IN CLEAR FOCUS: Guests Shanté Micah and Joshua Moody, co-founders of Good News, reveal how earned media builds unmatched credibility in today’s fragmented attention landscape. They discuss the Good News Blueprint for systematic PR success, outdated practices to avoid, data-driven audience targeting, and creating compelling pitches under 200 words. Listen now to discover strategies for turning earned media coverage into lasting business assets.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS …
Joshua Moody: These tools should do tool things. They should do bot things, whereas humans should do human things. And that’s also one big reason why we advocate for the model that we do.
Shanté Micah: Earned media cuts through the noise and it gives you immense amount of credibility with your visibility. It’s the type of credibility that money can’t buy. Trust is the most valuable currency you can have from your audience.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. While digital technology has transformed marketing in countless ways, one timeless principle remains: Third-party endorsement builds a level of consumer trust that’s difficult to achieve through other channels. Our guests today are pioneering an innovative approach to public relations that makes media visibility more accessible to businesses of all sizes. Shanté Micah is co-founder of Good News, an agency that specializes in helping brands, public figures and thought leaders enhance their visibility, clout, and credibility through earned media. With over 20 years of experience in media and public relations, Shanté is also the author of “PR Power Play,” a book focused on modern PR strategies. Joshua Moody is an award-winning marketer with over a decade of multi-channel experience who also serves as the technical expert and co-founder for Good News. Joshua has previously led teams of marketers, writers, and designers at companies including Salesforce, Discover, and Pluralsight. At 97th Floor, Joshua led one of the largest revenue-generating teams and trained many of the company’s leaders in content marketing and overall digital strategy. Together, Shanté and Joshua have developed the Good News Blueprint, a systematic approach to helping brands secure meaningful media coverage without the high costs traditionally associated with PR. To discuss how brands can leverage PR to build trust and credibility, I’m delighted that Shanté and Joshua are joining us today from Utah and Texas, respectively. Shanté and Josh, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Shanté Micah: Thank you.
Joshua Moody: Glad to be here.
Adrian Tennant: Shanté, why is earned media more important than ever for brands?
Shanté Micah: Earned media is more important because the old playbooks, they’re not working anymore. I think we’ve all noticed a change in paid ads, in even our own content strategies, in social campaigns. It’s not working the way that it used to. And it’s for a number of reasons, which I’m sure we’ll get into throughout this conversation, but also that just the highest level attention is fragmented. So attribution is just a mess. Consumers are savvier than ever. So ads, we’re all experiencing ad fatigue. Consumers are more put off by it than they were before. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Absolutely. But it doesn’t work in the same way. Earned media cuts through the noise, and it gives you what we consider immense amount of credibility with your visibility. So it’s the type of credibility that money can’t buy. And today where trust is the most valuable currency you can have. from your audience. We strongly, firmly believe that earned media is your competitive edge out there.
Adrian Tennant: What led you to establish Good News?
Shanté Micah: It wasn’t something that I thought I was going to do initially. I’ve been in the PR space and brand marketing space for 20 years. And Josh and I have known each other for 11 years. And we met at a digital marketing agency. We didn’t work together. We had our own teams, but we’d have these sidebar conversations where we would just talk about everything from leadership and “How are you running your team?” and “how are you creating impact here?” And then of course, strategies on how you’re doing by your clients. And through those conversations, we had this alignment of values that was really clear. So after I left the agency, we stayed in touch. And a couple years after that, Josh crossed my mind one day. I reached out to him. I said, “Hey, we need to chat.” And he’s like, “No way. I just thought about you the other day.” So we got on a Zoom call and what we took away from that Zoom call was just to be accountability partners. We each had projects we were working on. I had gone corporate side. I’d been through the pandemic with a billion-dollar brand. And I honestly thought I was closing the chapter on PR. I thought I’d seen it all at that point and thought I was like gonna dive into leadership and leadership development. But yeah, Josh and I, we synced up, we became accountability partners where we’re checking in each week on different projects. And one day he asked that question of, “Would you ever be interested in doing something together?” And I was like, “You know what, Josh, that list of people I’d partner with is real short and you’re on it.” And Good News came about, honestly, if I think back, it was a few weeks after the fact. We were considering doing maybe a podcast together because we really loved the medium, but I kept getting phone calls from people, people that I cared about, former colleagues, friends, family, and they were just asking about this PR space and how to demystify it. And so that was where I brought the idea to him and said, “Do you think we could take my frameworks of 20 years and engineer a better solution – like build the thing that I wish I had had over the 20 years?” And he took a look at it and Josh is quite brilliant, you’ll find at engineering those types of things into scalable operations. And that’s what we did. That was the impetus of Good News. And it’s been four years now. And I thought I was closing chapter in PR, but I’m back. It’s exciting as it’s ever been.
Adrian Tennant: Great to hear the founding story. Josh, how has the relationship between digital marketing and PR evolved in recent years?
Joshua Moody: It’s evolved substantially. And what I like most is that I don’t feel like we are through the evolution. I feel like we’re just kind of at the beginning. So I come from a digital marketing and largely SEO background. SEO, social, ads, kind of all of these different disciplines used to live kind of in their own silos, right? You would create a piece of content. You would then push it out, get it live. And then you would have, you know, maybe another part of your team that’s building backlinks, you’d have another team member that’s doing social and kind of pushing it out there. Your core goal is that you would rank your content, right? As you rank your content, people would see that on search. And they would get excited and think, “Hey, Google is vouching for this brand, they must have some sort of authority.” And so not only do you get the click, and you get the traffic and potentially a sale if you’ve done everything right, You get that credibility that flows through to your brand and that manifests through other channels like direct traffic or branded searches. Nowadays, AI is kind of blurring those lines. So now you go to Google and you type in a search and what you’re going to see is you’re going to see an AI overview where AI is now synthesizing an answer and giving it to you. And because that’s kind of being blurred, everything is fundamentally shifting. In order to optimize, to show up in those results, it’s not the same old game that we all used to play with SEO. Nowadays, these AI large language models, they’re pulling from the entire corpus of the internet. Everywhere, you know, how how do you become what we like to deem omnipresent or “effortlessly omnipresent”? And really the core strategy is going to be you got to be everywhere You got to be out there promoting your brand and we believe that the best way to do that is through PR. There’s a lot of other kind of benefits that we’ll get to other byproducts later, but I feel like that’s kind of the core way the digital marketing and PR is evolving is nowadays. PR is really the Genesis to the flywheel and it’s enabling all the rest of your channels. So if you really have to focus on one, we say, “Look, focus on PR and you’re going to get your content assets. You’re going to get your links. You’re going to get all of the other waterfall effect from that content.”
Adrian Tennant: Why should PR and digital marketing functions be more integrated within organizations?
Joshua Moody: Yeah, so because I come from a marketing background, I am a lover of data. And Shanté and I talk about this endlessly, that you can leverage a lot of that data that you get from the digital marketing world for PR. And so that’s another angle in which these two disciplines are blending. In the digital marketing space, you would do something like keyword research, which is really the SEO jargon for sizing up your market demand. You know, you’re trying to get a sense of what people are looking for, where they’re at online, what their interests are. You can use that data in order to understand what is the most valuable for your audience or to your audience. And then from that, you can then create stories that resonate with said audience. And that’s really at the heart of what we advocate for is leverage some of these tools in order to understand your target market so that you can be more human. But it really is about getting to that human level. So while that data exists, use it not just to be kind of a robotic person, but to enable yourself to be more human. And then on the other side of that, everything that you create, you can then leverage for backlinks. You can leverage that for more social media posts. You can run advertising to those podcasts that you’re featured on. You can put it in an email for your nurture sequences, but that only really hits kind of the maximum synergy when those are all blended together. If they’re operating in silos, there’s almost too much time in between one channel to the next to actually have the maximum impact to drive someone from your press back to your site, have all of your messaging line up and then have them take whatever action that you’re looking for.
Adrian Tennant: Shanté, when we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned that most businesses approach PR like it’s still 1999. So what outdated PR practices do you still see companies clinging to?
Shanté Micah: So many, so many. So I think that the biggest thing is PR, there is a mystique to it. And there’s a glamour, but I would say that it’s become this elusive thing. So even just having PR instead of public relations, people sometimes consider it synonymous with press releases. In 1999, press releases, you know, before social media, before even podcasts, all of these different mediums we had, that was the way to announce something. And press releases are largely outdated. However, I don’t think that most big companies have gotten that memo. And I understand the need for a press release on the tail end of a campaign, especially if you have investors. That’s usually something that signals to them that, you know, “This is part of our just bank of assets that we have to do.” But for the most part, press releases, they’re not going to get you press. Press releases are not, you know, what journalists are waiting with bated breath to read. They’re not great demonstrations of the actual story. So that’s one thing. I do think that the PR agency model specifically, it’s outdated. It has not caught up to what we need today. I don’t think it’s the same for other agency models, but for PR specifically, where it’s the Rolodex and the gatekeeping that has to happen in order for that to, you know, to translate into your value, it needs to change. We have access to more information, more data. So bloated PR retainers with a very elusive type of result structure does not make sense. I think we need to ground those a lot more. More people need to know that they need a visibility system. They don’t necessarily have to wait until they can afford an agency. You don’t need a Rolodex in advance. You need simply a system to do that research, connect the dots, so that the pitches, you can have some pitch consistency. And you can do that. You can do that with all the tools that we have now.
Adrian Tennant: Josh, how are you using data and research tools at Good News to scale the traditionally relationship-based PR process?
Joshua Moody: So, I want to be clear, we don’t advocate for anything other than relationship-based PR. And that’s kind of a different, I think, take from the way most people think about it when they hear, hey, you know, you’re using AI, you’re using tech to scale this. Really, the way that we think about it is we want to leverage tools, SaaS products, AI, all of that kind of nerdy stuff that I love. We want to use that in order to make people have more free time so that they can be more human first. So one way that we talk about it internally is these tools should do tool things. They should do bot things, whereas humans should do human things. And that’s also one big reason why we advocate for the model that we do, which is not go out and get a PR agency to run all of your press. But rather, we want to empower you to run your own PR campaigns, because we believe that it is human-to-human. We believe you should be the one telling your story, because no one’s going to tell as good as you are. And you’re going to be able to craft the right pitches that will resonate with journalists and then, by proxy, resonate with the audience, which is the most important. So really what we’re doing to scale kind of this traditionally just one-to-one approach, it’s still one-to-one in terms of the outreach, but then all of the data collection beforehand, the understanding individuals. So a good way to think about this is say you wanted to get out there in the podcast space. And instead of going and trying to find, you know, one podcast at a time, we can analyze thousands. And in most cases, tens of thousands of podcasts at a time to understand which podcasts talk about the different macro topics in your industry, micro topics in your industry. And then we can take that and run it through a series of filters. Is that podcast defunct? Have they posted in the last 45 days? And then we can go even further. Do they likely have guests? So instead of saying, “Hey, go out there and pitch every single podcast,” we can say, “Hey, here’s a really tight list. Here’s 200 podcasts, but they’re exactly what you’re looking for because they contain the audience. That’s going to resonate most with your message.” Then you as a practitioner can go and pitch those podcasts. You know that your message is going to hit with a much greater kind of thunderclap and then the audience is going to benefit from it. So it’s really this holistic human-to-human process as opposed to being something akin to just scaling, you know, in mass.
Adrian Tennant: Well, I can attest to the success of that approach because that’s exactly how you reached out to me.
Shanté Micah: Here we are.
Adrian Tennant: Shanté, let’s talk about your book, “PR Power Play.” What are the key components of the Good News Blueprint?
Shanté Micah: Yes. So the book “PR Power Play,” it came from the frameworks that I used for 20 years. And then the nomenclature of the Good News Blueprint was just me putting a name to those frameworks. So the blueprint is basically what we’ve suggested so far, which is building this visibility system. And it has three pillars and some of them you would recognize, but we call them different things for very specific reasons. So the first one is what we call a connecting index. That’s your roadmap to the media, to the publications, the journalists, their beat, their body of work, their audiences, the degrees of separation between you and them. And we call it a connecting index as opposed to a media list because we’re reminding people it’s about connecting with them. It’s about understanding them as a person versus the email that you get from a database. So that’s the first pillar. The second pillar is the storytelling index. And this might be, I mean, it’s pretty on the nose, but it’s the stories, it’s the angles that you can be participating in in the world, that are happening in the world. So you might think that it’s my products, it’s my services, not necessarily. It’s the angles in which those products and services are relevant to a stranger. So you have to consider it from trends, timing, obviously relevance, and all of those narratives that the journalists and their beats, their bodies of works will cover. So that when you go to the third pillar, which is the pitching index, those are the emails and you can find best practices online. And I would say absorb those, but I would caution you from just downloading a swipe file, putting it into AI and be like, “Yeah, create me a bunch of pitch emails.” It might get you 60% there, but the specificity in which you want to pitch. You may think that the stakes are pretty low if you mass blast, but the truth is, especially for journalists and hosts like yourself who probably get dozens if not hundreds of pitch emails in a given week or a given day, if you get a pitch that is just obviously lacking in any type of effort and homework, you may not blacklist them, but you’re not going to consider them a source to you moving forward. You may not open the next email you get from them. So the stakes are a little bit higher. But if you can put together all of these parts of a pitch in under 200 words, make it pithy, make it relevant, make it powerful, demonstrate you did that homework: that is what we talk about in that third pillar, which is the pitching index. And then, of course, we go into, in the book, the metrics and monitoring and the things that come once you have that pitching pipeline up and running, you’re going to want to edit against. But yeah, that’s what the Good News Blueprint is.
Adrian Tennant: Shanté, your “Pitch Perfect Checklist” includes, as you just mentioned, keeping pitches under 190 words. So what other elements must be included in a compelling pitch, do you think?
Shanté Micah: Yes, this is so important. If I cannot emphasize anything else, this is absolutely the reason you do all the other things. You do all that research that Josh was talking about. But you need a few things and these are a few things that you probably saw in the pitch that we sent you. you might think I need to be really clever and there’s a time and place to break some of the rules and you know add some levity, but the truth is you need to be helpful. So the singular job of a pitch is to make a stranger care. The breakdown of that is yes, 200 words. You have no reason to go beyond 200 words in that initial pitch. You want to make it easy to scan. You want to make it easy to digest. I would say the things that work really, really well are things like a intro line that says specifically, “Hey, this is a pitch for this show” – specifically get their name right. Please don’t say “To whom it may concern,” please find a name and then get the name right. Spell it correctly. That’s that tells them a few things, but that first line is going to be, “Hey, this is what it is” specifically. And I like to add a little bit of a pattern interrupt where I acknowledge I am creeping into your inbox cold. And I want you to know that I know that, and I respect your time, and I want to be of value to you. Then you have the briefest of intros – and by briefest I mean two lines max. There’s no reason for it to be a paragraph or multiple paragraphs. Then you want to have a clear tie into their audience. So you want to demonstrate, “I know these things about your audience. I know that they care about these things.” That’s what you’re going to say. And from that, you can tie into the pitch idea, the thing that you want to tell them. “Here’s my idea.” I like to serve that up in bullet points, just three bullet points, no more. And then have a clear ask that respects the journalist, the host’s time. And then from there, have a good signature with a link in it so that they can click on that link and immediately see, “Well, yeah, you are who you say you are,” because you’d be surprised what AI is doing right now. And that’s it. You have no jargon, no buzzwords, no full-on bios thinking that’s your pitch, just the story, why their audience will care, two follow-ups, no more, and then let it be.
Adrian Tennant: Love that. Also love the use of the audience insights. Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
|
|
Kate Mackie: Hello, I’m Kate Mackie, author of “B2B Marketing Fundamentals: Drive Impact Across Brand, Reputation, Relationships, and Revenue,” published by Kogan Page.
My book translates well-proven marketing theories and frameworks into actionable strategies specifically designed for B2B marketing. Drawing on over 20 years of experience, I address the unique complexities that B2B marketers face on a daily basis. This book will help you build stronger brands and drive measurable revenue results. You’ll discover how to leverage AI and connected data for actionable insights, with real-world examples to illustrate effective B2B marketing in practice. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on “B2B Marketing Fundamentals,” when you order directly from KoganPage.com. Just enter the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and UK. I hope my book helps you develop the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to deliver effective marketing strategies that drive tangible business impact. Thank you! |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Shanté Mica and Joshua Moody, co-founders of Good News and pioneers of a streamlined approach to PR and media visibility. Josh, why do you prefer using tools like BuzzSumo and SparkToro rather than traditional PR databases?
Joshua Moody: We believe that fresh is greater than fossilized. So what do I mean by this? Well, if you are leveraging one of these databases, they don’t update as frequently as you would hope. Even the most updated databases aren’t going to update as fast as checking what they’ve recently published that morning. And that is where you hit someone when they’re promoting work that they just spent, you know, copious amounts of time on trying to get it out the door. That’s fresh. It’s raw to them. So fresh is always gonna beat fossilized, and I think about this a lot when I think about cold pitches, right? So you’re pitching a host journalist, whomever. Imagine that you were doing that in person, like you were sitting at a coffee shop, and you were going to go and you’re going to pitch someone in person. If you just walked up and pitch them the same way that probably many people have pitched you via email, it would make for a really awkward encounter, probably pretty abrasive. But instead, if you approached with common ground, you know, having seen, “Hey, we overlap in this area of marketing” or what have you, “I see you’re working on this. You know, I’m actually in the space too.” It’s going to be a lot more human-to-human, a lot more natural. You’re going to be able to grow that relationship from there. And maybe it’s not, “Hey, it’s going to be a good fit to be on my show or vice versa.” Maybe there’s some data that you don’t know. This is why it’s person-to-person and very human. Because we’re building contacts here and contexts instead of just, “Hey, this is quid pro quo. I’m going to be on your show. You’re going to, you know, do this for me. I’m going to do this for you. We’re done.” But instead, you know, we’re building these relationships for the long term. So that’s really why we prefer tools like BuzzSumo, SparkToro. They feel like they get you closer to the human, what the human wants. SparkToro is kind of the other way, where SparkToro helps you understand your audience really deeply. In addition to the journalist, which again, that’s really what you’re shooting for with any of this PR is you’re trying to add value while getting your message out there. So I guess that’s why we prefer those types of tools over databases that can get outdated and lead to poor connection.
Adrian Tennant: Shanté, you make a distinction between using earned media as a trophy versus as a tool. So how should brands leverage media mentions after they’ve secured them?
Shanté Micah: So when I mean trophy versus tool, it’s two things. It’s one, how you get press as you think, “Well, I just won an award,” therefore press release goes out. That usually has some version of, “We’re thrilled to announce, dot, dot.” A change in lineup of executive team or an initiative that’s important to you. And again, press release, “We’re thrilled to announce, dot, dot, dot.” So on the front half is you’re treating it like it’s a trophy and really it is a tool. So on the back half is you have to consider it more than vanity metrics. You have to consider that every media feature is a business asset. So it could be atomized. It can be shared across multiple times. A podcast like this, you’re going to get 30, 60-plus snippets that even if you shared it every so many weeks, a snippet, a year from now, most of your audience would still consider it new information to them. So that’s using it as a tool, as an ad. So after everything that you get as far as feature, we talk about Atomize, Amplify. Atomize, amplify, again and again. And it’s all that. So turn it into something that lives on your website, but not just there. Contextually, how can you serve that up to your audience in a way that’s relevant again and again? There’s snippets, there’s quotes, there’s actual full stories, there’s ways that it can be immersed in the sales process. Turning one story into 20 visible touchpoints is utilizing it as a tool. Otherwise, you’re leaving a lot of attention on the table.
Adrian Tennant: Josh, you’ve used the term “effortless omnipresence.” What does this concept mean for brands?
Joshua Moody: Effortless omnipresence really is being such a thought leader that it feels like you show up everywhere. So when people are looking for you or looking for information in your space, you just happen to be there. You have a hot take on the specific issue and you’re seemingly everywhere. And from a practitioner perspective, that means energy arbitrage is what we like to say is like using every input that you have to maximize more than one output. So one input equals six outputs. And PR allows you to be able to do that, right? We can film a podcast, and then we can take that podcast and we can snip it up. We can promote the core podcast. We can promote the sub clips. And then not only that, I know I mentioned this before, but you’re going to get backlinks from iTunes, from Libsyn, from wherever it’s hosted, from wherever it’s shared. So that’s going to age your SEO. It’s going to age your content market. It’s going to age your social. And that really maximizes the amount of energy that you get out of the energy that you put in. It’s so huge. So many PR departments that we work with or founders, they don’t have a ton of time to say, “Hey, I’m going to go spend hours and hours and hours pitching every single day.” So they really do need to maximize every unit of energy going into their PR efforts for every little squeeze of lemonade that they can get.
Adrian Tennant: Shanté, in your book, you talk about turning borrowed audiences into owned audiences. What strategies have you found most effective for this kind of conversion?
Shanté Micah: First, I’ll double down on that Amplify, Atomize. There’s a lot that you can do once everything goes live initially. And even if it lives on another platform, you can obviously reshare all of that content. You can retarget through an ads campaign. This is where your understanding of digital marketing comes in really handy – with amplifying and atomizing. There are CTA bridges. BuzzSumo did a study and they found that I think it was upwards of 50 percent of journalists are open to you talking about something like an offer. So having something prepared obviously has to be really easy. So a simple link that people can remember wherever they’re from and if it’s not clickable it’s something that they could type in so it’s direct traffic. And have a high-value gift, something. We couldn’t call it a lead magnet or a training, something that would be the next nurture sequence to anyone listening and resonating with what you’re saying. And then, of course the post-feature nurture and workflows. I think there’s two audiences you have to consider. The journalists, There’s a lot of ways to keep rapport with a journalist and it’s not just pitching them. You know, it’s noticing their work after the fact. It’s resharing their work. It’s commenting on their work. It’s amplifying what they’re doing and the value they’re producing and acknowledging that. And then it’s the people that do find you. We find a lot of people come to our website. They opt into one of our lead magnets and they’re the best person because they come from a podcast like yours. And they have a relationship with you and they think, “Well, if Adrian says these guys are okay enough to be on a show” and you put in all these positive deposits, they come to us and they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t have these barriers. I don’t have these walls put up.” So those are probably the two specific strategies that I would not misjudge how effective those are.
Adrian Tennant: Josh, beyond counting media mentions, how should brands measure the success of their PR efforts?
Joshua Moody: Yeah, that’s a great question. My answer is the unfortunate, “Well, it depends …” Let me give you some context. It really depends because what we find is when we’re working with brands that are just starting out, so say they’re young, they’re emerging brands, they haven’t had a ton of PR traction quite yet. There could be a few reasons why. Maybe it’s that they don’t have the skillset, and maybe they don’t understand exactly how to do it. Or maybe it’s, there are a lot of nerves involved with getting out there and spreading your message. And Shanté and I can speak to the entrepreneurial aspect. When you’re building something, it’s your baby. And so getting out there and telling that story, there can be a bit of apprehension. So what I would say in the beginning, the core thing to track is kind of those first few podcasts. We always advocate for podcasts. Podcasts are so amazing in terms of energy input to output. But if you’re not looking to do podcasts, your first placement in the media, there’s a lot of psychological reasons why I say, “Hey, before you start getting too deep into the metrics of tracking, dial it back to getting your first feature and then your second, and then your third.” The psychological benefits are you’re going to overcome the fear of getting out there and sharing your message. The second thing is just because you’re creating something, or maybe it’s a brand you’re working with, you might think you know how to tell the story really well. But when you actually get into telling that story, things might change a little bit. You know, you might say something and feel like, “Oh, why did I say that?” Or, “Oh, that came out a little bit clunky.” So those first few features that you get really teach you just as much as anybody else, how you should position yourself and how you can phrase things really well. So it not only squashes that fear, it helps you refine your message, but then also helps stress test your message moving forward for pitches. Cause you’re going to find out what resonates, what doesn’t resonate and move on from there. So that’s kind of the first milestone that we advocate for is time to getting those first few features. Because what we typically find is once people get those first few features under their belt, they’re on fire and they’re excited. And they’re like, “Wow, I just saw myself go live on this podcast. I shared it. I’m getting all this positive feedback. Now I want to do more!” And the ball is rolling down the hill. Now, if it’s a company that has a little bit more exposure and has been out there for a little bit longer, one thing that we talk about a lot is the consistency of those features. And the reason for that is Shanté and I both believe that PR isn’t just one, one big campaign and then you’re done, you know, and then move on. But it’s a system that you put in place that you can massage for the long term. And there are so many positive benefits of doing it that way. Not only do you get to kind of shape your perception in the public over time, but when different unexpected threats arise and you need to get your story out there, you need to do some sort of damage control, having those already lined up, those features already ready to go. give you kind of a superpower that you’re grateful when you have it. It’s that whole kind of phrase that people say that you want to dig the well before you’re thirsty. And so those are just a couple of reasons why, but if you’re tracking, you know, how many features you’re getting ongoing, in addition to the size and the scale and the impressions, those are all great. And we don’t advocate not tracking those. But if you had to just track one number that shows if you’re going up or going down, track the number of mentions. Because you can reuse those for so many things. It’s not only about the big shows either. The way we structure all of our blueprints is we have phase one, phase two, and phase three outlets, and they all have their purpose. It’s not all about getting on Forbes and Joe Rogan and Huffington Post. It’s about leveraging phase one outlets, phase two outlets, and then to work up to phase three outlets. So even those seemingly small emerging outlets are going to be incredibly beneficial to you.
Adrian Tennant: Great advice. Shanté, if listeners take just one action after hearing this conversation to improve their PR efforts, what would you recommend?
Shanté Micah: Here it is – this is the bridge! Go to higoodnews.com and that’s “hi” as in “hello.” So HI, higoodnews.com. What we have is a banner, and you can opt into this banner. We have a little bit of an intake. It should take you about two minutes. And then in about two days, we’ll return to you a sampler of what that connecting index could be for you and specifically to podcasts. So it would give you an idea of where to start. Podcasts are, we think, a perfect pace for anyone to start and then fold in industry and digital and contributing authorships and eventually leverage things for top national. But get started. We’ll help you. Just go to higoodnews.com.
Adrian Tennant: Insightful and practical conversation, loved it. Shanté and Josh, thank you both very much for being my guests this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Shanté Micah: Thank you.
Joshua Moody: Appreciate it.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guests this week, Shanté Mica and Joshua Moody, co-founders of Good News. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS
02:40: The Importance of Earned Media
03:47: Founding Good News
06:14: Evolution of Digital Marketing and PR
08:35: Integrating PR and Digital Marketing
10:15: Outdated PR Practices
12:35: Using Data to Scale PR
15:22: Key Components of the Good News Blueprint
18:06: Elements of a Compelling Pitch
20:52: Using Tools for Effective PR
24:27: Leveraging Media Mentions
26:18: Effortless Omnipresence
27:54: Turning Borrowed Audiences into Owned Audiences
29:50: Measuring PR Success
33:56: Actionable Takeaway for Listeners
34:52: Conclusion and Thanks
