Emilie Gerber: recommendation

Transcript context

…Awesome, okay. So you've mentioned a couple of times the rise of newsletters and podcasts. So there's kind of two buckets of questions here. One is going after these kind of non-traditional media platforms, and then the other is building your own following, and building a following on Twitter, for example. I know you worked closely with the CEO of Vox who's really good at this, and basically doesn't need press. Elon is amazing at this, maybe that's why he bought Twitter, he has this huge platform to talk about all the stuff. So maybe in the first bucket, talking about when you're trying to decide, should I go after traditional media, Vox, and VentureBeat, and Axios, and all these guys? Versus I'm going to go for newsletters. As an example, Ramp got a lot of benefit from Not Boring, that newsletter with Packy, who wrote about them constantly and loved it. And they're sponsored posts, and organic posts. So I guess the question there is just, how do you think about going after podcasts, newsletters, Twitter, LinkedIn, influencery platformy people versus traditional press? I think of newsletters and podcasts actually in the camp of, if we're pitching traditional press, we're 100% pitching those. Social is its own ball game, but I would not leave out newsletters and podcasts from any core PR strategy. To me, it's now just a part of any PR program that we're going to run, because it's just part of media now. And to me, it's just a very important part of media. In terms of social, I think doing social well is very hard. So you gave Aaron from Vox as an example, that was all 100% him. I think I helped with one tweet once about a Microsoft partnership that we did, and I was so excited. How did it do? Actually really good. A publication ended up writing a story on the tweet about Microsoft and Vox partnership because of it. Yeah, so that was fun. But generally it's not always something that you can just turn on by hiring an agency. And I've seen many companies try doing that, and not necessarily see as much success as they'd hoped for. So if a founder is naturally good at that stuff, lean into it as much as humanly possible, go for it. If they're not, and you're trying to outsource it, it can be done to some success. But I don't necessarily think it's as easy as just posting three times a week on relevant topics, there has to be more going on there. I think that if the spokesperson or the executive that you're trying to build the presence of is willing to... Going back to what I said earlier, kind of push the limit. ... Presence of is willing to, going back to what I said earlier, push the limit on opinions that they have, be bold, be controversial, then it could be worth potentially investing in. And I have seen it play out where reporters have seen those posts and used and quoted things in their articles as a result, so it can tie to your traditional media strategy a little bit, they're not necessarily fully siloed, but I would say if you're considering investing in social to just do corporate channels and not think about executives, you're really leaving a lot on the table. Corporate channels, it's very hard to build a following. To get someone to follow a brand and care about a brand, you have to be bringing something new to the table, because they don't want to read your latest blog post, they don't want to read a relevant article that your social person just decided to put out there. When you have an executive, you're following a personality, you're following a person, ideally there's more flexibility with tone, all of that sort of stuff. And so I think it's important to think about it from the people perspective and not just the brand perspective. So just to make it clear, the CEO or some execs should be the people tweeting and LinkedIn, and not the company as a brand?…

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