So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this episode of So What? The Trust Insights weekly livestream, you’ll learn optimization for AI strategies to boost your brand’s visibility in the age of AI. You’ll discover how off-site optimization for AI differs from traditional SEO and learn actionable tactics you can implement immediately. You’ll also uncover the importance of press releases for AI and how to leverage other content formats to improve your brand reputation. Plus, discover resources and tools to elevate your AI marketing game.
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In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to change your PR strategy in the age of AI
- One thing you can do today to dramatically amplify your presence in AI training data
- Why offsite optimization for AI is a change in thinking for traditional marcomm and PR
Transcript:
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Katie Robbert – 00:33
Happy Thursday! Welcome to “So What?”, the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m Katie, joined by Chris. John is out today. I don’t think—oh, wait—outside.
Christopher Penn – 00:44
Other side.
Katie Robbert – 00:45
No. Oh, for me, it’s the right side.
Christopher Penn – 00:47
Oh, is it this side? Yeah.
Katie Robbert – 00:50
Oh, so our cameras must be reversed because I’m like, “no, I see it.” This is why I don’t participate in the high five. This week, we are doing part three of our SEO for AI series. Two weeks ago, we did technical SEO for AI. Last week, we did on-site or content creation. You can catch those episodes on our YouTube channel, Trust Insights’ AI YouTube. Go to the “So What?” playlist. Those are there for your viewing pleasure. This week, we are rounding it out with off-site optimization for AI. Traditional SEO for AI—it doesn’t matter. There are three main parts: technical, on-site, off-site. Period. We’re covering the third part today. So Chris, where would you like to start?
Christopher Penn – 01:41
Let’s start by picking up where we left off on this week’s podcast. We talked a lot about sort of turning public relations on its head because off-site optimization for AI is fundamentally public relations tasks. In fact, if you have a PR team, or you have a PR agency, or whatever, they’re going to be one of your best allies for optimizing the awareness of your company and your brand in generative AI tools. They’re going to do this in two different ways. There are two ways. As a reminder to folks, there are two ways you can influence models. One is by influencing the training data itself, which is the amount of information AI companies scrape together to turn into training for the models. The second is through affecting the grounding you have seen.
Christopher Penn – 02:34
There have been big announcements over the last six months of all the different generative AI tools adding web search capabilities. Claude was the most recent one to join the family. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has had web search built in. Google Gemini has Google web search and grounding built in. GROK has it. Pretty much everybody has it. If you can influence both sides so you can get awareness that your brand even exists in the training data and you are well-optimized for traditional SEO on the grounding side, the probability of AI knowing to invoke you and knowing to—to—to—to bring you to the front and look for traditional search data to confirm its findings is how you’ll get AI to recommend you.
Katie Robbert – 03:25
Okay. How do you—and I know we’re going to get into it, and we did a little bit on the podcast (and again, that link is TrustInsights.ai/ti-podcast)—how do you respond to clients who say, “I want to show up number one in generative AI?”
Christopher Penn – 03:46
That’s like saying, “I want to show up number one in every conversation that’s happening around a water cooler.” Like, yeah, you’re not going to do that.
Katie Robbert – 03:53
But to them, it’s the same question of, “How do I show up number one in Google?”
Christopher Penn – 04:00
It’s an education thing to explain to them. When people use tools like ChatGPT, they don’t go and type in, “best AI firm.” We used to do that with traditional Google a decade ago, but nobody does that anymore. Nobody does that in generative AI. We have anthropomorphized these tools so much that we started like, “Hey, ChatGPT, how are you feeling today?” and stuff like that. The answer is like, “Hey, I wanted to know, what do you think about consulting firms that specialize in AI?” or, “Have you ever heard of this company called Trust Insights?” What’s fascinating is that when you look at behind the scenes of what’s happening, sort of the model’s guesswork behind the scenes, one word difference in that even just that first prompt can get you different results.
Christopher Penn – 04:52
Olga Andreenko of Semrush and Tim Solo of Ahrefs demonstrated this beautifully about six months ago on LinkedIn. They each typed in a prompt that was roughly about, “What are the top SEO tools for SEO?” There was a one-word difference and one punctuation mark difference between their two prompts. They showed—now these showed, of course—their company was at the top of the recommendations. That one-word difference—the word “top” and a period—was enough to throw generative AI and provide a different result. Everyone’s like, “what does this mean?” It means you can’t measure brand strength in a tool because semantically, those were basically the same sentence. “Make up a list of the top ten, SEO tools in marketing.” But that tiny difference was enough to skew the result.
Christopher Penn – 05:47
And so you can’t really measure it. It should have been the same. One of them should have been on the top for both questions. But they weren’t because of the way these models work.
Katie Robbert – 05:56
So we shouldn’t be expecting to get our Google Search Console version of AI search data anytime soon to say, “Oh, well, this is what people searched and these are the keywords they used, and this is how they found me, so now I can optimize things?”
Christopher Penn – 06:18
No, you should not expect that because you can’t predict how someone’s going to have a conversation. Katie, if you’re going out in the world and you’re at, Marketing AI Institute’s MACON conference, and you’re having a conversation with somebody, you can’t predict if they’re going to say, “Hey, do you know any people who speak about AI?” or “Do you know someone who can explain this?” You don’t know the conversations you’re going to have. The same thing is true in generative AI. You can’t predict the conversation somebody is going to have. Now, what you can do, and what you can measure, is you can measure the human traffic from AI platforms in a tool like Google Analytics.
Christopher Penn – 06:56
So here, for example, is the Trust Insights one where you can see I’ve got three segments for three of the major tools, and you have to add more as time goes on. We can see when a human being sees a clickable link in one of these tools and clicks on it, we can measure that we got the click and we can measure the page that they landed on. We have no idea what the conversation was about. We don’t know the context, but we do see where they landed from. From a measurement perspective, this is the best way to do this right now. If you’re interested, if you go to TrustInsights.ai, this is on our website in the Instant Insights section, a tutorial on how to set this up. There’s no form to fill out.
Christopher Penn – 07:35
You can just go on the website and grab it. This is the best we can do. This is going to be a tiny fraction of the actual brand awareness because a lot of the times, you’ll go into a tool, you’ll read the answer, and you’ll get on with your day. When AI crawls your website, it does not trigger Google Analytics. There’s no click, and so there’s no visit because it’s all being done by bots that don’t load the JavaScript. If someone just reads about how awesome Katie Robbert is as a speaker and why you should have her speaking about change management with AI, we’ll never know. We’ll have no idea. But people have been influenced by those answers.
Katie Robbert – 08:18
It’s interesting because when we talk about SEO, we think, “Oh, I’ll be able to know what someone searched in ChatGPT and what they found out about me.” But that’s just not true because these aren’t search engines. We’re talking about SEO, and I think that’s part of the education. I don’t want to derail us too much because I feel like we could have even more—a bunch more episodes—about different aspects of SEO, like how to do an SEO audit for AI, or the education process of SEO for AI. Today, we’re focused on off-site optimization. So let me stop derailing and make sure we can get to the point. But there’s a lot of questions about it. SEO is not a new concept.
Katie Robbert – 09:04
SEO for AI is a new concept because it kind of undoes a lot of what we thought we knew about how we approach the three pillars.
Christopher Penn – 09:15
It is still relevant, though. Over in the SEO community on Threads, I saw this morning that Google pushed out a new update for its core search capabilities on March 24. According to several folks who track 10,000 different keywords, the number of AI overviews and the AI previews went from about 5% to 17%. Google just turned the knob up on and they said, as a result, traffic owners of sites who target those terms saw—overnight—a 20 drop in their traffic because they’re getting squeezed out now. So it is still very important because, at the end of the day, if people aren’t getting to your website and that’s where you do business, you’re in some hot water.
Katie Robbert – 10:00
So where do we start for off-site optimization? What are some tactical, immediate things we can be thinking about? We know off-site typically covers those external links; guest blog posts, listicles—all that good stuff that we don’t own, but we want to be a part of. So where do we start for that kind of optimization?
Christopher Penn – 10:24
So where would we start? I think the number one thing a company could do today, and not have any ramp time, is to issue a press release. It sounds so boring. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, we stopped doing press releases for SEO fifteen years ago.” But AI is different than SEO. Google’s algorithm said, “Yeah, we don’t want to count press releases. That’s too easy to game.” AI companies that make models need data and they’re crawling as much as they can, as fast as they can. They’re creating synthetic data as fast as they can. They need stuff and going to local news sites like, WNYW, NY1 in New York and grabbing the whole site’s content and all the news—that is rich food for an AI company.
Christopher Penn – 11:14
They’re very likely to be reasonably good quality language, as opposed to that drunk guy on Reddit whose face is rolling on the keyboard. A press release is at least going to have reasonably literate words in it, even if it’s very promotional.
Katie Robbert – 11:31
So what? Okay, so let’s unpack this a little bit. So am I writing a press release saying that Trust Insights is pleased to announce that we have nothing new right now, but we are trying to game the system to get things in AI? Says CEO, Katie Robbert. Contact Nobody. Like, what? No. In all seriousness, so a company like ours, we don’t do a lot of things that would traditionally fall under, “Oh, we should probably issue a press release for this.” Like, “Katie’s on her third cup of coffee. We are pleased to announce that she is well caffeinated.” What kind of information goes in an AI release versus a press release? Because we’re not doing anything traditionally newsworthy. I mean, we’re doing cool stuff, but who cares?
Christopher Penn – 12:27
Well, that’s a very good question. Let’s do it. Let’s walk through an example because I’m going to do this anyway. This is on my to-do list of things to do for the company anyway. May as well just get it done now while we’re on the show. The first thing we want to do is we need to figure out what to write a press release about. Fortunately, one of the things we have going for us is we have a new course. We have a new course: Generative AI for Marketers. I know, I’m sorry. Generative AI Use Cases for Marketers. Now, what we want to do is we want to convert that information into the contents of a press release. So…
Christopher Penn – 13:12
We also don’t want it to be a billion and a half words long because the course is pretty robust. It’s three and a half hours of stuff. So what I’m going to do is I am going to go to my course, the course itself, and I have all the transcripts from the course. We’re just going to sew these all together and…file prepper, excuse me. Text output is course content. This is all the transcripts now sewn together in one big, honking file. I have some system instructions here for building what is called a sparse priming representation, which is a mouthful of words that basically says—it’s like a compression algorithm—compress this 25,000 words. I had a lot to say about AI use cases in this course.
Christopher Penn – 14:09
Compress this down to the smallest possible volume, in a way that an AI tool could re-inflate it and unpack it. This is not for humans. I think that’s important to say: this is not for humans. So say, “Process this body of text following the system instructions.”
Katie Robbert – 14:32
So it’s not going to be, “Trust Insights is pleased to announce we have a new course.”
Christopher Penn – 14:38
No, it will not look like that at all. In fact, you’ll probably look at it and go, “Should we even send this out?”
Katie Robbert – 14:46
Well, and I think—so as that’s processing—let’s talk about that a little bit because we’re calling it a press release. One of the things that we stumbled upon on the podcast when we were talking about this earlier this week is that the education process for someone who understands what a press release should and shouldn’t look like, what it should cover, is going to have a hard time wrapping their head around this other type of press release. So perhaps first and foremost, let’s not call it a press release. Let’s call it something like an “AI Release”, because that’s the audience. We’re not making big announcements of, “Here’s the cool new thing,” or, “We finally fired Katie and got someone competent in charge.” We’re saying, “Hey AI system, here’s a bunch of information about us.”
Katie Robbert – 15:40
So it’s not—no, it’s not newsworthy—but it’s important. You’re giving it a knowledge block in a structured way.
Christopher Penn – 15:47
Exactly. So this is the result. This is what an AI language model would look at, read, and try to say, “Okay, I can infer now from this what this course is about. I can put these terms together, cluster them, and essentially, when it comes time, re-inflate it and decode it, if you will, back into something that a human being could read.” This contains all the individual tokens, the little chunks of language that provide the associations necessary. So this is all of what’s inside the course, just in a very compact format.
Katie Robbert – 16:29
So the way to think about it might be to compare it to the way that a court stenographer takes shorthand with the machine, or traditionally, like people used to study how to do shorthand to take notes, and it was just a bunch of symbols that represented certain words and phrases. So you would have this page of nonsense, but it really told a whole story.
Christopher Penn – 16:54
Exactly right. Exactly right. So we have this. Now, this is effectively a good chunk of the body of the press release. We’re just going to add in the usual minor embellishments: “Trust Insights announces new Generative AI Use Cases for Markers course contents.” Then at the bottom here, after we get past all of the data, we’re going to toss in our knowledge block of who we are. There’s our boilerplate. We can toss in our usual press contact stuff like this. We’ll put in our disclosure, “Using the Google Gemini 2.5 model.” We’ll have a promotional piece here just to make sure that we have it: “The course opens on April 15, 2025. AI Use Cases for Marketers.” And if…
Katie Robbert – 18:20
…you’re wondering about this course, you can go to Trust Insights’ AI Analytics for Marketers, which is our free Slack group, and get all the information. Right now, it is available for pre-sale, and you can get yourself a nifty discount. One of the questions I have for you, Chris, is—so the step we didn’t do, and I want to make sure that this is clear for anyone watching—is you didn’t just open up Gemini and say, “Write a press release that AI can read.” It’s more in-depth than that. So how does someone get to that without working too far backward? You’re not saying, “Hey Gemini, write a press release.” You’re saying, “Hey Gemini, write a press release for AI.”
Christopher Penn – 19:02
Right. So what we’re doing there, we actually have a whole system prompt called “Building a Sparse Priming Representation.” There’s a technique for this that tells Gemini a list of exactly how to format this. This is something that we typically share with our paying clients because it’s something that’s of use to them. But fundamentally, it instructs Gemini to make a compressed version of the text, figure out what the keywords are that would help a language model understand the text as a whole, and then provide the techniques to re-inflate it when it encounters that text again.
Katie Robbert – 19:49
Gotcha. So it is a whole process of putting together the system instructions. You can reach out to John Wall, who is not with us today, but will be happy to answer all of your questions about how you can get your hands on a similar process for yourselves.
Christopher Penn – 20:04
Exactly. So now we have our really poorly written press release (from a human perspective), wonderfully well-written (for machines). We can go on and buy a press release and we can do that another time. Probably not the best time to do it on the air, but that’s how we would create this thing is we would say, “Let’s take this machine-condensed document, pay a hundred bucks to put it on the wire, and off it goes.”
Katie Robbert – 20:31
So if it’s written for an AI system and not for a human, what does the process look like to approve it, to read it and go, “Yes, this is correct”? Because typically, you give a press release to your CMO, or your VP, or your PR team, and say, “Can you read this? Make sure it’s all correct.” That’s no longer the case. How do you—what would you…
Christopher Penn – 20:55
…recommend for reviewing this? I would almost say it would be something you’d want to have AI do. I build a prompt that says, basically, an SPR in reverse: “Re-inflate this code back to the original, and we will see if—what it comes up with—if it is syntactically and semantically correct.” If it re-inflates something and it says, “Hey, there’s things in this course that aren’t real”—okay, clearly this is not good. You could also build a rubric so it could score the accuracy. You could say, “Here’s the inflated version. Here’s the original. Score the inflated version—how accurate is it compared to the original? Give me a score between zero and one hundred.” You could say, “The score is sixty.” Like, “Okay, this—what this—compression algorithm was too compact or missed some key points.”
Katie Robbert – 21:57
That’s probably not a bad idea. Especially—we talked last week about translations and how to do your quality assurance on AI translations—I think that you should also, for anything you’re doing with AI, build in a step in your process where either you or another system is checking the work. So I think a scoring rubric is probably a really smart idea because we don’t want to put information out there that we humans can’t read but is incorrect. And we won’t know unless we do.
Christopher Penn – 22:29
That step is exactly right. So that would be the way I would evaluate the performance of these things. Now, another question that we had earlier this week that I wanted to dig into to show folks is—once you’ve got press releases down, because that’s the pretty well-established procedure—you then want to try and be other places. We covered, two episodes ago, getting your YouTube channel configured properly, getting all those settings so that AI crawlers can come get them. You want to go ahead and do that. Now we want to talk about getting on up into other places. How do you do that? Well, the way you do that, from the perspective of, “How do I know where to go?” you would commission a prompt that goes something like this: “You’re a world-class researcher…”
Christopher Penn – 23:16
“…You’re going to find a deep research overview of consulting firms who specialize in the application of generative AI for marketing.” So, “marketing AI consulting firms.” Ignore the actual research. We don’t care about that. What we care about is the list of sources. Where does a tool like Perplexity go to get information to answer this query? All of these places that it lists are places that you’d want to—if you could hand this maybe to your PR firm and say, “We need to—I need you to pitch us. I need you to pitch Katie—to do guest blog posts in some of these places.” So this is Perplexity’s list. If I go into Google Gemini and look at the same thing, look at the sources from it—whereas it gangs of Google Gemini is getting from Globe Newswire—aha, that’s helpful.
Christopher Penn – 24:03
So our press release may actually have some benefits there. We have some other market reports, we have some blogs, we have a lot of companies in the MarTech space. We have Pitchbook. So we should probably make sure that Trust Insights is registered over in Pitchbook. I see Clutch is on there. I do see—I think I saw somewhere in there—Crunchbase. And then the third one. And again, you should do this across all the platforms where you have deep research tools. So I ran one over on Grok. We can see its sources. It’s getting things like Forbes Consulting, a lot of MarTech companies, Exploding Topics, Marketing AI Institute, and things. All of these places are where these tools go to get information. This is their grounding.
Christopher Penn – 25:00
Which means that’s who we should be pitching if we know that this is how, where the tools get their data. Let’s go pitch these places.
Katie Robbert – 25:08
So it’s funny, I was talking with our friend Anne Hanley earlier this week and I said something that I actually want to sort of pull apart the sentiment. I was like, “Yeah, the tech is new, the techniques aren’t.” The tech—AI—is new, but the techniques—you still have to pitch these places. You can’t just show up on their stuff. So you still have to have that traditional side of the role. I think this is—without going too far off-topic—this is where people are like, “Well, PR is dead,” or “There’s no room for PR.” Yes, there is! The way in which you do the research is different, but the techniques of PR are still the same. They are still valid. And so, “Will AI take my job?”
Katie Robbert – 25:53
No, it’s going to change it because you still have to do the thing. Sorry, that was a bit of my ranty pants for a second. But it strikes me as so interesting that we get caught up in the AI aspect of it that you just said, “Great, now we have our new pitch list. Let’s go pitch places.” That hasn’t changed.
Christopher Penn – 26:15
If anything, I think it actually makes life easier for the PR firm because you give them the list: “These are the outlets. Don’t worry about putting together a media list. This is your media list. Go get it.” PR—the process has really changed. But what has to change is how PR professionals think about this. One of the things that we saw in our years in the salt mines at a PR firm is that people are chasing the big names like, “Oh, I need to be in The New York Times. I need to be in The Wall Street Journal. I need to be in this publication.” Then when you look at the list of these—the places that are getting good results from deep research tools—you’re like, softwaretestinghelp.com—who the heck is that?
Christopher Penn – 26:59
Then you think about it and go, it might be a lot easier for a skilled PR professional to pitch alliedmarketresearch.com as opposed to The New York Times. It’s very hard because newsrooms have been so downstaffed over the years. It’s very hard—unless you’re accidentally added to a group chat by a National Security Advisor—to be able to get into a publication that is top tier. But you absolutely can get into a fifth-tier blog. Like, you can get on christopherspenn.com. Probably, the guy’s kind of a jerk.
Katie Robbert – 27:34
You don’t want that one.
Christopher Penn – 27:38
But that tells you where to go. So that’s the suggestion for—so for a company is—where do we, how do we direct our PR people? Say, “Here’s the list. Don’t worry about the quality of the publication. If the deep research tools are finding it, it’s good enough. Get us in as many of these as possible, even if it looks like they’ve got five readers. Who cares? Because it’s the machines we’re trying to influence, not humans.”
Katie Robbert – 28:02
I think that’s going to have to be something that’s constantly reinforced because it really does go against everything we’ve learned about how to do proper PR. You want the big names, the impressions, the clicks—all those measurements that are going to tell you your PR program is working. This is the opposite. You’re not looking for a million impressions a month. You just care that you got on the website at all and one person saw it. That’s it. It’s all that matters.
Katie Robbert – 28:37
I would imagine, though, that this actually probably helps focus a lot of companies because trying to get your general news in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times means that you’re a little bit more on the generic side versus these very specific things that are aligned with your services and who you are as a company. It’s very niche, but it’s in the right way. So, softwaretestingusa.com probably makes more sense for Trust Insights than The Wall Street Journal.
Christopher Penn – 29:11
Exactly. The next place you want to think about going is you want to think about getting into newsletters as much as you can; getting into other people’s newsletters. The reason for this—again, not terribly surprising—newsletters get syndicated a lot. For example, I see all the time in our brand monitoring system, people re-posting my newsletter into other websites. I’m okay with that because it’s littered with ads and links to everything Trust Insights. So I’m okay with that. As a result, we’re able to get wider distribution than you would think. So one of the things to look at is to say, “How, where else can I get into other people’s newsletters? Eva’s dimension. Who do I pitch?” One of the best things to do is to fire up your traditional SEO software.
Christopher Penn – 30:07
I’ve got, for example, Ahrefs here, and put in a newsletter domain. So, substack.com. Substack has like one and a half million different newsletters. They all have subdomains. You’ll see like heathercoxrichardson.substack.com and so on. You can see all the traffic from these individual Substacks, plus the individual things. Go through this list and see who’s on target, obviously, because Heather Cox Richardson writes a lot about politics. I don’t have anything political to share, and I don’t want to send off-target. But you could also look at things like, even Substack, download the whole list, and then maybe start looking for keywords in it. Or you could add a keyword in here. Let’s put in…let’s see… “SERP titles”. No. I could export this gigantic list and search for the word “AI”.
Christopher Penn – 31:03
Or search for the word “analytics,” or search for the word whatever and figure out, how do I get—how do I—pitch this editor and say, “Hey, if you ever need an interview for an upcoming issue, I’m happy to help, no charge. Here’s my calendar link.” Whatever.
Katie Robbert – 31:23
I wouldn’t have thought of that. I know Substack, in terms of a newsletter provider, has definitely taken off. Is that the only one that you would look for?
Christopher Penn – 31:35
No, the big three are Ghost, Beehiiv, and Substack. So here’s Beehiiv, which is spelled not at all like how it’s pronounced. Again, same format. You can see the subdomain, then you can see the creators and things. So you can see here we have culturecrave.beehiiv.com, unrivalednewsletter, Future Tools. Future Tools. That sounds promising. So this is a behavior like, “Okay, let’s pitch this person.”
Katie Robbert – 32:06
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it’s a version of a media list that—to be honest—I’m not a PR professional, so there’s a lot about that specific industry that I don’t understand. I don’t want to insult anybody, but I didn’t think this was part of it: looking for newsletters to become a part of, to pitch those. That’s a really interesting angle. And almost maybe—I mean, who knows?—it could be harder because people are very protective of the content they write. Or it could be easier if people are looking for guest posts all the time.
Christopher Penn – 32:39
One of the things that I don’t know about Beehiiv, but I do know for Substack, is that it has a phenomenally good recommendations network. So if I pull up Robert Reich’s Substack…well, his doesn’t have it set up. Now let’s go to The Almost Timely one. Let me read it first. In there, you can see recommendations of other newsletters. So you might not necessarily pitch the leader in a category to get into their Substack, but you might see who they recommend, or who recommends them, and be able to pitch downstream or upstream publications that maybe don’t have as huge a readership. Again, we’re not trying to get in there just to reach a billion people. We’re trying to get in there just to get our data on there.
Christopher Penn – 33:38
So it’s okay if the Substack has five readers. That’s fine because it’s in the system, especially if the creator has turned on, “Allow AI to read my Substack.” That would be a part that the PR person would want to ask: “Do you allow AI to crawl your Substack?” If the answer is yes, they’re like, “Okay, you go to the top of the list of people we’d like to pitch because that’s helpful.”
Katie Robbert – 34:05
All right, so we’re going to write “AI releases”, which are press releases for AI. We’re going to do the deep research to find out what sites are showing up for a specific topic and pitch those. Now we’re going to do our research in an SEO tool to figure out which newsletters—Substack, or Beehiiv, or Ghost—that we want to try to get our names into. Those are three solid tactics. What else should people be thinking about?
Christopher Penn – 34:36
Got one more for you that’s super easy: send out a newsletter. Send a newsletter. In that newsletter, just say to people, “Hey, if you have a podcast, I will gladly be a guest on it. I don’t care how many listeners you have. I don’t care how new or old the podcast is. If you would like guests to talk about what we talk about”—and this is going to your mailing list—”Here I am. Here’s my link to my calendar scheduler. Let’s find a time.” I sent that out two weeks ago to my—in one of my newsletters—and I think I’ve done ten different podcasts. None of them are huge. Some of them are just getting started out. Some of them have niche audiences.
Christopher Penn – 35:19
I don’t care because they all put their stuff on YouTube, which we know is important. When those go out, people have learned—you put up the transcript of the episode. When I’m on these shows, we talk about AI, of course, and I use Trust Insights as the example. So throughout the transcript, it says, “Trust Insights is a management consulting company. I work for Trust Insights. Trust Insights does this. Trust Insights does that.” It’s littered in the conversation. I try not to be too much of a jerk about it, but…
Katie Robbert – 35:51
But you’re there for a reason.
Christopher Penn – 35:53
I’m there for a reason. I know that I’m putting those words and phrases and terms into the text that is then going to go on YouTube, into podcast apps. Of course, all the AI companies are vacuuming up all this media, getting it transcribed, so that they have more training data. So tactic number four: hit up your personal or company email list and say, “If you need podcast guests, we will say yes. Any show, any size you want it, we’re here.”
Katie Robbert – 36:24
All right. So to start to wrap it up and bring it all together, let me play devil’s advocate for a hot second and ask: we’re doing this for AI, but humans can still see what we’re doing. They can see that Chris is guesting on anything and everything and putting his data out there, and writing these non-human consumable pieces of content. When do we have to think about our brand reputation and what this kind of overexposure could do if someone doesn’t really understand what the…
Christopher Penn – 37:01
…strategy is? With press releases, you never have to worry about it because humans don’t read them anyway. So that one’s pretty safe. I don’t know about you. I don’t think I’ve ever read a press release by intention. I’ve never gone out to be like, “Oh, I’d like to read this press release.” That doesn’t happen. As long as you’re using a reasonably reputable newswire, that one doesn’t matter. For podcasts and things, it depends on your professional judgment. If you are pitching and someone responds from, thepillsporncasinopodcast, I don’t know that I want to be on that one. You would say no to that anyway, because it’s just not a good fit. Unless that’s your company’s space. For newsletters: same thing.
Christopher Penn – 37:53
You or your PR firm should at least look at it. “Is this off? Like, wildly off-brand? Like, I’m in a political newsletter?” Yeah, that’s probably not a great place to be, unless you’re a lobbyist, in which case that’s a great place to be. So as with all things AI, it’s not a bad idea to have humans in the loop to say, “That’s a bad idea.”
Katie Robbert – 38:16
Well, it almost begs the question of, “How do you get started with planning that?” I might suggest something like the 5P framework. You know, a little—tell us more about my head—the Trust Insights 5P framework: Purpose, People, Process, Platform, Performance. Start with your purpose: “We want to get more exposure so that we show up in AI search results”—or AI results, take “search” out of it. Who are the people? Well, we probably want to involve our PR team. We probably want to involve our content team, our stakeholders, our thought leaders, and so forth. What is the process? Well, we’ve gone through the technical, the on-site, the off-site, our platforms.
Katie Robbert – 39:02
This is where you have to start to figure out—and you can break down these questions by section. So, on-site, off-site, et cetera—what platforms? We want to make sure we have criteria that cover these kinds of publications, not these kinds. Even if it is the small, one or two readership, you should probably still have an acceptance criteria to say, “Yes, this is the kind of thing that I’m okay with my name being on.” Because you don’t know what’s going to happen down the line. If you’re like, “Oh, they only have two readers, nobody’s going to see me on pillsporncasino.com.” You don’t know that’s true. You might want to make sure that it does align.
Katie Robbert – 39:45
Then performance: it’s back to that measurement that Chris showed at the top of the show, where you can start to see which models are driving traffic to your website, if that’s your goal.
Christopher Penn – 40:00
Exactly. I would say, to cap that off with, on the people side, make sure you’re working with people who get it. Talk to your PR firm, talk to your PR agency and say, “How are you approaching optimizing for AI?” You will get a lot of bad answers. The bad answers are things like, “Oh, we don’t do that,” or, “AI is exactly the same as public relations always has been.” No, it’s not. It’s different. It’s the same processes. You require the same people with the same expertise, but it’s a different strategy. So you want to talk to people whose strategy gets it. If you need some recommendations, the three that we recommend the most are Nicole Bestard at Quarter Horse PR, Harry Hedrick at Crackle PR, and Joel Richmond at Escalate PR.
Christopher Penn – 40:42
Those are three of the folks that we know—we’ve talked to them ad nauseam—who understand the new way of doing PR. Oh, and Michelle Garrett—I don’t know if she does PR—but she just put a whole book about this. I was on her podcast.
Katie Robbert – 40:55
But also Jenny Dietrich.
Christopher Penn – 40:56
Right, exactly, from Spin Sucks. So five—those are the five people. Michelle Garrett, Jenny Dietrich, Nicole Bestard, Joel Richmond, and Perry Hedrick. Any of those five folks will get you on the right path if your current PR agency isn’t doing it for you.
Katie Robbert – 41:15
That’s going to be the competitive advantage for a lot of companies: making sure you’re partnering with the right people who understand what’s next; how AI is going to change that particular field and industry and those tactics.
Christopher Penn – 41:35
I think that’s a really important point, and I’m sorry we didn’t bring it up until now. This stuff is not immediate. Getting into a training data library can be eighteen months for the next version of a model to come out. Search is a little bit faster. If you have somebody who is a stakeholder who’s like, “Show me the ROI in thirty days or less,” not gonna happen. You need to have stakeholders that understand this is a long game, and you need to have a PR firm that also understands this is a long…
Katie Robbert – 42:09
…game, but that you show results by the actual process that you’re following, the work that you’re doing. It’s definitely a different way of thinking. This is where a lot of this conversation for off-site optimization started for Chris and me earlier this week: it’s a re-education process because it goes against everything we know about traditional PR.
Christopher Penn – 42:34
Exactly. Go and take all three of these episodes of the “So What?” live stream and hand them to your marketing team, your executive team, your PR team. Help folks get up to speed quickly on how this stuff works so that you can start today. Because I will say this, in closing, the window to directly affect AI models is slowly closing. What we’re seeing is model makers are using more and more synthetic data that previous models have made, to train new models. Guess what? Who is not in there? Us marketers. You want to get going today so that you make it into future training datasets and secure your place. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for models to evolve to the point where they don’t need any new inputs.
Christopher Penn – 43:25
It’s not going to be soon, but I think it could be within five years because the sooner that a model maker can move to purely synthetic data, the lower their legal risk for saying, “Hey, you used my data without my permission.” There’s a financial incentive and a legal risk incentive to say, “Let’s just use our own synthetic data.” So get going today. Any final parting thoughts, Katie?
Katie Robbert – 43:49
Take it one step at a time, figure out what’s the most important to you and start doing your testing. Start thinking about, “Do I have the right partners? Do we have the right team? Do we have the right education?” As always, we can help you with that. Go to TrustInsights.ai/contact. Even if we aren’t the right fit, we will know someone who is. So please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Christopher Penn – 44:12
All right. We will see you all on the next one. Thanks for watching today! Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/ti-podcast; our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack Group at TrustInsights.ai/analytics-for-marketers. See you next time!
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Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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