Is your brand PR ready? 5 steps for the AI era

0:00The first thing every communications team must do is to assess the information environment around the organization. They must make sure that it's clear, current, and credible.

0:11Jason Mudd: Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd.

0:18Jason Mudd: Hello and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. I'm excited to bring you yet another episode of our show. Thank you for tuning in. We really appreciate it. If you have a moment, don't forget to leave us a review. We'd be sure to enter you into a prize where you can get drawn to win some on top of PR swag and maybe even a personal gift from me. Today, we've got a guest of Slava Balikov. We're here to talk today about, is your brand PR ready? What communication teams should measure before a crisis? And we're going to talk a lot about AI as well. So I'm excited about this episode.

0:55Jason Mudd: Let me welcome Slava Balikov, a member of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland, brings 15 years of senior communication and public relations experience across technology, financial services, telecommunications, and consumer brands. He has led global PR programs and guided organizations through crisis, reputation challenges, and major business transformations. Slava helps organizations get more value from their communication assets. He builds stronger, more consistent reputations and identifies gaps before a crisis or change exposes them, including what AI can reveal about those blind spots.

1:38Jason Mudd: Sava, welcome to On Top of PR. Yeah, thanks, and I'm really excited, and thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm glad to be here, glad to have you. Thank you for the opportunity here. So today we're talking about, is your brand PR ready? What communication teams should measure before a crisis? We're going to get into how to audit what AI says about your brand and what to fix first. We're going to talk about how to assess PR readiness before a crisis or transaction tests it. And then thirdly, we're going to talk about what executives want from PR reporting and why coverage volume rarely answers it. Slava, does that cover everything you want to talk about?

2:15Jason Mudd: Was there anything else we should also include? I think you'll cover even more than I'd expect it. All right, let's do it. Excellent, excellent. So you're connecting with us today from Ireland. Thanks for joining in. Very excited to jump into this question of, is your brand PR ready? And then what communication teams should measure before a crisis? So if you're interacting with an organization and how do you pose the question to them or how do you help them answer the question of, is your brand PR ready? So if we speak here, like about mostly about the PR readiness and the AI era. So here is really important because many organizations at the moment, they speak a lot about the AI optimization.

2:56But, you know, before optimizing anything, organizations need to understand the information environment that already exists around them. So what their own channel says, what the credible third party says, where information is outdated or contradictory, what AI took currently surface. So for me, this is kind of a starting point of the PR readiness, especially now in the AI era.

3:20Jason Mudd: Slava, let me ask you, what should communication teams measure before a crisis? So for me, the first thing every communications team must do is to assess the information environment around the organization. They must make sure that it's clear, current, and credible. So I actually have like five steps of this kind of PR readiness of my personal PR readiness framework. So the first one is to establish the baseline. It's what can people and AI tools discover today, identify gaps, outdated information, and contradictions. The second one is to check owned information. So it's websites, corporate pages, even like metadata on your website, leadership profiles, and all other control touchpoints.

4:06They all should clearly explain who the organization is and what it does. The third one is to look beyond the owned channels. So you need to map credible third-party sources, media, industry sources, analysts, and other references. These are part of the information environment, even though PR team has no control on them. The fourth is diagnosed divergence. So it's where own and external sources differ. Ask why. Because the difference may be like as a factual problem, you know, data source, legitimate criticism, and maybe a narrative displayed incorrectly. And the fifth of the final one is that products is monitored over time.

4:48So products, executive coverage, and AI outputs change treat readiness as an ongoing diagnostic, right? Like just not one of exercise. After you apply all these changes, you have to monitor and check everything. Maybe, you know, not once, but let's say every month to see what changed.

5:06Jason Mudd: So check it every month to see what changed. Meaning your own content as well or other moving parts? Everything. Because, you know, especially in big organizations, you work a lot with different departments. and sometimes communications, you know, between departments can struggle. So you need to always keep an eye on what's happening with your own source. But at the same time, you need to, for example, ask AI about your organization. You can ask, like, use different AI tools. Ask Cloud, ask ChatGPT, what do they know about organization? Ask about, like, crisis situation around your organization.

5:41So you need to make sure that information is moving after you, you know, apply some changes. Of course, like PR is not a magic tool or you don't know like magic spells to, you know, to change everything, click your fingers and change everything. Yes, this is kind of constant. This requires constant monitoring. And this is actually, it's like with the news coverage. You monitor them every day to see what's happening around your market, around your competitors, around your business. So I think this might be kind of, it's pretty similar exercise here.

6:15Jason Mudd: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So who owns this in an organization, would you say? I mean, does the leader do it or do they delegate it? Who's best charged with, you know, obviously the leader is always going to be responsible, but who do they delegate it to in your mind? So I think that if it's a big organization, for example, and this organization has an agency, agency can actually do that as a part of their day-to-day routine. They monitor news coverage using some, you know, third-party tools or Google. And of course, someone from the team must be involved in this process. Because if an agency spots any divergence or any difference that they think is not good, or if they think is great in terms of how a company is displayed in the A2.

7:00So in this case, actually, they can flag the PR person. And I think that the communication team actually must own the process. Okay.

7:11Jason Mudd: And when they don't like what something AI says about them, how would you prescribe that they fix it? It's all actually all depends because critical doesn't mean incorrect, right? So if the facts are wrong, we need to seek for a correction where appropriate. If the facts are correct and criticism is accurate, in this case, the main job of the comps team is to understand it and, you know, make the company's position available where appropriate. and address the underlying issue rather than, you know, trying to erase the criticism. Right. Okay. Okay. And let's see, the next thing we want to talk about is how to assess PR readiness before a crisis or transaction ultimately tests that.

7:52The approach is pretty similar. You have to start with analysis, right? You have to see where your company now and like to make sure where do you have, you know, gaps and you actually can use this five-step PR readiness framework that I mentioned just to understand your company position. Because if your company has some significant gaps across your own sources, or if the information somewhere is incorrect about your company. So this is something that you need to fix before it starts rolling into a big snowball and potentially become something that company must, something that can become like a crisis, which everyone wants to avoid, of course.

8:35Jason Mudd: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I like how your framework can be applied to this as well. So let's talk about the other thing that you mentioned here, which is what executives want from PR reporting and why coverage volume rarely answers that. It's a really nice topic, actually, because for executives, it's important to see the value from the coverage companies receive. Because, to be honest, executives, there's no obligatory for the executives to know every media resource existing, right? And they just rely on the PR and communications team to see the result in this. actually they're not just publishing something somewhere, but this actually meet their specific target audience.

9:20And in case with the coverage volume, which you mentioned, of course, sometimes when you try to count the number of pieces of coverage you receive, it doesn't make a lot of sense because, for example, when you distribute your press release across the wire, you'll get tons of coverage. But if it's actually coverage you would like to get, Will this coverage bring the value to your organization? So in this case, it's important to show the executives why this specific piece of coverage is actually important to the organization. And this piece of coverage brings the value to your organization. And yeah, because showing the numbers, it's fine.

10:00And like, you know, seeing like hundreds of publications is really, really lovely. But as I said, quality is much more important than quantity.

10:09Jason Mudd: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, I don't know many CEOs who are asking, you know, how many media clips did we acquire this week or this month or this quarter? They're truly interested in how did that impact the organization? So measuring impressions or number of appearances and all that feels very, you know, people will call, you know, vanity metrics as opposed to a true business impact or, well, what is that media coverage visibility or number of, you know, news stories? What did that actually do for our business? How has it made our company more successful, generated more leads, generated more revenue, shift perception or shift support and things like that?

10:46Jason Mudd: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, very good. Well, this was very helpful. I think you shared some interesting insights with our audience. Do you want to cover anything else while we're together today? One thing also I would like to cover, maybe just to say, you know, just two lines about the, you know, currently a lot of people's actually focused on adopting different AI tools and optimization tools. before checking the fundamental. This is really important, and I want to highlight it one more time, that information is key here, and if you don't understand what's happening around your organization, then you probably will meet a lot of problems when you start with AI optimization or even start any huge campaigns.

11:27Jason Mudd: Yes, I completely agree. You've got to stay ahead of it, for sure. So, very helpful. Well, Slava, this has been a great episode. I really appreciate the insights you shared today. For our audience, I want to thank you for tuning in to On Top of PR and giving us the privilege and the pleasure of helping you stay On Top of PR. If you found this episode beneficial, please take a moment to share it with a friend or colleague in the profession who would benefit from hearing these insights. And again, we appreciate all that you do. And thanks for your support of On Top of PR. This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.

12:01Jason Mudd: Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. and check out past shows at ontopofpr.com.

12:33Bye.