague Michelle Garrett.

Generative AI, particularly language models, are being used by more and more people as substitutes for search engines. They'll go to Chat GPT and ask for recommendations for short lists, for suggestions. And this use case is so well known that entire companies like Perplexity have appeared to serve this need. Same is true for Google's AI answers. Google has said, hey, people are using search in a different way now.

We need to get on board. But to be recommended, an AI model has to know who you are and what you're about. Well, how do they do that? By the data they're trained on. Where does that data come from?

By and large, it comes from the public web. Uh services like the common crawl, which uh is a service that scrapes the web twice a month. Uh, that archive comprises 70 to 90% of what AI models learn from these days, depending on the model. Unlike search engines, though, AI models learn at subword level. They pay attention to pieces of words called tokens.

And critically, they pay absolutely no attention to links. And beyond a certain baseline, they don't even pay attention to quality. They pay attention to volume of text. So it behooves the AI aware company to have relevant text about themselves in as many places as possible on the internet, in blogs and podcast transcripts, and YouTube captions, news articles, in books, and influencer channels, you name it, if if you can be everywhere. Be everywhere you can be, be.

Be like the American Express card, right? It's everywhere you want to be. And who does that better than almost any other profession? Public relations, PR. The discipline excels at getting placements, getting you in places other than the channels you own.

Now, obviously, you should be publishing your own stuff at scale, but you also need to be in lots of other places because things are picked up. So, for example, um, when I do a guest blog post, say on uh social media examiner, the social media marketing world podcast, um, I see in the in my monitoring tool, my media monitoring tool, you know, dozens of people making copies of that and you know, posting summaries of it and things. I see it on LinkedIn. Um, when I uh do a blog post for the content marketing world blog, the content marketing institute, that gets scraped like you wouldn't believe. It gets me everywhere.

So who does that really well? Public relations professionals. They can get you in places other than where you create content, but not every public relations professional is alike. The new strategy, the age of generative AI is to be everywhere, not just top-tier publications. In the old days, in old PR, you'd be like, Oh, I need to get in the Wall Street Journal, I need to get in the New York Times.

My client wants to be on Good Morning America. That's fine. But from an AI, uh, an AI model's perspective, an article in the East Podunk evening circular is just as valuable in terms of raw text as an article in the New York Times. There's no difference. They're both a pile of text, they're both can be used for training data, they're both fine.

And from a PR perspective, it's actually more valuable to get that placement in the East Podunk evening circular than the New York Times, because the New York Times has been aggressively trying to restrict AI companies from using their content. East Podoc Evening News, probably not doing that. So getting the placement in the East Podunk evening news is actually an improvement over the New York Times, right? This is a total realignment of PR strategy. This turns PR strategy on its head to go from uh be in the the the most reputable publications to be everywhere that isn't like spam, right?

So if a if a publication has any level of credibility, and it's not like you know, some hate groups newsletter, anything above above that bar, you want to be in it. So your PR professional or your PR firm needs to recognize that strategy. It is a it is in the early days here of AI, it is a volume play. Get in as many places as you can. So some PR professionals understand this, others do not.

You obviously want to work with the ones who do understand this. And there's a whole cadre of PR folks who think that AI is the enemy. They're like, oh, we don't use AI with no one, no one should be using AI. AI is bad and all this stuff. And some of their viewpoints have validity in that if you're you know, people who are using AI and not using it skillfully create some pretty bad results.

And there's no shortage of PR pitches that I receive in my own inbox, where like, ah, I can tell you about that with chat GPT, you didn't even remove the markdown uh syntax from your pitch. You didn't need you just copy and paste it right out of the tool. The best is when it says this prompt should be like uh you don't really know how to use those tools, but at least those folks are trying. There's a whole, like I said, there's a whole cadre of folks who will not will actively resist AI in any incarnation. You do not want to work with them.

They will not help your business. Um, they will not help you achieve your goals. And and if you're vetting a PR firm or PR professionals to hire, you want to you want to hire people who are avid and eager to use AI and to understand its impact on the profession, not people who are resistant. So be very careful who you hire. People who resist AI are not going to understand how the technology is going to change your business and are not going to help you achieve your goals of working in the new environment.

Whether or not we like it, whether or not we think it's a good idea, we need to adapt to the way people use the technology now. So my advice to companies who want to do well in generative AI models is to realign your PR strategy to focus on volume and pour as much budget as you can spare into it to be in as many places as possible. From guest articles on the local news to relevant post comments on LinkedIn, every piece of text counts. And here's the good part. Here's the good part about this.

Suppose we're wrong. Suppose you know AI companies radically change how they train models. Oh no, your company's mentioned all over the internet and every place your prospects go. Oh no, what will you do? Right.

So you will still win if you are in trade publications and little local journals and stuff like that, even if there's no AI benefit because you're where the people are. And if your current PR agency or firm or team does not understand this, it is time for a new one. And you will want to put this in your RFPs. You'll want to put this in your in your agency search criteria. Must be avid AI enthusiasts.

Not understands AI, but be enthusiasts. And then go check out those people. Um check out the principles of different agencies. See how they're using AI in their LinkedIn posts, their content, their blogs. There is no excuse now for a PR professional to not have a rich and robust blog because you can with skillful prompting generate tons of content with the stuff, right?

So that's my suggestion to you on this particular topic is invest heavily in public relations with the right PR professionals, and you will do well. You will have a a short-term competitive advantage over a whole bunch of people who are not there yet. And just as a uh shameless non-plug, I haven't worked in PR in six years. Um, and trust insights is a consulting firm. We're not a PR firm, so you can't hire us for that.

If you do want to hire us, we don't do that. So we'll help you with the AI, but not PR. That's gonna do it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. I'll talk to you soon.

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