PR through Press Releases

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Mickie Kennedy – eReleases

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 Improving media strategy overnight
06:10 Basics of a Press Release
07:18 How journalists find stories
13:22 Exploiting AI with press releases
16:00 Challenges with AI in literary writing
18:50 Crafting impactful press quotes
23:43 Media consumption through newswires
27:26 Journalists adapting to digital changes
29:29 AI in Journalism: Current Challenges
32:26 Importance of trade publications
35:59 Choosing the right PR firm
39:40 Turning losses into profits
45:00 Media headlines and interpretations
47:02 Discussing marketing and clickbait headlines
51:12 Getting meaningful survey responses
54:15 Being the contrarian in your industry

Podcast Transcription:

Mickie Kennedy [00:00:00]:
We work with all different types of verticals. We work with authors, used to be mostly self-published authors, but over the past, I would say, 12 to 14 years, we work with a lot of traditionally published authors as well. You know, everything under the sun. We work with a lot of people who appear on Shark Tank, people doing side businesses, hoping that it’ll turn into something. Everybody’s out there trying to get a little attention and find a way in which they can make press releases work for them.

James Kademan [00:00:25]:
What is a press release? A press release?

Mickie Kennedy [00:00:27]:
Basically, it’s an announcement to the media. I always tell people, if you are looking to work for— with a PR firm, you want to make sure that you choose one that is in your industry. The biggest mistake that I see and the most amount of money that I’ve seen people waste is working with a local PR firm thinking that that was the way to go when they should have chosen a PR firm that focused on their industry.

James Kademan [00:00:55]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found on the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, Calls on Call Extraordinary Answering Service, as well as the Bold Business Book. And today we’re welcoming slash preparing to learn from Mickey Kennedy of eReleases. Mickey, how is it going today?

Mickie Kennedy [00:01:23]:
Good, good.

James Kademan [00:01:25]:
Excellent. And tell me, we’re talking about press releases for businesses, is that right?

Mickie Kennedy [00:01:31]:
That’s correct, yes.

James Kademan [00:01:32]:
All right, tell me a story. What is eReleases?

Mickie Kennedy [00:01:36]:
So, uh, we are a press release distribution company. We send releases out over PR Newswire, which is the oldest and national press release newswire here in the United States. It’s basically a duopoly, PR Newswire, then Business Wire. And we have been in business since 1998. We send out about a little over 10,000 press releases a year, giving mostly small businesses, entrepreneurs, startups access to the Wire at a huge discount because the Wire charges about $2,000 for a national press release going out of 600 words or so. And with us, it’s about a third of that price. Wow.

James Kademan [00:02:17]:
All right. And how— tell me about the discount. How were you able to pull that off?

Mickie Kennedy [00:02:23]:
Because when they reached out to us years ago, they were really trying to promote like a city distribution. And I’m like, well, my clients are really looking for national media attention. And we kept communicating and I went and met their editorial team. And the one thing I noticed is They have an editorial team overnight, but they don’t do much, they said. They said, we have to be there in case there’s breaking news or, you know, something happens. And I was just like, well, what if I set up all my press releases for next business day so you could set them up overnight? Wouldn’t cost you any additional labor. And they also looked at my customer profile, which is really small businesses, mostly people whose budgets are $2,000 or $3,000 a year. their salespeople would not reach out or want to recruit any customers like that.

Mickie Kennedy [00:03:13]:
They’re going for Fortune 500 companies. They’re looking for people who are spending $20,000 to $40,000 a year. So in that way, it was just found money for them. And doing 10,000+ releases a year, it’s still a significant amount of money that we’re sending them, but it is a huge discount. And, you know, some of our customers do graduate and become much larger, and then we just introduce them directly to PR Newswire and they can work directly with them.

James Kademan [00:03:40]:
Sure. I suppose if the PR actually works the way a business owner wants it to work, then we hope they graduate up.

Mickie Kennedy [00:03:46]:
Yeah, absolutely.

James Kademan [00:03:48]:
Right on. Is there a certain vertical of industry that you typically work with?

Mickie Kennedy [00:03:52]:
We work with all different types of verticals. We work with authors, used to be mostly self-published authors, but over the past, I would say, 12 to 14 years, we work with a lot of traditionally published authors as well. Seems like the publishers aren’t doing marketing anymore, even for established presses and publishers that you’ve heard of. And so, you know, everything under the sun. We work with a lot of people who appear on Shark Tank. The producers recommend that they do a press release before their episode airs, and we get mentioned quite a bit as a good place for them to send their releases. And so, you know, I think that everything under the sun is who we work with. You know, people doing side businesses, hoping that it’ll turn into something.

Mickie Kennedy [00:04:39]:
You know, people who have small businesses that might have 20 or 30 employees. Employees or even more mid-sized companies moving from there. But I would say it’s a pretty mix across all different types of industries. We see everything from technology to, like, you know, waste management to, you know, really, you know, a local carpet company in New Jersey. So everybody’s out there trying to, you know, get a little attention and find a way in which they can make press releases work for them.

James Kademan [00:05:09]:
Sure. How do people end up— or business owners, I should say— how do they end up finding you?

Mickie Kennedy [00:05:15]:
So a lot of it is either word of mouth or they’re doing searches. And, you know, they’ll come across us as maybe a blog post that we’ve written. We’ve been in business for a long time, so we have over 1,000 articles out there. We also advertise on Google and some other places. But I think You know, I would say probably half of all new customers are just direct referrals. And so someone has suggested they give us a try and, you know, they reach out to us. It’s more consultative because a lot of people don’t know how it works. So they’ll either call and speak to one of our editors or chat or email with us.

Mickie Kennedy [00:05:56]:
And we walk people through their first press release and their first PR campaign on a a weekly basis.

James Kademan [00:06:03]:
Sure. Let’s lay down the foundation of press releases just so that people understand. What is a press release?

Mickie Kennedy [00:06:10]:
Basically, it’s an announcement to the media. It’s usually written in the third person. If you’re writing in the first person, it’s usually a quote, a company quote, or someone being quoted in, in the press release. They’re generally— you’ve probably seen they say for immediate release at the top. They might have a dateline with the city, state, and the date of distribution. And there’s usually a media contact towards the bottom, someone that the media could contact if they have more questions or if they need something a little more specific, like, hey, I really like this, but I’d like to get a quote around this topic, you know, and do you feel like that would be a good fit? So, you know, that’s what it is. It’s a lot of these just go out on a regular basis. Publicly traded companies have to issue these types of things just to keep their public informed about it so that investors don’t feel like they’re, you know, something happens that’s significant and they weren’t notified or given some kind of, you know, alert to the public.

Mickie Kennedy [00:07:18]:
And in addition to that, it’s one of the main ways in which journalists get stories. You know, there are PR firms and people who reach out directly to journalists and try to pitch them. But the newswire is becoming the predominant way in which media are getting these articles. Unfortunately, for national journalists and media, email has become pretty ineffective. Media databases have become pretty commonplace over the last couple of decades. And so, there’s a lot of spamming of journalists. And it’s not— I don’t think it’s intentional, but if you’re a golf club company and you just you know, spent $12,000 to license a database and you just sent an email press release to say 2,400 golf journalists, those who cover the golf industry, and then you’re sitting back and nothing has happened. You’re like, well, you know who else likes to play golf? Business people and bankers.

Mickie Kennedy [00:08:20]:
So let’s blast every financial analyst with a press release about our golf club despite the fact that they will never write about golf clubs. So, you know, a financial analyst is only gonna cover matters pertaining pertaining to them. But that sort of conversation is happening in every vertical. And the off-targeted emails have just become so commonplace. There’s no penalty for it. It doesn’t cost extra from these media databases to blast 100,000 or 200,000 people. So, it’s made email very difficult. And PR firms that used to just rely on email pitching is now— they’re now finding that they have to call up the journalists they have a relationship with and say, hi, how are you doing? I don’t know if you know this, but we sent you over an email pitch yesterday.

Mickie Kennedy [00:09:08]:
And they’re like, oh, let me go try to find it in this chaos. And so the thing about the newswires are, in the case in the US, it’s basically a duopoly. So it’s easy for them to just go and check both locations. And when they log in as a journalist, they have a customized feed that speaks to their verticals, their industries that they cover. And they can also set pins so that if it’s got a certain keyword that they’re very, that they follow heavily, it’ll appear at the top. If it’s, you know, an industry that’s pretty broad, like fashion, but they don’t do, like, you know, retail or the common fashion, they can set up keywords to exclude. So if it mentions retailers like JCPenney or things like that, they won’t see those press releases. And so that’s, it’s the exact opposite of their inbox.

Mickie Kennedy [00:09:56]:
Their inbox is off-targeted and chaos. The wire is very clean. And for that reason, you know, it’s It’s the preferred way for a lot of journalists to get their news and to get their sources for articles.

James Kademan [00:10:11]:
Gotcha. All right. Yeah, it’s interesting. As we add different or additional communication channels, at first we had, I don’t know, I suppose Morse code and telegraphs. Maybe there was spam there. I don’t know if there was or not, but telephone, we killed that or in the process of killing that. Text messages, we’re in the process of killing that. Emails certainly have been spam-ridden, and it seems like even social media communication— like, is there a clean form of communication that’s not spammy, shy of maybe only talking in person with your friends at a campground away from all electronics?

Mickie Kennedy [00:10:50]:
If there are, I would love to find more. You know, they seem to be like little pockets of places and things like that, but it is one of those things that’s just very difficult. I think having a curated community is probably one of those places. And, you know, outside of that and probably a few other places, it’s probably very difficult to manage that because it seems like anytime there’s something to be exploited, people tend to exploit it.

James Kademan [00:11:22]:
Yeah, no doubt. I remember when fax machines were a thing, And at the print shop that I worked at, we would get these faxes about a Hawaiian vacation or something. And I was thinking, who picks up a fax with this cold thing about the— about a vacation? And they’re just like, ah, this seems cool. Let me send my money to this guy. Maybe it’s actually legit. I don’t know. It just seems very weird. Let’s, uh, let’s shift gears into the— Since we last spoke, a lot has happened in the AI world.

James Kademan [00:11:55]:
And I imagine that has only polluted or muddied the waters as far as press releases go. Now you can essentially program AI to just send thousands out. So tell me a story about that, your experience and your opinions on that.

Mickie Kennedy [00:12:10]:
So there is a little bit of a loophole right now where AI is looking at press releases on the wire And it’s treating as a news source. And so if you send out a press release and you say in the boilerplate, we call that the about section that usually gets recycled at the end of every press release where it’s just like a small paragraph that just is, here’s the elevator pitch of what your company’s about. But you put down there that you’re, you know, the leader of small business PR and you go to AI, ChatGPT and Claude, for example, and say, who’s the leader of PR? They’ll say, Well, of course, it’s e-releases, and here’s the source. It’s PR Newswire. And then you click on it, and it’s like, it’s their press release. So currently, people are ranking in Claude and ChatGPT by saying in a paid release that they’re the best at something, and/or language around that. And I think that hopefully that will be quashed, and that this is just one of those little loopholes that exists temporarily. We saw a lot of that with SEO.

Mickie Kennedy [00:13:22]:
In the early 2000s and the late 1990s where you could, you know, write white text on a bottom of a page and say anything and appear in search engines and stuff like that. So I think that this will be closed at a certain point. But we are getting a lot of press releases around that because people are trying to exploit it and take advantage of the fact that they’re ranking in ChatGPT and Claude as the best in their industry for certain things because They’ve just said it in a press release. And I think that, you know, both of those are looking at news and they are treating news as a source and they really like recency. And so rather than rely on, you know, a roundup on a blog that’s 10 months old, they give preference to an article or something that’s maybe appeared in the last 2 to 4 weeks. And I think that’s one of the reasons that currently it can’t distinguish between the press releases and the news, but I think it will rather quickly if it hasn’t been closed since the last couple of days. But, you know, so that’s interesting that that’s happening. And of course, people are taking advantage of it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:14:33]:
The other thing is, you know, people are using AI to write press releases. And at the end of the day, we’re looking for the press release to be transformed into an article that a journalist writes and transforms. So, you know, working from a press release that’s been written by AI, I don’t feel there’s a problem with that. I don’t feel like it’s content. It’s not the end result. You’re looking— you’re basically providing the content that hopefully a journalist will then transform by writing an article. And so I don’t really have a problem with people using AI to write a press release. I have a very serious problem with people trusting the AI to choose what to write about.

Mickie Kennedy [00:15:16]:
AI has been trained on the vast majority of press releases that are out there. And the reality is 97% of press releases generate no earned media. So it’s being trained on the garbage. And I’ve seen this with poetry. Every time you ask AI to write poetry, it writes really bad poetry. And even if you say free verse, non-rhyming poem, it writes terrible rhymey poems. And I had someone say, oh, that’s not true at all, Mickey. I send a happy birthday poem to all these people, and I put all these little things about that person in there, and it spits it out, and it rhymes, and it looks like it belongs in a Hallmark card.

Mickie Kennedy [00:16:00]:
And I’m like, yeah, that’s the problem. You know, a lot of people like poems like that, but for people who are serious about literary poetry, it’s not gonna cut it. And so, I think that in a lot of cases where there’s discernment, AI’s really bad. And I think that the worst thing you can ever do is have AI write a press release and it choose the subject matter. For best results, you’re gonna go to AI and say, hey, obviously the AI probably already knows you because you’ve used it quite a bit. So you don’t have to, like, tell it much about you and your company. But you could just say, hey, we are getting ready to launch this new product or service. Here’s some information about it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:16:48]:
I would like you to structure this as a product launch, but also incorporate a case study. And here’s an example of someone who’s beta tested our product. Here’s the amazing outcome they had. You know, generate a quote on behalf of us for that. And, and now give me the structure of that press release. It’ll immediately, in 20 seconds, give you the press release. But I ignore it and then say, okay, that’s great. Now the structure for what you just wrote.

Mickie Kennedy [00:17:19]:
And it gives you the structure. And I go, okay, now we’re going to attack it piecemeal. Give me 10 options for a headline for this press release. Give me 3 opening paragraphs. Oh, I like this paragraph, the second one, but you didn’t mention this. Now redraft this paragraph and give me 2 options incorporating that one fact that I want to get in there. And so now you’re having it write piece by piece through the press release. Maybe on the second or third paragraph, in this paragraph, be sure to include a company quote.

Mickie Kennedy [00:17:52]:
And, and then it generates that. So This takes about 6 minutes as opposed to 10 to 15 seconds. But at the end of it, you will have a press release that while it may read very similar to the initial one, it’s probably going to perform 2 to 4 times better. And when the pickup rates are only like, you know, 3% of press releases getting picked up, that’s a big difference. Another thing is I then go back and I really pay attention to the headline. And that company quote, because those are the 2 biggest factors of whether you get picked up. And the quote is probably the most important. If a journalist is looking at 2 press releases of similar newsworthiness, and most press releases aren’t that newsworthy, if they write an article for each and they put the quote in there, if it’s an amazing quote, it’s gonna make that article smack as a better article.

Mickie Kennedy [00:18:50]:
And so they’re gonna gravitate towards an amazing quote. So what’s an amazing quote? Mickey, you know, you might be a wordsmith, you might be lucky, like I went to creative writing school, and I could just really, you know, spin a beautiful yarn, but most people can’t, and AI rarely can. And so what I would do is just make, you know, as strong of a sentence as possible. Say something with active verbs, make it as succinct as possible, say it with conviction. Make it so that if a journalist took that quote out and just paraphrased what you said and you had previously read it, you go, oh, I ache for what was previously there because he said it perfectly. And so that’s what you’re striving for. AI rarely does that. Most press releases have a safe quote with passive verbs, and it looks like it was just voted on by committee, committee, and no one’s going to be fired for that quote, but no one’s also going to like, pay attention and really feel like, wow, that’s an amazing quote.

Mickie Kennedy [00:19:53]:
And that’s the real difference. And I think that AI is not good at that. And so, that’s where you need some human intervention. And I think that you also wanna pay really close attention to the headline. A lot of people write sexy headlines, headlines with puns in them that are clever and fun. You’re not writing for the end user. This is not the New York Post, which has always got, you know, it seems like every day is just full of puns. You’re writing for a busy journalist who’s looking through a lot of headlines and they’re just trying to figure out, is this headline relevant to me? And basically, what’s the gist of it? What’s going on? So the best headlines are usually hard to distinguish.

Mickie Kennedy [00:20:34]:
They’re not— most people wouldn’t know that that is an amazing headline, but if it tells in a very short period Exactly who you are, what’s being announced, the industry, all of that. Those are big signals, and you’re doing a journalist a great job who is browsing that, yeah, this is relevant to me. I wanna click through. I wanna drill down and read even more. And so, you know, that, that’s the way I, I, I approach it. I think that for people who cannot write very well, and I get it, AI is a great thing to lean on, but don’t trust it to write the press release. It’ll write the type of press release that you see your competitors send out. And what you don’t realize is these are 97% of the press releases that the media is never going to pay attention to.

James Kademan [00:21:21]:
That’s awesome. It’s very interesting how that has changed the industry here. When you are releasing these, I guess pumping out these press releases, you tell me how it works, right? Because we’ve got the PR Newswire. Is that just upload it there and then hope for the best? Or is it upload it there, make some phone calls, or how does it work?

Mickie Kennedy [00:21:41]:
So, um, you upload it with PR Newswire. Um, you are given the option to do some discrete email sends, um, through some Cision lists that they have. Um, and if you order our PR Pro, you get access to that. Um, it, you know, it goes out, uh, to their matrix of people as well as available on their website, um, for journalists who are credentialed. And the good news is they credential a lot of different types of media today. I guess around 15 years ago, I had to fight like crazy to get a telecom blogger media access to PR Newswire. They’re just like, Mickey, he’s not a member of the media. And I’m just like, well, let’s go to this little website called Alexa.

Mickie Kennedy [00:22:29]:
And I said, here, give me the leading telecom trade publication. They didn’t even know it. So we typed it in. And I’m like, here you go. They get 42,000 visitors a month. I’m like, yeah, they’re the real deal. Let’s type in this guy’s blog. He gets 72,000 visitors a month.

Mickie Kennedy [00:22:50]:
And then she said, let me go grab the vice president, probably one of many vice presidents at a company like that. They come in, I show it to them, and they’re just like, okay, this guy gets access. And I was just like, They didn’t realize that these bloggers were more influential at the time than a lot of the trade publications. And so, you know, I know now they’re very accepting of a lot of different types of media. For example, on Instagram, there’s a lot of people who follow fashion brands and they will say, hey, here’s a new sneak peek at the lineup from this fashion designer. and it’s photos that they pulled from the wire. I follow somebody on TikTok who does a video roundup of new snacks reaching grocery store shelves. He’s called Snackulator.

Mickie Kennedy [00:23:43]:
And he’ll often say, I don’t know if that’s a glaze or just the shine. I just pull these images off of the wire. And so, you know, a lot of people are using this and it’s great because this guy who’s following these snack trends, rather than having to visit a lot of grocery stores, he can just visit Business Wire and PR Newswire And that’s capturing almost 100% of these new products hitting the shelves. And the same thing with people who cover other different types of industries. And so, um, I think that The Wire has woken up and recognizes that how we consume media is changing. And I love it that they now aren’t fighting you, but they’re actually very accepting of taking a lot of people, uh, who aren’t what we think of as traditional media and giving them access to this.

James Kademan [00:24:30]:
How is there not that much competition for PR Wire? And is it Business Wire? So, um, or is there competition? Like, I’ve heard of HARO. Would HARO be a competitor?

Mickie Kennedy [00:24:41]:
No, PR Newswire acquired HARO, saw that it was garbage, and got rid of it. Um, HARO is in theory great and worked for like a year or two pretty well. Um, but what you found is Someone would say, hey, I’m a telecom reporter and I’m looking for someone who can talk about consolidation in the US cell phone industry. Well, all of a sudden you have 82 to 100 people competing. The odds aren’t great for you, but what it became is 1,400 to 2,400 people competing for one story. You’re not, you’re not gonna, it’s not worth your time. And that’s what happens. It’s not scalable.

Mickie Kennedy [00:25:26]:
And so it did, someone did buy the brand recently and it is small. But even now, having talked to a couple of the journalists, it’s beginning to get too big. You know, they said, we capped ours at 700 people. And I was like, oh, do they allow you to cap it? It just says no more opportunities. He goes, no, we just quit looking. after 700 people reply. And so, that’s the problem with that. Now, there are people who have tried to compete with Business Wire and PR Newswire.

Mickie Kennedy [00:25:58]:
Globe Newswire was a big one. And I really liked what they were doing. They acquired, I think it was Market Wire. And before that, it was known as Internet Wire. And what happened there is journalists, they’re not doing so well. And so instead of writing 2 stories a week, they’re now expected to write 4. And so they don’t have the luxury of browsing like they used to. And so what happened is they quit searching these tertiary websites that didn’t yield a lot of stuff.

Mickie Kennedy [00:26:31]:
And so Globe Newswire, realizing that journalists aren’t really responding as effectively through it, sort of pivoted themselves and said, hey, for publicly traded companies that are trying to meet SEC disclosure requirements, uh, you can do that through us and it’s half the cost. You don’t really want to reach a lot of journalists anyways. Do you really want journalists going through your numbers and trying to find a story that maybe you don’t want there? So, you know, that’s sort of the take that happened with that. I think we’re going to be in a duopoly situation for a very long time. Um, really?

James Kademan [00:27:06]:
Okay.

Mickie Kennedy [00:27:06]:
Yeah, because journalists— if you’re a journalist, what’s Would you want to learn how another wire works and how to go, and now you have to fish in 3 or 4 or 5 oceans? It’s easier to fish in 1 or 2. And so, they’ve already shut out Globe and NewsWire. They quit going.

James Kademan [00:27:26]:
Oh, wow.

Mickie Kennedy [00:27:26]:
And so, you know, and you get it. You know, if I’m a journalist and I used to be able to do this in 40 hours, now I’m expected to do double or triple that. in the same 40 hours, something’s got to give. And for a lot of people, it is the ability to be able to scout for stories. You don’t hear of journalists using Twitter anymore and social media for gathering a lot of stories. I’m sure there’s a few anecdotally that still do, but most of them don’t because they don’t have the ability to sit there for 2 to 4 hours babysitting and refreshing social media. They just don’t have the hours. And so, for that reason, We are going to be in a duopoly situation for a while until the next big thing comes along.

Mickie Kennedy [00:28:13]:
And the wires are going to enjoy those $2,000 per press release for a national press release. They’re quite expensive and they can afford to be expensive because it’s that or competing with inboxes that are off-targeted and overflowing and not a lot of journalists are really able to navigate So are journalists using AI to sift through all this stuff, or how are they—

James Kademan [00:28:38]:
because they still have to sift through hundreds or thousands of press releases, right?

Mickie Kennedy [00:28:43]:
They do. And I think a lot of them use those search tools that The Wire has and the ability to pin stories that mention certain keywords that they’re really interested in right now. And maybe over the next month or two, the senior editors said, hey, we really want to make sure we’re covering this in the industry. So they set up keywords and things like that to capture it. I am not familiar with a lot of journalists using AI to hunt for stories. I can’t even effectively use AI to go into my Gmail account and pull up my receipts for domain names that I bought. And it’s like Google’s locked it down. It’s like you can search 20 emails at a moment and that’s it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:29:29]:
And so, I don’t know how effective journalists are going to be using AI until things get opened and there’s more capabilities with it. But potentially, I think that’s there, that journalists could lean on that. But I also don’t know that AI can effectively tell you what is a great story. You know, a journalist knows what’s going to be entertaining or educational to their audience, but is AI really going to know that? Again, you’ve got AI looking at this body of press releases that are mostly garbage and not newsworthy. And so I think it still takes human curation at this point. But I think that once you’ve done the human curation, using stuff like AI to help research and, of course, verify it is useful. And I’ve heard of some news sources that are Actually, small papers and stuff, they’re using AI to write articles. And, uh, that’s very controversial in an industry that’s made up of writers, but it, it is the situation that we find ourselves in.

James Kademan [00:30:40]:
Yeah, it’s interesting when you put all these demands on a journalist to do twice as much work as you used to and then not expect them to use the tools that are available. Whether they end up with a better product or not could certainly be argued that It’s probably not going to be a better product, but you’re asking for volume, we’ll get you volume, right?

Mickie Kennedy [00:31:01]:
Right. And there is noise out there in the marketplace as well. There’s a lot of people that try to give the perception they are a newswire. They even have wire in their names, but they’re not a true wire where journalists are going and pulling stories. It’s predominantly a lot of syndication that’s happening. And that is a, that is a big distraction. So, you know, there’s one place that you can pay a fee, and it’ll give you a report showing the press release replicated on 700+ websites. And if you were able to put a pixel on that press release, which you can’t, I guarantee you it would show 500, 600 visits and probably 99% of them bots.

Mickie Kennedy [00:31:48]:
These are locations of websites that people aren’t paying attention to. They’re usually subdomains of a website. And if you go to that website and do a search, your press release won’t even show up because it’s not one of their articles. It’s not their content. It’s just a way for them to monetize their, their, their, the fact that they’re a news source and they’re just going to throw the subdomain up and give people the perception that, hey, we appeared on this website. And so I try to avoid that and try to get people not excited by that because that’s not meaningful. You’re not going to get any orders from that. You’re, you know, you might be able to put some logos up that you were featured on a place.

Mickie Kennedy [00:32:26]:
But, you know, I like when I have a client who gets picked up in Waste News, which is a publication, a trade publication, and then tells me, hey, we got contacted by 2 cities in Australia and said, can you build these facilities for us here? And I go, yeah, we do it all over the place, including one— here’s one we just did in India, $30, $40 million deal in those 2 cities from one article in Waste News. And, you know, that’s what happens when people read about you. If they see an ad, they just glaze over and move on. But when people see an article, there’s an implied endorsement that happens. There’s credibility. And all of a sudden, they’re like, I want to learn more about this company. Would they be a good fit for what we’re looking for? And that’s how people discover and find you.

James Kademan [00:33:11]:
You know, you raise an interesting point. In my head, press releases, news releases, releasing all this information to the wire was aiming for New York Times or USA Today, but it may be more specific industry newsletters kind of thing. Is that what’s happening?

Mickie Kennedy [00:33:28]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s all over the place. So you have, you know, in that case, someone who builds waste facilities, you might have them picked up in one that’s just for them, Waste News, a trade publication. But you could also have maybe Wall Street Journal writes an article about here’s this little company here that’s setting up, you know, nuts to bolts, handling the entire build-out of both a waste management facility and recycling facilities for people. And, you know, it— that, that could happen as well. It could also appear in other types of, you know, general business magazines. But a lot of it is specific to your industry and trades. And being known in your industry is pretty powerful because generally That’s where your customers and clients sort of show up in those places.

James Kademan [00:34:15]:
Gotcha. All right. I mean, that makes sense because I imagine in the waste thing, if somebody reads that in the New York Times, the volume of people may be higher looking at it, but nobody cares.

Mickie Kennedy [00:34:26]:
Right. They may be less targeted of who they’re looking to get that. And that’s usually cities and municipalities and places like that.

James Kademan [00:34:35]:
Is it harder to find those publications or the people that The journalists, I don’t, are they called journalists if they’re a writer or editor for a publication like that?

Mickie Kennedy [00:34:44]:
Yeah, they’re journalists. I think they’re all sort of considered under the umbrella of journalists. They’re not hard to find. You know, they, they have their pipeline with the wires as well. There are instances where they might be easier to pitch directly, especially if they’re a little bit smaller community and smaller world. I imagine they’re still dealing with a little bit of that spam issue that’s happening. But probably less so than a business editor at the New York Times, which is just probably chaos for them. But I think that, you know, there is also the opportunity for you to, you know, establish your own relationships in your industry.

Mickie Kennedy [00:35:24]:
I say if you’re in a small vertical like that, you know, the waste management, probably there’s just under probably 5 or 6 influential writers or magazines or blogs or communities that are interested? And is it possible for you to sort of build these relationships yourselves so that you could pick up the phone and say, hey, I wanted to let you know I’m working on this big project and I feel it’d be perfect for an article. Any interest there?

James Kademan [00:35:56]:
And is that something— is that a service that you offer?

Mickie Kennedy [00:35:59]:
That is not a service that I do. We work with a lot of small PR firms and that’s their bread and butter. We don’t compete with them because they’re, you know, they’re the ones that build these relationships and, and, and, uh, you know, they, they charge a bit more for it. It is a little bit more art than science when it comes to that because it is very relationship-driven. Um, and I always tell people, if you are looking to work for— with a PR firm, you want to make sure that you choose one that is in your industry. The biggest mistake I see is people who’ve worked with PR firms and nothing happened. And I’m like, well, who did you choose? So they said somebody local. And when I hear that, 99% of the time they’re generalists.

Mickie Kennedy [00:36:40]:
They’re like, oh, I work with you who is a manufacturer, but I also work with this person who’s a boutique and this. And there’s no way for them to establish relationships across a dozen industries. It’s hard enough to establish these relationships in a single industry. So that’s why a good PR firm will be like, a good fashion PR firm or a good telecom PR firm. And there’s probably another that’s good with high-tech venture-backed and high-tech, you know, another path. And there’s probably PR firms that specialize in AI-driven companies right now and people building tools for that. So you really want to pick a specialty. Unfortunately, most of them will not be local to you.

Mickie Kennedy [00:37:23]:
And I know that a lot of businesses feel more comfortable being able to sit face-to-face But I tell you, the biggest mistake that I see and the most amount of money that I’ve seen people waste is working with a local PR firm thinking that that was the way to go when they should have chosen a PR firm that focused on their industry.

James Kademan [00:37:42]:
That’s fair. That’s— I can completely understand that. And in the end, I guess remote or someone that’s thousands of miles away from you that has the connections or know how to deal with your vertical Unless you’re a plumber in a local area, I suppose. Maybe, maybe whatever you’re trying to get for the end result is to get more customers. You want customers in that area. But if you’re, you’re selling dumpsters or something like that across the world, what do you care?

Mickie Kennedy [00:38:08]:
Right.

James Kademan [00:38:08]:
If your PR person is your neighbor or not. Tell me a story about supply and demand. Are there more articles or more press releases than there are places to put press releases? Or are journalists hungry for press releases? Or maybe there’s a mix and there’s a quality difference that we need more, but we need more higher quality.

Mickie Kennedy [00:38:28]:
I think it’s we need more, but we need ones that address what we want. And those are the types of releases that tell a story. Most press releases don’t have the building blocks for a story arc. And if you look at even a small article in a newspaper or a magazine, they like to follow a story arc. You know, it’s, you know, we grow up learning stories, being read them as kids. We know somebody at work who tells a great joke because he just tells a good story. He knows the story arc. There’s an expectation there.

Mickie Kennedy [00:39:00]:
And then, you know, my clients will then take and send me service launch and product launch press releases. And it’s just, here’s a new product, here’s a new service, and here’s a bunch of features. There’s no story there. And so, one of the easiest ways And I think I mentioned this when I was talking to AI is give me a use case study. Let’s take someone who beta tested it and what that outcome looked like and then get a quote by them. So, if I have a logistics software solution, I want to promote myself but it seems counterintuitive. The best way to do that is say, here’s someone who is 3 years old. They’ve never had a profit.

Mickie Kennedy [00:39:40]:
Our casualty rate in our industry is 74% of new companies fail in the first 5 years. Take that publicly data point, put it in there, and that shows the stakes of why this company looks like it’s going to be another casualty. After 6 months of using our software to write their invoices, they’re now projected to have their first net profit at the end of this year. And then have a quote by them saying, we just thought that if we won more bids, we would become profitable. But this software showed us where we were making big mistakes and you know, basically winning bids that we were never going to make money on. And so, now we can bid responsibly and know when to just stop participating in bids and move on to those that are more profitable. A quote, a little bit smaller than that, but having an amazing quote by your client, this is the best way to showcase you. It’s counterintuitive, but it also excites the media because they notice that, yeah, If my audiences, their eyes will glaze over when they read about this product and a bunch of features, but now you captivated them and said, wow, here’s a company that was going to fail.

Mickie Kennedy [00:40:48]:
They completely have been transformed. This seems like a great solution. And so those are the types of story arcs that are just missing from press releases. And, you know, taking publicly available data is a great way to punch up your press release. Use case studies is a great way to You know, build the stakes there. Every time you’re getting ready to issue a press release that you feel is meaningful to you, think about how can I make it meaningful for that audience person, making them want to read it, make it easier for a journalist to say, yeah, I think my audience would love to hear that. And it is a bit of reverse engineering. But I think if you put that creative thought in and you just adapt, And, you know, put the pill in the cheese, I think you’re going to have a much more effective outcome because at the end of the day, you will accomplish what you want getting these articles written about you.

Mickie Kennedy [00:41:41]:
And, you know, in a lot of ways, you’re going to find a lot more engagement because you’ve found something that is aligning with readers or people who view it even more.

James Kademan [00:41:52]:
You know, you raise an interesting point about the whole story arc thing. Because I can tell when I’m reading some newspaper articles and there’s a lot of quotes in there, and I’m like, I feel like I’m not reading fact, I’m reading opinion or quotes from someone. We’re thinking of doing this, we’re thinking of doing that, that person’s gonna do this, that person’s not gonna do that. And I keep thinking, this isn’t a story, this isn’t an article. This is a story because it’s more almost like a romance novel where it’s talking about this person said this and this person said this.

Mickie Kennedy [00:42:30]:
It’s more performative. And they know because the readers like that. The readers want a little drama in there. And so sometimes—

James Kademan [00:42:36]:
I am in the minority there. I’m like, where are the facts? Where— I don’t need your social media posts. I need like what law was actually passed amongst all this. So, it’s very interesting how, and I feel like that’s been a shift over the past decade. Is that safe to say?

Mickie Kennedy [00:42:54]:
Yes. And a parallel to that is, you ever looked up a recipe online? Oh my God. And you have to scroll 95% of the way down to get to it because it’s like, let’s talk about what this recipe means to me and my relationship with my grandmother and all these other things that have nothing to do with the recipe because it’s just fodder for a lot of ads. And to sort of get you there. But the same thing’s happening other places. People are trying to build theater into these things because people, a lot of people like it. I know you, and I think a lot of business people just want the facts and we want them succinct. But I think that there’s a lot of people that still enjoy the performance, the story, the drama.

Mickie Kennedy [00:43:38]:
And I think that it’s a very human element. You know, when people go on Shark Tank, they don’t just open with, Here’s my business and here’s my numbers. They’re like, oh, you know, I lost my job and I took all my money out of my 401 and said, I’ve got this one idea. I’m going to try to make it. And all of a sudden, you’re like, this person is risking everything. I hope they make it. And, you know, there is something about the human interest element that really just cuts through everything and gets us to care. And we start championing the little people.

James Kademan [00:44:09]:
That’s fair. I understand that. I can, I can get that, especially on something like Shark Tank where they’re trying to jazz it up and make it all entertaining and more dramatic than it probably really is. I mean, that’s, that’s their game. People are sitting there to be entertained, right?

Mickie Kennedy [00:44:24]:
Right.

James Kademan [00:44:24]:
I think they are. I don’t know, maybe it’s more for the judges or something like that to be entertained. It is interesting that you’ll read an article and you’re like, I don’t think there was actually any facts in this article. I think it was just a bunch of quotes from obscure People or social media stuff that you pulled, but there was no definitive, this is what actually happened. It was just, this person said this, this person said this. It was weird, I guess, as far as that goes. Tell me a story about headlines, because I’ll see headlines, I guess, piggybacking off of that. Some of them are just— I’ll give you a really quick example.

James Kademan [00:45:00]:
I’m outside of Madison, Wisconsin. We had an airplane that, that was going— I think they’re going from Chicago to Minneapolis— had to get diverted to Madison, uh, because I don’t know the entire story, but it sounds like some old guy had a mental breakdown. And so somebody— I think it was at my kid’s baseball game— he’s like, oh my gosh, an airplane has been hijacked in Madison! And I’m like, what? And we all open up our phone and the article title from 10 different news sources was way different. One person had a psychotic episode, one is a hijacking, one is drama at the airport. Like, but it was the same thing that happened. It was just the way that it was, the article was essentially sold or written. So tell me about the headlines and the art that are art and science that gets enthralled with all that.

Mickie Kennedy [00:45:51]:
The good news is those are the headlines for people and consumers. And there’s a lot of clickbait there. There’s a lot of cleverness and puns and there’s a lot of manipulation. But when it comes to headlines for your press release, the best ones are going to be boring. They’re going to try to contain as much factual information about what you’re announcing. You’re going to try to make it very specific to the industries that you’re trying to cover so that a busy journalist who’s skimming headlines on the wire is going to say, ah, here is a press release that’s definitely relevant to me. and it looks like it’s on a topic, I will click through. And so, there are these 2 worlds of headlines.

Mickie Kennedy [00:46:33]:
And a lot of my customers can’t— they don’t know the difference. They come in with the puns and the things. And I’m like, I can’t tell what industry this is. And they’re like, but it’s a great headline. I could see it on the New York Post because New York Post is the king of pun-making headlines. And the fact is though, you’re not writing for the end user. And to be honest, most journalists aren’t writing those headlines. They have basically managing editors.

Mickie Kennedy [00:47:02]:
And I think they’re more from the marketing side of things where they’re really trying to build headlines that are fun, clever, get people excited, maybe even chuckle as they are walking down the sidewalk. And they go back and say, I got to grab that newspaper today. And so, that’s there. Unfortunately, with online, There’s so much of the, you know, rage-baiting and click-baiting and, you know, trying to get people to click through. I’ve seen them where, like you were talking about, where it’s one thing and then you start reading the article and you realize it’s completely counter to what the headline was saying. The headline made me think that this was really bad, and then you start reading, you’re like, ah, this is actually pretty good, but they got me there. And so, that is the problem because I don’t entertain that online. If I see something like that in my newsfeed on Facebook or something like that, I’ll just unfollow them because I don’t like people who do rage bait and clickbaity headlines that are, you know, you know, basically trying to trick you or anything like that.

James Kademan [00:48:09]:
It’s interesting because you’ll come across articles where someone posted something, they’re like, you won’t find this in the regular news. I’m like, well, that’s a news article that you’re posting though, isn’t it? Like, you won’t find it in the regular news because nobody else cares, or because this particular news thing doesn’t have a good following, or what? What are you saying right now? Because you literally pulled a news article. It’s just a weird, weird dynamic there.

Mickie Kennedy [00:48:35]:
It is.

James Kademan [00:48:36]:
Tell me a story about what expected results can be and some of the successes that you’ve had. In regards to businesses hiring you for PR?

Mickie Kennedy [00:48:45]:
So I always tell people, don’t measure a single press release as, you know, whether PR is going to work for you or not. You always want to do a PR campaign of 6 to 8 releases. And, you know, depending on how small you are, the cadence for that might be quarterly. So you might take a year and a half to 2 years to do 6 to 8 releases, or maybe you’re able to do them every other month. So it might be a little bit over a year. You want to make sure that you’re testing and trying different approaches with the media. And I say, you know, try to be strategic, try to make sure that you’re developing a story arc and getting that in there. There are certain types of releases that are the 3% of releases that are getting picked up, and there’s patterns in there.

Mickie Kennedy [00:49:30]:
And so I have a whole free hour-long video that goes into those types of releases, the 3% that are getting picked up. And if anyone’s interested, it’s ereleases.com/plan, P-L-A-N. And again, completely free. And, you know, things that work in the 3% are, you know, doing an industry survey. And there’s no caveats for who can do an industry survey. By you doing it, you’re claiming the bag of like, I’m a thought leader in our industry. You don’t need to have a Rolodex of 100, 200 people to send a survey to. You can just go to a small or independent trade association in your industry, and they’re out there.

Mickie Kennedy [00:50:16]:
Every industry has dozens, if not more, of these. You’re going to avoid the big ones that everyone knows that puts on the conventions. They don’t need you. They have their own PR team. But if you approach one of these smaller ones that might have 1,500 members or 1,200, you know, you take a link you created. I like SurveyMonkey. I like to do 4 questions per page. So, I might have 12 to 16 questions.

Mickie Kennedy [00:50:37]:
I take that link and I go, hey, I’m conducting a survey in our industry. Here’s the link to it. Could you send this to your members? In exchange for this, as long as we get some statistical relevance of at least 100 responses, I would be willing to put you in a press release I’ll be issuing over PR Newswire in the coming weeks. So, again, PR Newswire, it’s $2,000. They’re not well known. So, they’re gonna see this as a win-win from their standpoint of getting some publicity as well. And so, it helps you. It gives you a little more legitimacy partnering with the trade association.

Mickie Kennedy [00:51:12]:
Gives them the opportunity to get picked up. And if I only get 60 responses, I can go back to them and say, hey, I’d hate for you to lose this opportunity. Could you maybe pitch it again on social media? Do another email send to your members to try and get those numbers up? And they’re pretty invested. They don’t want to lose that opportunity. And then, you know, you look at the survey results. You pick, you know, you want to make sure you ask meaningful questions. So, what’s hot right now? Are there concerns around AI in your industry that you can ask? Is there, you know, things about work culture changes, you know, post-pandemic? Are there still people who don’t want to go in the office? Is that a concern or a problem? You know, what else? Is there economic uncertainty? You know, are there things that you would ask at a conference that you want to see whether other people are experiencing what you are, like people not wanting to pay net 30 or whatever it is that’s commonplace is changing. Are you only seeing that or other people in your industry seeing it? A lot of times, the survey is an appropriate place to ask those things.

Mickie Kennedy [00:52:14]:
And, you know, just brainstorm what are some really cool questions that people would want to know the answer to right now. And the great thing about it is they can be questions that were asked a year ago. The problem is, you know, we don’t know what, how, if that shifted in the year. So, your survey can be a good way to take someone’s temperature today. I have a client. This is— I didn’t get this from me, but a client was doing this over many years across a lot of verticals. And I realized that every time they issued a survey press release, they were getting between 8 and 14 articles. And these are unique individual articles by, you know, some in newspapers, some in places like Inc.

Mickie Kennedy [00:52:54]:
magazine, some, you know, all over the place. And they were getting a lot of SEO benefit from it and just a lot of attention over a period of several years. And so, what you want to do when you put together your press releases, what’s the big aha moment in this survey and make that the focus of the press release? Build a resource page on your website where you put all the questions and answers so someone can go and look at those. And some journalists go there and they’ll pull out another story And like, ah, this is really interesting. They asked this question and wow, you know, this is meaningful. And so, you put together what you feel is the most meaningful aha moment. You’re going to put quotes around it. You don’t have to agree with what people said.

Mickie Kennedy [00:53:37]:
You could say, hey, you know, 82% of the people believe they’re going to be replaced by AI in our industry in the next 5 years. I don’t agree with that. But I do think that those who don’t know how to utilize AI are going to be at a very serious disadvantage in the next 5 years. So, that’s a way to be rational and analytical and putting your thought onto the situation. But you don’t necessarily agree with what the outcome was. And like I said, most people who do this get at least 6 articles as a result of it. And it’s something that anyone can do. So, these are the types of meaningful strategic types of press releases that just work.

Mickie Kennedy [00:54:15]:
Having a contrarian viewpoint when everybody is joining a trend And, you know, it seems like everybody in your industry has consolidated in one direction. And if you sent out a press release agreeing with everybody, you’re competing with thousands or hundreds of people. But if you’re one of the few people who says, I disagree with everybody else here, you stand the likelihood that every time someone in your industry writes on that issue, that they put you in as the contrarian because journalists like to be fair and balanced. And a lot of them go to press with only one viewpoint and one side because no one has bothered to raise their hand and say, I want to speak for the other side. For example, I don’t think electric cars are good for the environment. I think that they’re, they’re causing a lot of problems with how they’re mined, not to mention labor issues. I also think that we don’t know what’s going to happen to these batteries at the end of their life. And also, when these cars catch on fire, sometimes it takes 10, fire trucks to show up and tens and tens of thousands of gallons of water to put it out.

Mickie Kennedy [00:55:16]:
I think we should embrace electric cars, but we shouldn’t mandate them until we figured out a solution for this. And I think that we probably will in the next 5 to 10 years. And so we should slow down a little bit. That is a way to be completely rational. And boom, every time someone talks about the pros of an electric car, they— you could get plugged in as the one little contrarian. And you will appear in way more places than someone just agreeing with everybody else.

James Kademan [00:55:45]:
Gotcha. That makes sense. That totally makes sense. Where do you see PR going in the next, let’s call it 5 years, especially with AI, the advent as internet changes and all that?

Mickie Kennedy [00:55:57]:
I’m interested in when we’re going to get to a video press release. I think I keep thinking that’s the next iteration of of PR because so many people consume media through video. But I haven’t seen it yet. But I think that maybe in the next 5 to 10 years, we’ll start maybe stop issuing written press releases and maybe start doing something more with video or providing B-roll that can be incorporated. Like maybe your company assets and video can then be introduced with a reporter. So the reporter seems like they’re standing in your facility talking about your products and solutions. I’m not sure. So, but I do think that video and the AI’s ability to manipulate video is getting to a point where it can be like you have reporters actually standing in your factory and reporting from there and not actually being there.

James Kademan [00:56:51]:
Interesting. Yeah, I guess I didn’t even think about that. Video, I mean, video’s certainly definitely being consumed on a grand scale compared to what It was just a few years ago. But even just the storage and stuff like that of video seems to be— I imagine that was prohibitive, the speed of our internet back in the day.

Mickie Kennedy [00:57:11]:
Yeah, but I think the costs are coming down and it seems like the data centers keep going up. So we’ll see.

James Kademan [00:57:18]:
Yeah, I remember going to a website, we’re talking mid-’90s, and I don’t know, I was doing research on something back when I was going to college. And you’d pick a website and you’re like, ah, this isn’t what I want, but I gotta wait 5 minutes for the next one to load.

Mickie Kennedy [00:57:35]:
Right.

James Kademan [00:57:36]:
You’re doing research on whatever project, like this is taking forever. And now you just have to deal with all these ads and stuff like that that still suck your bandwidth just on a different level, I guess, than you didn’t even know was possible. So very interesting. Mickey, tell us that website one more time.

Mickie Kennedy [00:57:52]:
So it’s, uh, our website’s ereleases.com and that free video masterclass of strategic types of releases, the ones you should be focusing on, is ereleases.com/plan, P-L-A-N.

James Kademan [00:58:05]:
Got it. Simple enough. And that’s a video or is that a book?

Mickie Kennedy [00:58:09]:
It’s a video. There is some accompanying download materials as well, but it’s largely a video that’s under an hour. It was like 4 or 5 hours and some of my staff said, people just aren’t finishing it. So, I really went back and tried to condense it to get it so that it’s digestible. Who knows? Maybe I probably need to get it under a 2-minute TikTok, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

James Kademan [00:58:33]:
That’s just many 2-minute TikToks, right? Yeah, one at a time. I get, I mean, that’s the nature of the beast here. We released hour-long podcast interviews and we’ll get tens of views, but the little clips get thousands of views. So we’re all just a bunch of goldfish, I guess. I don’t know, the attention span. A little short. So anyways, Mickey, I appreciate you being on the show.

Mickie Kennedy [00:58:57]:
Thanks for having me.

James Kademan [00:58:59]:
This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. My name is James Kademann, and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country, on the web at https://callsoncall.com. And of course, the Bold Business Book A Book for the Entrepreneur in All of Us, available wherever fine books are sold. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, give us a big old thumbs up, subscribe, and of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends, especially those friends who got some news or they need to hire someone like Mickie to help them get some news, write some news, to release the news to grow their business. Is that safe to say, Mickie?

Mickie Kennedy [00:59:43]:
Absolutely, yes.

James Kademan [00:59:44]:
Right around there. We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guest, Mickie Kennedy of eReleases. Mickey, can you tell us that website one more time?

Mickie Kennedy [00:59:53]:
https://erleases.com/plan. P-L-A-N.

James Kademan [00:59:56]:
Perfect. Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night at the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome, and if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.