(2:10) The history behind the term “podcasting” 

(4:30) The early days of Twitter (X) with Evan Williams

(06:29) The inception and evolution of Muck Rack, a media database that includes journalist contact information, media monitoring, and reporting

(10:36) The broadening definition of media relations and podcasting’s place in it 

(12:12) The current state of social media

(17:32) Muck Rack’s 2024 “State of AI in PR” survey findings

(23:12) Practical tips for incorporating AI into PR and marketing workflows

(26:30) Using customer data for training purposes, and how Muck Rack is different from ChatGPT

(30:20) The importance of listening to client feedback and input

(32:21) Muck Rack’s approach to innovation and the importance of continuous development to stay relevant

(35:02) The ever-evolving landscape of PR and media relations

[00:00:04.410] – Kriste Goad

Hey, welcome to How It’s Done, a podcast for curious marketers. I’m Kriste Goad. I’ll be your host, and I’m really glad you’re here. Hello, curious marketers. I am super excited about today’s topic, which is part of our AI series. Today we’re talking about the future of AI and PR, comms and marketing, specifically different tools and some tips and tricks to use AI. That’s why I’m so excited about today’s guest, Greg Galant. Greg is, for those of you who aren’t familiar, Greg is the co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack, the public relations management platform that helps thousands of organizations to build trust, tell their stories, and demonstrate the unique value of earned media. Greg also is the co-creator and executive producer of the Shorty Awards, which honor the best of social media. And in 2021, Greg also founded the Work Remotely Forever Pledge, which is a commitment by business leaders who promised not to force their employees to work from an office. I want to hear more about that in a minute, Greg. Since launching that, more than 75 companies have signed on. Welcome to the show, Greg.

[00:01:24.240] – Greg Galant

Great. Thanks for having me, Kriste.

[00:01:26.190] – Kriste Goad

Really glad you’re here. Would you just kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, a little bit more about Muck Rack, and on topic, a little bit more about how AI is changing PR, comms, and the marketing industry as we speak?

[00:01:43.510] – Greg Galant

Sure thing. So I’m the co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack. Started the company almost 15 years ago now.

[00:01:50.950] – Kriste Goad

Wow.

[00:01:52.470] – Greg Galant

Been a really long journey. Funny enough, I kind of got into it through podcasting. I started a podcast back in 2005, interviewing founders about how they got started.

[00:02:07.110] – Kriste Goad

Cool. You were sort of on the cutting edge then, doing podcasting then.

[00:02:13.370] – Greg Galant

Yeah, the term barely existed. And back then, you’d listen to it on your iPod, which is where the name comes from.

[00:02:22.510] – Kriste Goad

Greg, I don’t think I ever knew that.

[00:02:24.940] – Greg Galant

It was a wild time. People actually didn’t think the name podcast would stick because everyone thought Apple was going to sue everyone for using the pod term since it was kind of an open source.

[00:02:37.690] – Kriste Goad

The opposite happened, didn’t it?

[00:02:39.600] – Greg Galant

That’s right. Apple gave up on the iPod and favored the iPhone and podcasting lives on ever since. When I started podcasting, it wasn’t even part of the Apple ecosystem. You had to download third-party software to download the podcast, and it was a real mess to use it. It was only later that Apple and Spotify and all these other companies integrated podcasting straight into the platforms.

[00:03:07.070] – Kriste Goad

Man, that is awesome. I don’t know how I didn’t know that.

[00:03:10.180] – Greg Galant

It was a very interesting time. And back then, I had interviewed Reed Hoffman back when LinkedIn only had 50 employees.

[00:03:18.670] – Kriste Goad

What?

[00:03:19.870] – Greg Galant

Founder of Yelp, Vanguard Group. It was a real wild time.

[00:03:23.920] – Kriste Goad

It was like the Wild West. So is that podcast still available somewhere? Can we go listen to it?

[00:03:29.490] – Greg Galant

It is, yeah. Still available. It was called Venture Voice. So if you just search for Venture Voice in your podcast software, Google Venture Voice, it’ll come up.

[00:03:40.440] – Kriste Goad

I’ll include that in our show notes as well. Cool.

[00:03:43.180] – Greg Galant

Cool.

[00:03:43.960] – Kriste Goad

So that led you to Muck Rack.

[00:03:47.360] – Greg Galant

Yeah. Well, what happened was one of the people I interviewed on the podcast was Evan Williams, who was doing a startup called Odeo, which itself was a podcast directory. Remember, this is back before iTunes had, you know, built a place you could find other podcasts. So I stayed in touch with Evan because we were both doing stuff in the podcasting world. Podcasts took a long time to take off, as you probably know, a decade later…2015.

[00:04:18.340] – Kriste Goad

Yeah.

[00:04:19.010] – Greg Galant

So I watched Evan realize that Odeo wasn’t going to work as a business, and he pivoted to a little side project they had called Twitter. Yeah, it led me to sign up for Twitter way early. So I got my first name on there @Gregory simply because no one else had signed up.

[00:04:41.780] – Kriste Goad

What year was that name? That would have been like ‘07. Wasn’t that 2007 when he came out with that?

[00:04:48.190] – Greg Galant

Yeah, I think it came out in 2006. I might not have signed up till 2007. Twitter took a very long time to take off, really, till late 2008 that it kind of got to critical mass. Things moved slower then because you didn’t have other social networks to go viral.

[00:05:04.460] – Kriste Goad

And businesses didn’t see any of that value at all at that time.

[00:05:10.210] – Greg Galant

That’s right. So as I kind of got to see, just as Twitter was taking off in those early days, that there was all this interesting stuff happening on there, but no way to figure out who you should follow based on your interest. That led us to then launch the first site. We could vote with the tweet for who you thought is the best on social media. And now voting with a tweet is super common, or sharing your vote.

[00:05:43.310] – Greg Galant

No one had done that back in 2008. So we launched it. We figured tweets are short, so we called it the Shorty Awards and launched that. Within 24 hours, the Shorty Awards became the top trending term on Twitter.

[00:05:58.690] – Kriste Goad

Whoa. Was that surprising?

[00:06:01.890] – Greg Galant

Yeah, very shocking, because usually you put out a new idea and it just lies there in obscurity. For a while, and it takes a long time to get people to pay attention to it. But with the Shorty Awards, it just became the top trending term on Twitter immediately. We quickly got covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC, a whole bunch of other places.

[00:06:24.410] – Kriste Goad

Did you even have to pitch the story or they came to you?

[00:06:27.390] – Greg Galant

No, they came to us, which was amazing because I’d launched things before, like when I launched my podcast, and I’d also launched a podcast ad network at the same time. That never worked out. But I tried getting press for all that stuff, and it was really hard. It’s hard to get the press to care about something that’s new and has no credibility. With the Shorties, it was the opposite experience. We put this out there. It was kind of a joke. We didn’t think it would be a business. We built it in a couple of weekends, and it just got a ton of attention.

[00:06:59.110] – Kriste Goad

I love that.

[00:07:00.020] – Greg Galant

It was kind of perfect in the Zeitgeist, but also, since when on Twitter. That’s where we learned that, oh, journalists are using social media to figure out what to write about. Which again, today is obvious. But in 2009, late 2008, early 2009, it was very unusual because before that you just had Facebook or friends to MySpace and you wouldn’t go there to look for news and you’d only connect with your friends. So the idea to put content out there for a wider audience or get content from a wider audience wasn’t the way people thought about social media at the time. So we thought, hey, there should really be a site where you could find all the journalists in one place, because it’s very interesting to know what journalists are talking about. Originally, the idea was just to launch a free website, kind of aimed at journalists and news junkies. We  didn’t really have a PR community in mind. We launched that again, built a really quick couple of weeks, launched the first version of Muck Rack back in 2009. Became very popular with journalists. We had over 10,000 journalists request to get added to it.

[00:08:13.220] – Kriste Goad

Just, oh, wow.

[00:08:14.620] – Greg Galant

There weren’t even all that many more journalists on social media back in the day. It took a while for kind of the mainstream to follow. And then being in New York at the time, I kept running into PR people and they were all telling me like, oh, you do Muck Rack. I use your website to figure out who I should pitch because it’s such great data to know what they’re talking about and see their past articles. Folio tools so the journalists can show all, everything they’ve written in one place they realized, oh, that’s interesting. We have this whole profession using our site to do their job. We didn’t build it.

[00:08:51.070] – Kriste Goad

And it was free at that point.

[00:08:52.440] – Greg Galant

Yeah, totally free. We thought, hey, there could be a business in here. And we talked to the PR community more, and they were like, hey, yeah, we want functionality. We want to be able to add the journalists to media lists. We want to be able to actually email them and they describe their whole workflow. So we figured, okay, we’ll keep everything that we had free. And the journalist profiles for anyone who’s googled a journalist probably knows that Muck Rack profile is still free. But then we added in all these tools that we charge a subscription fee for, and we relaunched the site in 2011 and just been off to the races ever since. Back then, even in 2011, it only probably does like 5% of what it does now. We’ve added in a ton of functionality to help our customers monitor the news, build reports on the effectiveness of PR. Now, podcasters and Muck Rack, so you can find the right podcast to pitch to get opportunities, like the opportunity I have today and generally kind of manage everything you need for your public relations and earn media workflow. But it started in that very kind of humble way, just listening to our customers and hearing what they needed.

[00:10:10.790] – Kriste Goad

That’s cool. It’s interesting also this podcast angle, because I’ve had conversations with people, and some people don’t consider podcasting and podcast pitching necessarily part of their media relations. And I’m like, well, why wouldn’t you? Of course, it is a medium that people go to, to learn to hear thought leadership, to talk about interesting things. It’s just as much a media outlet, in my opinion, as the New York Times. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:10:46.700] – Greg Galant

100%. And in fact, a lot of the journalists at the New York Times are doing podcasts.

[00:10:52.090] – Kriste Goad

Doing podcasts, yeah!

[00:10:53.110] – Greg Galant

Yeah, they’re going to appear in iTunes just like you do, and just like anyone who starts a podcast. And a lot of the top podcasters might have more listeners than the journalists of the New York Times. So I think it’s a big question for the PR industry, because if the PR industry and media relations specifically defines itself as just pitching very traditional publications, it’s challenging because unfortunately, there are fewer journalists at these traditional publications now. And some of what they used to cover kind of, they don’t really need to cover anymore because it can just get released free on the Internet. So there’s a lot of stuff that they do where they’re adding a lot of value and investigating, covering the niche that they know. But then it used to be sometimes, like a daily paper would just run a national news story, and now it’s like, well, why does a daily paper have to run the national news story if you can just go straight to the national news one click away? There’s a bunch of transformations happening in media. But I think if you’re media relations and you’re just saying, how do I pitch people at newspapers and TV shows?

[00:12:08.810] – Greg Galant

Your universe is going to keep getting smaller. But if you say, hey, my job is really, I mean, I hate to use marketing buzzwords, but earned media just broadly, this idea of, like, who should we talk to? Who’s going to talk about us? Who are not going to pay? So we’re not marketers. We’re not looking for paid endorsements here, but there are a bunch of people aside from newspapers and TV shows who might want to talk about us for free, not that they’re doing it because it’ll be interesting to the audience and it’ll be more credible in a big way because it’s not the ad, it’s the actual content. And we’re even seeing it even now, like traditional things, like when actors release new movies. Part of their media tour is now going on a bunch of podcasts. When politics, even presidential candidates, want to make a run, they go on a bunch of podcasts. Even sitting presidents go on podcasts now. So, yeah, it’s all that. It’s kind of become a fabric of podcasting specifically, but I think more broadly, newsletter writers, which we also have in Muck Rack and other totally kind of similar types of influencers, are a part of the media fabric.

[00:13:26.060] – Greg Galant

They’re not the whole media fabric, but they’re an important part of it. So I think in PR media relationships, you have to think very broadly, like, who are all the people we need to pitch and talk to to reach the ultimate audience that we want.

[00:13:36.630] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, because you’ve got to reach people where they are, and they’re all over the place. Now, I’m curious, since you shared the story about Twitter, what do you think of the state of Twitter right now? Is it still as much of a news source or even more as it used to be, X, formerly known as Twitter. I’m just curious your thoughts there. I mean, people are still there. People are still using it.

[00:14:05.630] – Greg Galant

Yeah, I think it poses a really interesting challenge now to the marketer and PR, where on one hand, it’s definitely still vibrant. There’s a lot of people there. The conversations happen quickly. You can see it in politics. Both sides of the aisles there, journalists, they’re not spending as much time as these two, but they’re still spending. I mean, it’s not down by half. It’s down by a little bit. So you still have a lot of people going there, even if it’s declined a bit from where it was a year and a half ago. So I don’t think you can ignore it at all. I think for some people, it’s still advantageous to engage on Twitter, depending on what kind of Persona you want to have and who you’re trying to reach. At the same time, though, I do think it’s become more complex than it was prior to the pivot, because it used to be that Twitter was the only place to go for those status updates. But there have been a good number of people who are like, okay, maybe Twitter is not my place anymore. X isn’t my place anymore. Let me see what else is there.

[00:15:19.190] – Greg Galant

So you’ve seen some people shift the conversation to LinkedIn, some people to threads, Facebook’s option, some people to discord servers or Macedon. It’s gotten very fragmented outside of there. I think you have to pay attention to it at the very least. But you also have to realize it’s more complicated now than it was. And as it’s always been with social media, you always have to be watching for the next trend. I mean, there was a point not too long ago, Facebook seemed like this dominant monopoly, and then Instagram kind of replaced it. I mean, lucky for them, they acquired Instagram. But now TikTok’s number one and this kind of thriving scene. But it’s easy to forget, hey, at one point, it was Vine was in there, and Snapchat was number one. Now they’re kind of, again, still going.

[00:16:19.840] – Kriste Goad

I almost forgot about Vine

[00:16:26.080] – Greg Galant

I’m hoping they bring it back.

[00:16:27.930] – Kriste Goad

Bring back Vine! Okay, so you guys do an annual survey, the State of PR, and last year’s results were very interesting. But you have more recently released your 2024. Your 2023 was the state of PR, and then your 2024 is the State of AI in PR. One thing that I did notice is LinkedIn really bubbled up as a top place where PR professionals were going and getting placements. LinkedIn has certainly, they’ve got all these newsletters. They’ve hired a bunch of journalists. It’s very interesting, especially in the B to B space. It’s super. That’s the place to go and to build brand awareness and build individual thought leadership and brand thought leadership. Can you talk a little bit about those 2023 findings? State of PR? And then I really want to dive deep into this state of AI in PR report because that is fascinating and that’s where there’s so much energy right now.

[00:17:35.810] – Greg Galant

Yeah, both great questions we’ve been seeing that definitely LinkedIn is on the rise and thinking about kind of how you manage those own media channels. I’ve talked to a lot of pros where they hire someone just full time manage their CEO’s Persona on LinkedIn. It’s a really kind of fascinating time for what you can do there. Another big thing that we’ve seen is that both in our surveys and in the tools we’ve been building with Muck Rack, that there’s a huge rise in the use of AI in the PR community. And for pretty obvious reasons, I think when everybody was wowed by generative AI, we saw how well it can write and draft and get Grammar done to an extremely high accuracy rate. We saw that 89% of PR people are saying that they complete work, complete projects more quickly with AI, and 74% are even saying that they’ve increased the quality of their work with AI. So it’s been really interesting to see kind of how it comes front and center this profession.

[00:18:47.550] – Kriste Goad

And your survey even found that PR professionals said they use generative AI. Those that said they use it more than doubled, from 28% in March to 64% in November, and another quarter say they plan to explore using it. So I’m curious, with that said, how has Muck Rack integrated AI into its platform, and what are some of the plans that you have for further integrating it?

[00:19:19.090] – Greg Galant

Yeah, something we’ve been thinking about for a long time. We’ve been using machine learning, which is one of the core parts of AI, going back probably at least six, seven years now. So it’s nothing new to us. At the same time, the advancements are really exciting, so we’ve been having a lot of fun adding a lot more functionality. In one of the first things we launched in terms of generative AI is our presspal AI tool, which can be used in part for free by anybody, and then has more advanced functionality for our customers where it’ll help you draft a press release, which I think is a great use for PR. That, of course, you don’t want to use the final output from AI. That’s where you go over it, fact check it, all that. But we all know press releases for years have always been very formulaic, right? I mean, come on, everyone’s going back and copying pasting from their old press releases and using bits and pieces. So there, I think, is an area where AI can really kind of elevate the PR professional to focus on doing more strategic work. And it’s something we’ve really seen ever since we started Muck Rack, where when we started PR people, we saw they were doing a lot of time just copying and pasting stuff into media lists and doing these manual kind of clip reports and just all these functions where it’s like, hey, you’ve got this really thoughtful PR executive and they’re spending their time doing this super mundane manual work.

[00:20:52.880] – Greg Galant

So we’ve long been kind of helping people spend more of their time on what matters. I think AI takes that to a whole new level. And with presspal, it really lets PR people and corporate comms spend more time refining the press release rather than doing the first draft. We also did a version for helping to draft pitches where we kind of go the other way that we help people make their pitches really short. Because when we survey journalists, they all say they want short pitches, right? So helps people shorten it. Again, we encourage people, both in our surveys and through our actual user interface, to customize every pitch they send to a journalist, but helps people get the template and get over the writing block of the writer’s block of making that first draft. It also uses AI to figure out which journalists will be most likely to receive their pitch. And then we’ve even launched functionality now. So if you have a media list, we can automatically add journalists to that media list based on who else is on there and who’d fit in the best, or automatically suggest that. I should say it’s still up to the user if they want to add them or not.

[00:22:08.330] – Greg Galant

But it kind of gives you this kind of turbocharge to your work where you’re still making all the decisions and kind of bringing the strategic element to it, but then taking a lot of the more mundane tasks. Maybe what you used to give to an intern or some, or a secretary or the newest, newest person on the team is it can now do a lot of that work for you, so you can actually give your intern better experience than have them.

[00:22:41.090] – Kriste Goad

Now, are you personally still very involved in some of this new product development and iteration of your offering?

[00:22:51.130] – Greg Galant

I love getting involved where I can. I mean, we have a great team. We’re  well over 200 employees now. We have a whole product team and tech team, and they’re always launching features. And many of them I only find out about after it’s live on the website, so they’re definitely rolling out of their own. But when it comes to these really kind of game changing features, I always love getting an early look and helping to brainstorm what we could do there. I’ll also spend a lot of time talking to our customers, and then a lot of times through talking to customers, I’ll get insights on what they want. So I’ll go to the product team and be like, hey, have we addressed this? What can we do here? And helps us figure out what to build next?

[00:23:32.130] – Kriste Goad

Sounds kind of like the perfect role.

[00:23:34.940] – Greg Galant

It’s a lot of fun, so much fun to just go out there and hear what people need to do their job and then be able to kind of dream it up. And then the awesome thing about online software, like what we have is that once we build it, we can deploy it to tens of thousands of people.

[00:23:50.420] – Kriste Goad

To everybody.

[00:23:52.590] – Greg Galant

PR firms can be using it the next day. So it’s like this very invigorating feedback loop.

[00:23:58.190] – Kriste Goad

Well, so with that in mind, what do PR and marketing professionals need to consider when they’re incorporating AI into their workflow? And do you have any kind of tips and tricks? Because I did notice, interestingly, there was a question in your survey about who’s got policies around A: are people doing training and a lot of people are not. Do they have policies in place? A lot of them don’t, but maybe they’re working on it. Tell me about your thoughts there. Where is this going and how do people need to be thinking about this, both as a professional and how they’re using these very powerful tools? Because there are some things they need to watch out for.

[00:24:35.870] – Greg Galant

Yeah, well said. I think there’s also a lot of misconceptions about AI out there and that we see people, a lot of people, they go in one or two extremes. They either go very cavalier and put sensitive data into AI systems that say that they’re using that data for training data, meaning that you shouldn’t put anything confidential in. And then maybe they take the AI results and just release them without reviewing them. And we’ve seen some very embarrassing cases of that where the AI is hallucinated or just makes a mistake and they don’t catch. And now they have to explain to everybody like, oh yeah, I just had an AI and didn’t review it and.

[00:25:21.610] – Kriste Goad

Then didn’t do any fact-checking.

[00:25:23.990] – Greg Galant

That’s right. And then I think the other extreme is like, hey, this is new, this is scary. Let’s lock it down and have a policy that no one can use the latest technology and no AI. And I think that in many cases is misguided because, hey, this is very powerful technology, and everyone else in the industry is going to use it. You don’t want to be left behind. Also, you do any business or even nonprofit, your job is to make it run as efficiently as possible to better serve your customers, your constituents, or whoever your organization is meant to serve out there. So you don’t want to be negligent and not use the best technology to serve them. But I think that there is a path in the middle of saying, okay, let’s understand this technology, let’s be smart about the risks involved. Let’s be smart about what policies and guidance and training we give our team, but also let’s experiment and let’s see what’s out there. And I think that’s how we really advise our customers to use it, is to play with these tools. We’ve also been very careful with our tools. We don’t give out.

[00:26:46.960] – Greg Galant

No AI gets trained on the data the customers are giving us. So if you use presspal and you’re drafting a press release about something that hasn’t been released yet, it’s not like that’s going into training data and could come and bite you and someone else goes to draft their press release.

[00:27:04.950] – Kriste Goad

So you have built your own proprietary tool in what you’re offering your customers in terms of you’ve built your own AI model, as it were. It’s not like you’re just tapping into ChatGPT or anything like that, right?

[00:27:20.910] – Greg Galant

Well, we do a mixture. Some of the things we do are proprietary. There are some areas where we leverage ChatGPT, but we do it through their paid API way where they don’t use what we send to them for training data.

[00:27:34.840] – Kriste Goad

Got it.

[00:27:35.600] – Greg Galant

And we also anonymize it all. So ChatGPT doesn’t know which of the tens of thousands of Muck Rack users is requesting this data. So it gives you a lot more protection.

[00:27:48.150] – Kriste Goad

I think that’s key. Can we dive into that a little bit more? So if there is brand-level information or product-level information or news that hasn’t been released yet, your tool, if someone accidentally puts that information in your tool, is anonymizing that and protecting your clients in that way.

[00:28:10.380] – Greg Galant

That’s right. And maybe just to back up further, people are worried about is, let’s say you work at Apple and you’re getting ready to announce the Vision Pro 2. Of course, you don’t want anyone to know about the Vision Pro 2. But you log into the free ChatGPT with Kriste@apple.com and then you say in there, write me a press release for the Apple Vision 2. And you keep going back and forth with ChatGPT on it. If you’re using the free version of ChatGPT and you don’t turn off the default option about training ChatGPT is getting trained, is using what you’re asking it to keep training. And there is a risk, and it might not be a major risk because there are lots of users of ChatGPT and all that, but there is a risk there that ChatGPT might use that training data and someone else might say, oh, write me a press release about. Write me an article about the future of VR headsets, and then it might drop some confidential information in there. Thus the risk people want to control for is just some. And that’s why a lot of companies are sensitive towards their employees using the free ChatGPT or even using the paid ChatGPT.

[00:29:35.470] – Greg Galant

But maybe they forget to turn off the training data option.

[00:29:38.480] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, that’s kind of an important piece, isn’t it?

[00:29:41.390] – Greg Galant

That’s right. And then also, meanwhile, ChatGPT knows who’s asking what from the user account. And a lot of people don’t have special deals with OpenAI and custom negotiated terms of service and security reviews and all the things you do when you’re a big company buying enterprise software, that’s what you’ve done. Yeah. So what we’ve done is by using the ChatGPT API, which we pay for in that commercial relationship, ChatGPT affirms that they’re not using that for training data. So you don’t have to worry about that know permutation issue that I just mentioned with the Apple example. Secondly, we’re not even passing to ChatGPT, who’s asking the question? So instead of it’s Kriste@apple.com. It’s just some random Muck Rack user. Couldn’t even be a free Muck Rack user, so there’d be no way to infer, like, oh, this data came from someone who actually should be in the know. It could have just been any random Internet user.

[00:30:51.710] – Kriste Goad

Got it. That’s awesome. Are you finding that your clients are really loving those offerings?

[00:30:57.290] – Greg Galant

Yeah, actually, the presspal was one of our most quickly adapted new features ever because we just saw there’s such a hunger out there for using AI to help draft do these first drafts of documents. We got it out to market very early. One thing we really pride ourselves on at Muck Rack that I think our longtime customers appreciate is that we just have a very rapid cycle of creating new features, launching them to all of our customers. We include them all to our customers. If you bought Muck Rack, you just get all these features added throughout every year that you didn’t even know you were buying when you signed up for it. So it kind of gives them a lot more leverage. And I think also to their credit, people realize that this is a powerful new technology and they were willing to experiment and see how it works.

[00:31:49.160] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, well, I think it’s fascinating how you’re still able to sort of disrupt, if you will, this. You know, I mean, basically it’s like journalist database. You know, there’s a lot of competition and a lot of folks in that space, but you’re still able to really stay on the cutting edge of it and bring innovative new approaches to market. Does that get harder and harder to do or. Not necessarily. You just got to keep your ear to the ground.

[00:32:21.720] – Greg Galant

Yeah, I think that’s the challenge of growing it, where we really pride ourselves on really acting like a startup and launching new features. And we really believe like the best features we’re ever going to have are the ones we’re going to build from here on out, not what we’ve already built. So we all have that kind of mentality of what do we need to build for next year, because the business environment is always changing. It’s interesting though, when you’re small, it’s really easy to launch new features because you just have to have a couple of people and you can launch them. You don’t have a lot of resources though, but you can make up for that with greater scale. On one hand, it gets easier because we have many more programmers than ever and product people, and we’ve really reinvested a lot in our tech capacity. We analyze a lot more data than ever before, so we’ve got a lot more functionality. I think what we’re always trying to make sure doesn’t happen, and you see happen to companies all the time, is that once they get to scale, like, hey, you know what, I bet nobody would notice if we stopped investing in R and D and we just leave the platform as it’s been going.

[00:33:38.120] – Greg Galant

We’ll make more profits because we’re not hiring all these expensive developers and spending more on server space. And you figure, hey, I bet nobody will notice. And you can do that for a few years and probably make, and you can make a whole lot of profits. The problem is eventually five or ten years, you just become irrelevant. And then yesterday’s news.

[00:34:00.750] – Kriste Goad

Then the next new thing comes along.

[00:34:02.290] – Greg Galant

That’s right. So we’re big believers in always investing for the future and playing the long game. It’s really kind of part of our DNA. We’ve always been a founder-controlled company. We always think about this, like, how do we make sure this is going to. We’ve been around for 15 years, so we’re thinking, how do we make sure we’re a great company in another 15 years, as a lot of other companies are out there that might be owned by, primarily by private equity and whatnot, where they’re just like, okay, we got to sell the company in three years. What are we going to do to make it look good in three years? Let’s cut R and D. Let’s cut customer support. Let’s just try to crank the profits out, and then that’ll be the next owner’s problem. So we’re always saying, like, how do we be a great company? How do we make sure we’re going to be a great company in 15 years? And having that mentality, like, okay, let’s make sure that no matter what our position is, that we’re kind of very humble to the customer and we know the customers we’re ultimately accountable to.

[00:35:02.110] – Greg Galant

In a year when your contract is up, you can just switch to another software provider. So we’re always on the lookout for that and thinking like, okay, how do we make sure that we’re the very best option for you, not just today, but a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. Plus, we know to best serve our customers. Like, the media environment is always changing. When we started mucking.

[00:35:23.360] – Kriste Goad

Totally. And it is harder now than ever to be, like, a PR professional.

[00:35:28.550] – Greg Galant

Well said. Yeah, I remember when we started, it was really just all about, like, okay, I know the five publications I need to pitch. I just need to find the right journalist at those publications. We go tool for that.

[00:35:41.810] – Kriste Goad

And come up with the right story.

[00:35:44.030] – Greg Galant

Exactly. Yeah, the right story. But now it’s like a lot of people, they don’t even know the publications to pitch, even if they’re very experienced, because there might be a podcast that started six months ago that your client should be on, or maybe the beat reporter at the big publication that used to pitch now has their own substac, but it’s influential. So you still want to.

[00:36:03.000] – Kriste Goad

Oh, man, we hadn’t even talked about Substac yet. Let’s go there. But, no, keep going. Sorry, I interrupted you.

[00:36:10.870] – Greg Galant

It’s just like that media landscape is always shifting. It went from, oh, back when we started. I had a lot of people tell me like, hey, I don’t need your software because there’s ten journalists who are going to cover my company. And I take them all out to drinks every quarter. We’re drinking buddies. I just call them every new story. So why would I ever need software to discover who to pitch? And relationship tracking tools and all that. I haven’t heard that objection in several years now. It’s all, hey, the journalists keep changing jobs more rapidly than ever before. There are new podcasts and newsletters that I have to go out and figure out how to pitch. There are new forms of media always coming up. I have to be more creative in my angles when I do make my pitch because that ratio of PR people to journalists keeps increasing. So I know that I have to do a lot more to capture their attention. And that’s where we see all the challenges are. And that’s why we feel like, okay, if we have to help our customers reach an always changing media environment, we have to be always changing with it and keep launching new tools and figuring out understanding that media environment and then kind of redefining how we fit there and best serve the customer.

[00:37:28.360] – Kriste Goad

No doubt. Is taking journalists out to drink still even a thing?

[00:37:32.830] – Greg Galant

That’s a good question.

[00:37:35.170] – Kriste Goad

Literally, I don’t even know the answer to that question anymore.

[00:37:38.700] – Greg Galant

First you have to figure out where they are, right? Because a lot of people are remote, or maybe they put on their LinkedIn that they’re in the city of their outlet, but a lot of people have moved far away from the city or only come in now and mean, I do think in person still powerful. If you can do less, I think it’s probably harder now to be like, oh, we’re going to come to New York and do the East side media tour.

[00:38:04.390] – Kriste Goad

Right, that used to be such the thing.

[00:38:08.890] – Greg Galant

But I do see on the flip side though, a lot of people are hungry for connection now since they are working from home more. A lot of people are like, hey, it would be nice to see someone in person, but it might be less. Hey, come to the desk, it might be more. Can I meet you in your neighborhood in Brooklyn? Go to your local coffee shop or bar there? Or maybe there’s this industry conference coming up. So let me see if you’re going to be there too and find some time to get together. So I wouldn’t discount that in person connection, but it’s different than it used to be. On the flip side, though, the new thing is, let’s not forget pre pandemic. If you ask the journalists to get on a video call with you or just about anybody, they’d be like, are you kind of like a weirdo? Video calls? Right. A lot of people have webcams on their computers prior to the pandemic, but now you can do the video call, which I do think is a more powerful way to introduce yourself than a phone phone call, like in the old days.

[00:39:11.920] – Greg Galant

Yeah, those kind of landscapes, always adapting and you have to always just be experimenting and figuring out what works.

[00:39:20.900] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, I love that. I also love you guys used a term in your most recent AI and PR survey report about the AI curious. That’s certainly not a term that’s going to go away anytime soon, I would imagine.

[00:39:37.600] – Greg Galant

Well said. Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of people out there. I think that’s a great point. It’s like you don’t have to start with AI by having it draft your business, critical business communication. You can start with it for something fun, to have it riff on what should be in your shopping list, or have it write a poem for you about someone in your family. Do something. Just play with it. I think that’s what you have to do with any new toy. It’s like with the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out, we all played with it. We all tried taking a photo using Shazam to hear what music’s on the radio. And then once you played with it, you can figure out, hey, how does this fit in my business life? Oh, I can use it for emails. Maybe I facetime a colleague. Maybe I use the transcription or OCR tools in it to help with work projects. And that’s usually the technology adoption curve you saw. Even way back to computers. It was the homebrew computer club that involved in.

[00:40:41.790] – Kriste Goad

Remember the bulletin boards, community boards?

[00:40:44.730] – Greg Galant

Yeah, that’s right. The bulletin boards, early websites, they weren’t for business. It was only after that people figured out how to use them for business.

[00:40:52.540] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, great advice.

[00:40:54.870] – Greg Galant

Technology is play with it and have some fun with it before you try to figure out how, before you figure.

[00:41:01.890] – Kriste Goad

Out a business application. That’s great advice. Well, hey, Greg, we’re running out of time, so before we do, I want to know, and I know our listeners want to know from a guy like you with your finger on the pulse. I’m curious, what are you reading right now? What’s your favorite form of media? And I want to hear some of your top predictions for AI in the coming year, you can start with any one of those. What are you reading right now? What should we know?

[00:41:37.230] – Greg Galant

Yeah, let’s see. You mean books wise?

[00:41:40.270] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, anything you read science fiction or you stay straight up on news.

[00:41:47.090] – Greg Galant

I like reading, like, biographies in history. I just finished reading who is Michael Obitz? Biography of the founder of CAA, which was a really fascinating read. And also a reminder on how quickly the media changes, where he’s talking about the kind of glory days of movies. And even decades ago, he talks about how television disrupted movies and it was just viewed that movies were the prestigious holy grail and TV un-prestigious sideshow. And we all know how that’s flipped now. A lot more clout or culture relevance than movies. So it’s a very fun read for a bunch of reasons. But I think people always feel like, oh, technology is changing society for the first time. I can’t believe I’m living through it. But technology has always been changing society, and the media has always been changing. So it’s always a step back and get that historical view.

[00:42:50.470] – Kriste Goad

Good suggestion. I’m going to pick that one up. What about your favorite form of media?

[00:42:55.270] – Greg Galant

Favorite form of media? Well, I’m definitely impartial to podcasts, being here, yes, myself and coming on a podcast. But what I really love about is just how in-depth you can get. And again, going back to your question about should media relations be pitching podcasts? I think what people like about it, both from being on and consuming it, is that if you were writing this story for a 500-word article, we’d have this whole conversation, and I’d be lucky if you took one quote of what I said.

[00:43:26.610] – Kriste Goad

Right?

[00:43:27.250] – Greg Galant

Might well be the dumbest throwaway comment I made that you take that quote from. And then I look at it, I’m like, wish you’d picked another one.

[00:43:32.870] – Kriste Goad

Like, taken out of context.

[00:43:37.870] – Greg Galant

That’s right. Whereas here, I could get my whole story out, which is great, and know that as I said this stuff, maybe I’ll edit out some ums and ahs, but hopefully most of it makes it in there and I’ll get the point across. And then I think as a listener, too, it’s so powerful. I mean, so many times I’ll listen to a podcast with an entrepreneur I’ve read about or a celebrity I’m a fan of, and I read about them before in the news, but they were a caricature to me in the news. They were saying one or two brash things, and that’s how I form my opinion of them. And then I hear them in an hour-long conversation. I’m like, oh, wait, you’re like, oh.

[00:44:20.640] – Kriste Goad

I feel like I know that guy now.

[00:44:22.310] – Greg Galant

That’s right. You feel like you know them. You can tell. You can sense of the introvert or an extrovert. Do they lead them to heart or are they very analytical? You can get all these nuances about a person from an hour conversation that you can never get in person. And I’ll even if it’s someone who I know, because if you know someone, you catch up for drinks. You’re going to talk about your weekend and the weather and conversation flows both ways, whereas you listen to a podcast with them, you’ll learn a lot more about them than you’d probably have ever learned spending time with them, unless you spend an inordinate amount of time with them.

[00:44:59.870] – Kriste Goad

Yeah, and I love about podcasts, too. You can just sort of take it anywhere, right? And you’re like, oh, I’ve got a few minutes. I’m going to listen to this podcast I’ve been meaning to listen to. Maybe you’re sitting there waiting in the doctor’s office, or you’re waiting in line or you’re stuck in traffic or whatever. It’s just so portable. I love to listen to the podcast when I’m cleaning my house. I mean, it’s weird maybe, but it’s like a great way.

[00:45:27.110] – Greg Galant

That’s the perfect use case.

[00:45:29.430] – Kriste Goad

If I’m riding my bicycle, that’s a great time to listen to. I get all these ideas.

[00:45:35.420] – Greg Galant

Same. Yeah, actually, my big tip there, if you haven’t already come across shocks, it’s this bone induction headset.

[00:45:42.530] – Kriste Goad

Yeah.

[00:45:43.420] – Greg Galant

Awesome. So if you’re on your bike, it’s like you use a typical headset. It’s blocking your ears, and then you have less sense of traffic around you.

[00:45:52.050] – Kriste Goad

Right.

[00:45:52.690] – Greg Galant

Whereas with these headsets, they sit right in front of your ear and they’ll vibrate. It sounds weird. It vibrates and goes through your bones, but you can hear it. You would think you had regular headsets on, but it doesn’t inhibit your hearing. She could still hear a car coming or a person shout at you.

[00:46:12.460] – Kriste Goad

Oh, man. Product plug. I love it.

[00:46:15.590] – Greg Galant

And I don’t even get anything for that. I’m not even sure if they’re a Muck Rack customer or not.

[00:46:22.110] – Kriste Goad

They’re going to be now because we’re going to promote that. That’s great. No, it’s called shocks.

[00:46:28.090] – Greg Galant

Shocks, yeah.

[00:46:29.230] – Kriste Goad

All right.

[00:46:30.140] – Greg Galant

Aftershocks. And they dropped the after. Now it says shocks.

[00:46:34.280] – Kriste Goad

That’s awesome. Great tip. This is not necessarily a tip, but do you have any top predictions for AI in the coming year for us PR comms professionals?

[00:46:45.330] – Greg Galant

I think more people become AI curious. I think it’ll get used more widely for sure, and more companies that maybe initially blocked it will start opening up. But in terms of the possibilities, I think it’s one of those things where it’s very unpredictable exactly how it’ll be used and change business.

[00:47:05.510] – Greg Galant

In the same way that if you go back and read the articles when the iPhone came out, people didn’t predict it would end up doing all the things that it did in terms of revolutionizing how people take photos and videos and work mobile and FaceTime and all this. So it’s just an element with technology. And then also it’s hard to predict the timeline when so many things come out. Hard to know we’ll change things in one year, five years, ten years, 20 years.

[00:47:35.830] – Kriste Goad

Yeah. And then you have all these lawsuits going on, too, which is interesting. That’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.

[00:47:41.250] – Greg Galant

Yeah. So it’s a lot to get worked out. So I think the main thing is you just have to not make too many assumptions. Maybe it’s keep revisiting your assumptions. A lot of people, I think they try something once they form their view of it, and then they don’t try it again and they want to stick with their view for a year or two. I think it’s like you have to constantly be checking back and be like, hey, I tried this thing to do, this thing with AI two months ago and it didn’t work. But let me try it again because maybe it’s gotten better.

[00:48:11.630] – Kriste Goad

New iteration out there, right?

[00:48:13.740] – Greg Galant

That’s right. So it’s going to be a fascinating time to be alive.

[00:48:18.600] – Kriste Goad

No doubt. Well, I’ll keep my eyes on whatever you guys are, new releases, new things, and I’ll keep following you on podcasts. I really appreciate you coming on today. This has been awesome. Greg, thank you.

[00:48:31.940] – Greg Galant

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:48:34.000] – Kriste Goad

Well, for our listeners, as always, we will include links and background in our show notes. We’ve talked about a lot of great things. We’ll make it easy for people to find access to these. So listeners, be sure to check out our website growwithfuoco.com/howitsdonepodcast or wherever you get your podcast. And don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. You can also find Greg MuckRack.com. Any other places you want to tell people to find you Greg?

[00:49:10.630] – Greg Galant

Muck Rack’s the best place. You can also find me on FKA, Twitter now X or Instagram at Gregory. Just first name there or LinkedIn or anywhere else. But I highly recommend and just encourage people to go to MuckRack.com. We have a lot of free tools and play with them all there.

[00:49:30.900] – Kriste Goad

Awesome. Okay. Thank you so much. Well, again, my guest has been Greg Galant, co founder and CEO of Muck Rack. Thanks so much, Greg.

[00:49:42.190] – Greg Galant

Hey, thank you.

[00:49:43.310] – Kriste Goad

That’s it for now. Thanks so much for listening. We’re looking forward to keeping great conversations coming your way as we grow this podcast. There’s even more great content from our conversations on our blog. Be sure to check it out at growwithfuoco.com. That’s growwithfuoco.com. Stay tuned until next time. And no matter what, stay curious.

• Blogs, Podcasts, and Books
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