Speaker 1:
PR today is very different than PR yesterday. And so let’s dive into that firstly, what does PR today mean and why is it not the PR of yesterday?
Shama Hyder:
So much of PR used to be traditional press and analysts, the Gartners, the Forresters, blah, blah, blah. And today, oh man, it’s changed so much. First of all, I think PR and marketing have to play together, part of the reason people say is, “Oh, you guys do PR and marketing.” And see, our roots are in marketing because with PR it’s like, great, you get a placement, and then what? Or understanding that today’s influencer or contributor may be a great podcast host. It may be someone with a lot of influence on YouTube or TikTok, whatever it is, these are not always traditional journalists. And so the types of things that we do, I think, sometimes surprise people because it’s not traditional PR. It’s Twitter Spaces, it might be LinkedIn Fireside Chat, it may be a Product Hunt launch campaign. Stuff like that really moves the needle for especially B2B companies. And I think this is kind of PR of the future, if not now, connecting those dots.
One of the things I find fascinating is how divorced PR is often, from sales. For sales folks, sales teams, the thing that they need most is to be able to close, to be able to nurture these leads that they have and close. But PR is awesome for that, but they often have no idea, they don’t know what placements they’ve even gotten much less how to use that when they’re engaging people in conversations. So I do think B2B tends to be so much more product and sales focused. But it’s a huge, huge missed opportunity because every company is product and sales focused. And one of the things we absolutely know to be true is, look, the best product doesn’t win. And I think this is sometimes what breaks my heart is when I meet companies that have a better product than their competitors, and they worked harder at it, but because the competitor is perceived to be better because they have more market share. In psychology, this concept is called mirror exposure.
The more we’re exposed to something, the more affinity we have for it, the more we tend to trust it. And so just because of that, those brands are winning. And so I feel like there’s an obligation for every underdog out there that has a cool company that does something neat to be able, to take advantage of it and make sure that people know what’s what.
