Why Thought Leadership Is the New PR

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0:52Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance. My guest today is Amy Rosenberg. She's a seasoned PR strategist, agency founder, and author with deep expertise in building visibility and credibility for organizations of all sizes. We are going to talk about her latest book, A Practical Guide to Public Relations for Businesses, Nonprofits, and PR Leaders. So Amy, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. So you cover a lot of ground in the book. I mean, something that's called a practical guide is usually pretty broad. I mean, traditional media relations, obviously SEO is in there, AI is in there.

1:34What are the most common misconceptions, basically, when it comes to PR that you see businesses still having in 2025? thought. Well, I'm going to laugh if people still think that we need to do press releases. That's like an old misconception that like people should actually be over that by now. But mainly, this is going to be funny. You don't always need PR. That's kind of the thing. So here's the thing we and that's a whole book title. Practical. We need to be practical about things. We don't need to do everything. And sometimes we can do PR. Sometimes we can do a press release, but we need to think about it first and get things organized first.

2:14And actually we need to have ideally a nice online presence first, and then we can go and do some PR. And right now PR is actually helping with AI search. So showing up in AI. So the old story used to be, oh, PR helps with SEO, which is showing up in Google. But now, well, we still want to show up high in Google and we can do that through digital PR and I can talk about how. But now apparently PR is very important for AI search. But of course, I'm going to have to dig into that. Well, I think there's no question that the AI crawlers, we're going to call them that, are really looking at trusted media sources to get a lot of their information.

3:02So there's no you know there's no mystery I think in why that's become more important. Yeah and so it's always been a mystery to talk about PR because it well it's PR people actually like to make it very mysterious. So what I tried to do with my first book and then also now my second is to demystify it. So the first book is for PR people because I started to see a lot of them actually weren't trained and there's kind of a right way and a wrong way to do things. And oftentimes when we have rules, that kind of helps us in a hard field and it kind of gives us some guidelines to stick by. But as I finished that book, I was thinking, well, this book is really possibly not helpful for business owners because, well, I'm giving a little bit too many examples that the PR people need.

3:56And so this book, like five years later, six years later, is much more streamlined, stripped down on the media relations tactics and really actually leads with thought leadership and how thought leadership, it's always been a part of PR, but now thought leadership is really the key to getting up higher on Google and AI. All right. I want to come back to that. But I think part of the confusion is, you know, in the old days, before we had all these digital platforms, it was really more of a, it was very much a relationship game. It was, you know, who you knew at the publications because they were very gated, you know, how you could spin a story in a way that was meaningful to a journalist.

4:41You know, those were the real skills. But then all of a sudden, you know, you know, Facebook, or we've got blogs, and we've got Reddit, we've got all these other things that essentially can be lumped into PR. I mean, how do you help people kind of say what PR actually is? Well, good question. And I love that because it's, I do, honestly, I kind of do want a little bit of silo or separation. I, we can take a PR campaign and we can transform it into content to anything. Right. But PR typically is like you're saying, the media relations aspect. But also there's a lot of more, sometimes some strategy in there, some crisis comms, some crisis prep.

5:26So sometimes we'll know we can pick out our negative aspects and get organized around those and then actually not necessarily spin it, but kind of look at the positive side of our negative aspects and put the stories around those. So you already mentioned SEO and I'm seeing a lot of SEO folks, you know, it used to just be, Hey, we could get keyword rankings by doing X, Y, and Z all day long. That's how it worked. I mean, I've seen certainly a lot of them say that's not working so well anymore. And I see a lot of SEO people talking more about PR, not as a siloed practice, but as a part of SEO now.

6:07And then you make that case certainly in the book. Do you have an example of where integrating SEO or really thinking like PR as a core component of SEO made a measurable difference? Well, I feel like right now I'm the worst salesperson ever, and I'm the one that will never tout my profession too much because it's a little salesy. But a lot of SEO people have been saying that PR is the actual driver of authentic links. So here's the thing. Google knows when you're buying links. So sometimes. So you can forget sponsored articles sometimes, depending. And then we just need to get our clients, if we can, or ourselves on high domain authority websites.

7:00And the media actually has a higher domain authority than other websites. So not only are they more credible, well, some media more credible in the public's eye, they're more credible in Google's eye. So if you're showing up in Google, then ideally you would show up in an AI chat box as well. But I mean, that to me is a little nebulous. I feel like more research needs to be done on that. And you don't get anyway, you don't get all of those links that you don't get to to review in AI. So it's just going to get really much more strategic and thoughtful. And that is really what PR people are good at.

7:43So talk a little bit more about the idea of thought leadership. You know, certainly there's certain types of businesses, certain types of industries. It makes a ton of sense. You know, nonprofits, it certainly makes a ton of sense. Do you feel like that that needs to be a strategic component of just about every business? I mean, not just that person that's like, I'm, you know, I'm this well-known CEO with a book and blah, blah, blah. But just like every business almost has to have like their version of an influencer that is, you know, that's seen in the media. Yeah, it would be great if they could.

8:19And let me just back up a little bit. So thought leadership. So B2B media or thought leadership type of media, that's an easier way to do PR. It's easier to get results for that. So often we are not looking at relationships. We are looking at streamlining. We want because we can't make relationships with everybody. So we need to have good ways to scale our PR campaigns. And so when we're doing thought leadership, that's positioning a person, whether it's an article or on the stage. we are streamlining everything because you're getting a lot more value actually in google's eyes because it all ties back to i don't know if you know the acronym eat i'm gonna mess up that's what thought leadership is eat which is the what google looks for they have human reviewers and they're looking for anyone that's writing on a topic to have experience authority trust and there was another one.

9:22I don't remember. The other E they added is expertise. So it's experience, expertise, authority, and trust. And so that's where obviously the media plays a big role, but also being able to say, I did this thing rather than telling somebody how to do it. Case studies, things of that nature have become really important. Yeah. And I just want to add that we need to kind of start somewhere, right? We don't need to start. A lot of people get really tripped up over thought leadership because, first of all, I mentioned the stage. Well, a lot of my clients are shy and they are running companies, they're CEOs, and they're busy.

10:00You know, who really has time to go out and do a lot of speaking engagements, right? So sometimes we will do that, but often we start, you've got to start somewhere again. So we start with content. And this is where we're doing great blogs from the CEO. and then we're taking that and turning it into a press article and then the press article can run ideally on a high domain authority website and then our ceo doesn't have to go anywhere like for us we're really all about efficiencies too so and i feel like my clients they don't maybe they don't have time to to get on a stage or they don't want to so that's where this kind of like practical approach to public relations comes in.

10:50This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Morning Mate. It's your all-in-one work management platform for client facing teams with project management and built in chat. You can keep communication tasks and files all in one place. No more juggling emails, chat apps. Right now they're offering a free onboarding service. It's a$3 ,000 value. So get a free 30-day trial today at morningmate.com. I'm going to go through a couple categories or a couple platforms, I should say, or channels, maybe is a better word, and relate them to PR. We're on a podcast today recording this.

11:31I happen to think podcasts is an amazing channel for thought leadership, for exposure, for backlinks, for content creation. That really is not a huge lift for a lot of people to come and do those. How do you work podcast or being a guest more specifically on a podcast into your overall PR world? Good question. So first of all, they are huge for building domain authority or for getting SEO because, you know, so often what we will do is podcasts are part of the whole thing. So we really get detailed with our media lists. And this is where we have all of our lists, but we do outline DA. So to tell you the truth, before I decided to do, well, thank you for having me on the podcast.

12:16I looked and you have a good DA. You have a really good, like 54, which for my agency, I'm at like 20 something and I'm a small agency. So you are great. And then the media, they're, you know, around 80 to 100. anyway so anyway so we look at that and then for some clients again they don't want to be too they don't they're busy we don't want to bug them and so we will you know vet where we place them and then we will also think about it as a way to practice our talk so these this is where we again starting somewhere. So if we do want to go and do a speaking engagement, we do need a little visibility first to get our client accepted.

13:05So we start with podcasts actually. And then sometimes again, podcasts are more efficient to just keep doing those. Yeah. Yeah. So, so let's jump to another one. Social media. I think for a lot of PR people, it's kind of a double-edged sword from a reputation standpoint. How do you view or how do you advise clients to work social media into their overall marketing slash PR type of plans? Well, again, I don't want to say again because I've never said this before, but I noticed that you do a lot of systems work. And so we can't, busy people, especially myself, we can't do anything without system.

13:46So and so it might not be, quote unquote, strategic, but we need to get things done. And we do need some visibility on some of the platforms, not all of them. So we'll look at a client. We'll think, OK, what platforms should they be on? And then we will create kind of rules around how often we will post about something. And a rule would be, for example, three posts per blog post. and then another rule in different right right you have to write the post differently and then another rule would be at least one if not two posts per media hit and we have to do those because we have to thank the media and tag them so anyway so we have those systems and oftentimes we were a pr firm so a lot of pr people will say well we you do social that's your job you shouldn't silo it.

14:44Well, okay, but here's the thing. Sometimes people just hire us for PR and then we notice they're not doing social and we might need them to because we're looking at a crisis down the road. So we need some positive social now. And so we will just kind of say, okay, here's our system. This is what we're doing around this social and kind of get it done for them. So PR, I know you're going to have an answer for this, but I got to set it up this way. You know, PR is often looked at as, you know, as a nice to have is, you know, you can't measure it. It doesn't drive sales necessarily. How do you get a client over that or how do you actually prove to them that PR is value?

15:30Well, like I said, I'm the worst salesperson ever, so I don't fight people. I don't have nobody has time for that also. And then also, in a way, they might be right. We have to look at the budget. It's all about your budget and your bandwidth. So some clients, we can't work with everybody. That's why I wrote the book. But also, we would like to work with, and it doesn't matter what we want. It's who is ready for a PR and who's not. And it's got to be somebody who, you've got to get your stuff together first, which is your base, which is content, I think, in this day. We've got to have like a nice kind of streamlined thing going so that you're in the groove.

16:10We've got to, you know, beat the beast. Then we can layer in some PR and then we can put PR again on a program where we can look at it like we have goals. It could be almost like sales quota goals, but for PR or content where we say, OK, we're going to just we're going to do one campaign per quarter and that might just be enough. And we just have it all scheduled out so that we're not feeling like we're missing something. But we can't really, we're trying to measure our results, right? So we do have a great database called Muckrack that is our software that connects with our clients' Google Analytics.

16:55And so we can track like, hey, where did we have this online school? So we can track where our coverage landed in terms of the location and we can track the enrollment for the school by location. So you can get really granular with that. But at the end of the day, we're all working together as a marketing team, in-house marketing team. And we're not going to say it was from the PR. Right. So. All right. People listening today, we've been kind of all over the place, talked about PR, SEO, a little bit about AI, content, social. If somebody's out there and they're thinking, you know, I need to do more in this.

17:39I mean, is there a single most important thing they can focus on, say, the next six months? In your view, if somebody said, hey, I want to get the most out of it. And again, I'm not saying, I mean, maybe the best thing they can do is hire you. But, you know, short of that, are there things that you're telling people that, hey, you need to either stop doing this and start doing this, you know, over the next six months that you think would move the needle the most? So if you're really just not doing anything, I would just say try and get yourself on a monthly blogging program for SEO. So then you might not consider that PR.

18:13But once you kind of get that going, then you can look at like the marketing calendar and kind of think about how when you can do some PR, when you can do some proactive PR. And if you look, I have a calendar on my website that is free. I need to make sure that you can access the link, but it has you could fill out your marketing calendar. And I call it marketing, but a lot of it is PR. But to be clear, PR looks a little different these days. It's not a press for say. It's an article or this, that and the other. So if you're interested in learning more, there's a lot of great research. Well, so where would you invite people to kind of find?

19:00I know we're going to have links. We have a link to your blog and PR resources. I see. So are there is there anywhere you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about the book itself? Well, I'd love if they would like to connect on LinkedIn and I doing a lot of posts there about VR. And then, yeah, if they want to go to the resources section and it might actually be under marketplace on my website, you can buy books there. But also, well, we have other things there that are free, like a bunch of videos that can walk you through the process. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

19:44Yay. Thank you. Thanks for having me.