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Crafting winning media pitches, learning the elements needed to stand out and secure coverage.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. What doesn’t help your pitches
2. Following up — NOGAS
3. Use the phone to tell your story
4. Exclusive/advance/embargo — know the difference
5. Key elements to a good pitch

Quotables

• “Great sales is about helping, not about sales. Great media relations is about helping a reporter uncover a news story that's valuable and interesting that they didn't know about previously.” — @JasonMudd9
• “People really like people who have confidence and who have a unique, contrarian, and provocative point of view.” — @JasonMudd9
• “Improvising is one of the key attributes of being successful in PR.” — @JasonMudd9
• People care about stories about people. They don’t care about stories about corporations.” — @JasonMudd9

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others or leave us a quick podcast review.

About Jason Mudd

Jason Mudd, APR, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia in July 2002. Forbes named Axia one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

Clients love Jason’s passion, innovation, candor, commitment, and award-winning team. In an increasingly tech-forward world, Jason’s grasp of technological demands on companies provides his clients in multiple sectors a unique advantage in reaching their top audiences. After teaching himself HTML in 1994, Jason helped pioneer internet marketing strategies as an early adopter of e-commerce, search engine optimization, and social media, inspiring tech giants like Yahoo.

At Axia, Jason attracts, develops, retains, innovates, and leads top PR talent and clients. He oversees strategic communications for the firm’s national clients and provides high-level consultations to client leadership teams at billion-dollar global brands, both business-to-business and business-to-consumer, including spokesperson training, crisis communications management, analytics, social media, online reputation management, and more. He also speaks frequently to corporations and industry groups and writes about public relations trends and best practices for American City Business Journals and other national companies.

Jason’s contact info:

• Jason Mudd on X
• Jason Mudd on LinkedIn
• Axia Public Relations

Resources:

• Link to Bloomberg journalist’s LinkedIn post

Support the Show.

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.

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AI strategist Kathleen Perley shares top recommended AI tools and how to optimize them for business communications strategies.

Our guest

Our episode guest is Kathleen Perley, professor of AI at Rice University’s Jones School of Business. Kathleen is an innovative healthcare tech leader and trusted adviser in the emerging world of optimizing AI for business marketing and advertising.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. The race for AI: staying authentic while building public trust
2. Unique ways to use AI for business and personal development
3. Top recommended AI tools
4. How to utilize AI safely: best practices
5. AI and deep fakes: What is coming next?

Quotables

• “Do we let this ego race to be first end up hindering our ability to have a public that trusts and aligns with AI and doesn’t build this resistance?” - @Kathleen Perley
• “This [AI] is our generation’s moon landing.” - @Kathleen Perley
• “How do we take the mundane, the rote out of our lives so we can spend more time doing what we do best, which is developing these relationships and human connections?” - @Kathleen Perley
• “It's one of those things I keep hearing over and over again — that if you use AI to help generate content, you’ll get devalued in the algorithms from a search engine ranking perspective — but I’m not seeing that come true. I think the focus is more on quality and less on who is the creator or origin. If we use both humans and AI, it usually produces something even better than just a human or just AI alone.” - @Kathleen Perley
• “If you haven’t started integrating AI into your crisis communication plan, now would be a great time to start thinking about that.” - @Jason Mudd
• “My biggest fear right now is that [AI] produces so much content so quickly that it almost takes just as much work to go through and improve it and fix it. But that first draft is awfully nice to have most of the time.” - @Jason Mudd

If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to share it with a colleague or friend. You may also share your experience with others by leaving us a quick podcast review.

About Kathleen Perley

Recognized as one of MM+M’s Women to Watch 2024 and with her agency on the Inc 5000 list for three years, Kathleen is a celebrated leader in merging AI with business strategy, especially in marketing and advertising.

She also serves on MD Anderson's advisory committee and supports Ncourage, an investment fund aiding women-owned businesses.

Guest’s contact info and resources:

• Kathleen Perley on X
• Kathleen Perley on LinkedIn
• Rice University’s Jones School of Business
• Coursera class: "AI for everyone"
• Marketing Institute Podcast

Support the Show.

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.

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In this episode, Holly Bishop joins On Top of PR host Jason Mudd to discuss why your company's social media isn’t working.

Tune in to learn more!

Guest:

Holly is a seasoned social media and marketing professional with over 10 years of diverse experience spanning medical practices, retail/e-commerce, and non-profit sectors.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. Understanding the role of social media professionals

2. How to manage a work/life balance as a social media professional

3. Why your company’s social media isn’t working

4. How trust and flexibility with your social media team can improve your content

5. The importance of community engagement

Quotables

“There’s a lot of misconception that social media managers can do all of these things and that they’re experts at every single social media platform, and that is just not the case.” - Holly Bishop

“Companies either don’t prioritize social media or they don’t have the resources to make it an entire team. Yet, social media is a powerful tool with a global audience.” - Jason Mudd

“One person can’t do something great alone. They need others around them.” - Jason Mudd

“I'm seeing a huge shift in social media managers embracing the fact that our screen time is probably triple what a normal person’s would be by Wednesday afternoon. It just is what is, but also knowing when to turn things off and when to be unavailable.” - Holly Bishop

“This is the kind of role that you wouldn’t be doing unless you were genuinely passionate about it.” - Holly Bishop

“We also have our own social media too, which are almost always suffering and looking terrible because we're always so focused on the brands that we run.” - Holly Bishop

“They also don’t realize that what got them there doesn’t get them to be successful in social media. What I mean by that is they may be really good with their own social media, but what they don’t realize is that the expectation for professional social media is way higher. They can get away with typos and incomplete sentences on their own socials, but when you get to the corporate side, there’s not going to be a lot of patience or forgiveness when it comes to that kind of stuff.” - Jason Mudd

“Even for serious brands, it’s important to have fun with the things that are being put out with social media because at the end of the day, as a consumer for your audience that you are speaking to, if it's boring or it's not giving a hook or not interesting or providing that value why would they want to read what you put out anyways?” - Holly Bishop

“Having a really good professional working for your brand is so important because they are able to take that fun side but still utilize the important brand messaging and standards that you have for that specific brand but just making it their own, being able to speak in a way to that brand’s audience that captures their attention but still follows those rules of professionality.” - Holly Bishop

“If there isn’t that support to give for that professional to be a

Support the Show.

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.