Name: Beyond Media Hits: The Basics of Visibility Engineering
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T18:16:07.267Z
Duration: 58 min 48 s
Description: Beyond Media Hits: The Basics of Visibility Engineering

Transcript for "Beyond Media Hits: The Basics of Visibility Engineering": Hi, everyone. Alright. We're gonna get started here in just a second. We see quite a few people joining. We will get this kicked off so that we don't waste any time. Okay. Everyone can hear me? That's great. Okay. Good. Awesome. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks again for joining us today for I see some names that I've seen in here for several of our other webinars. So happy to have so many of you back. For those of you that don't know me or your first time joiners to our webinars here at Quoted, my name is Shelby Bridges, and I am on the user success team here at Quoted. As always, I like to start these with just a little bit of a level set, kind of set this the stage, the tone before we start the call. So, with this platform that we're using, we do have both a chat section and a q and a section, which is great. So throughout this presentation, feel free to pop your questions into the q and a section. We have left a bulk of this meeting for at the at the end, to do a q and a. So that way you guys get live interaction back and forth to answer a lot of those questions. You will also see that when you're perusing the questions and you're looking through, there is a little upvote option. So if you see a question that you really wanna make sure that we get to today, sometimes there are so many questions. We can't get to them all. So if you see something that you really wanna be sure that we have answered, go ahead and upvote that to help rank it towards the top of our list so that we can be sure to answer that at the end. Also, feel free to keep this conversation going in the chat. I see a lot of you in here, which is great. Everybody kind of pinging, and it's nice little networking opportunity for everyone as well. Okay. So last thing as a reminder too, our audience today is composed of a few different groups of individuals just so everybody's really mindful of that because we try to curate the content accordingly. So just like quoted, we have individuals who are in here representing themselves, pitching themselves out in the real world, and then we also have PRs who are out here representing a book of business or clients. So we'll we try to curate that, keep that in mind across the board, and adjust our language accordingly. But sometimes if we're talking about clients or talking about pitching yourself, that's where you will see the difference. We also have a few journalists registered for this call today, which is also great to be able to collaborate with them. So lucky for you all, this is going to be the least amount that you have to hear me speak on any of the webinars that we have had so far, and that's because we have an incredible presenter today. We have Jenny Dietrich with us today talking through visibility engineering. And like all of our presentations, we will loop back at the very end and tie this into how it associates to your quoted accounts if you have them. But, Jenny is going to first talk us through this visibility engineering to get us kicked off. So without further ado, I wanna introduce Jenny for those of you who don't already know. She is the founder, CEO, and author of Spin Sucks, host of Spin Sucks podcast, and author of the Spin Sucks, the book. She is the creator of the PESO model and has crafted a certification for it in collaboration with the SI Newhouse School for Public Communication at Syracuse University. She's the coauthor of Marketing in the Round and the cohost of the Agency Leadership Podcast. She also holds legend status on Peloton. So in other words, she is not busy at all, and she obviously has a very jam packed schedule. We are so grateful that she's been able to join us, and so I'm going to let her jump up on stage and take over from here. Thank you, Shelby. I think it's funny that I put that in my bio, by the way, that I have legend status on Peloton. I worked hard for that. Okay. Can we see my screen? Good? I'm assuming yes. Okay. First of all, hello. I'm so happy to be here. Shelby, thank you. And Liz, who's behind the scenes, thank you for inviting me for this quoted webinar. We're going to dig into something that I think many experienced com pros are experiencing but haven't quite had the language for yet. So my goal over the next few minutes is to give you that language and a framework that you can use as we kind of figure out what's happening with AI, what's happening with media relations, what's happening with our content, what's happening with all of the things. So let's start with the world that most of us were trained in. Not that long ago when someone wanted to vet you, whether that was a potential client, a journalist deciding whether to use you as a source, or a buyer evaluating your company, the path was pretty pretty predictable. Right? They'd Google you. They'd read a few articles. They'd check your website. Maybe they'd call a call a colleague and ask, have you heard of these people? And in that world, the media placement did double duty. It was how people discovered you, and it was the proof that you were credible. So getting quoted in the right publication was the win. That was what we were trying to do. We were trying to get the placement. We were trying to get as much news as we could. We were getting impressions. We were trying to get, you know, share voice and message pull through and all those all of those things. And that world made a lot of sense, and a lot of us got really good at operating in it. Unfortunately, that's not the world we're in anymore. Three things have shifted, and these three things have changed the entire equation. So first, as as you probably know and as you've probably done yourself, people are now asking their chatbots. They're asking about you, about the brand, about the industry, about the product, about the the service, or they're asking for recommendations in your category before they ever decide to buy. So think about your own behavior. When was the last time you asked ChatGP or Claude or Perplexity or Copilot or Gemini or one of the ones whatever you use to recommend something? Was it yesterday? Was it this morning? Are you doing it right now? Your buyers are doing the exact same thing. They're asking and instead of you know, we used to Google keywords. Right? Now we're googling big long questions, or we're asking our chatbot big long questions, and we're getting those answers surfaced in those in the AI. Second, AI tools are handing your audience summaries, recommendations, and answers without anyone ever coming to your website. That's a big, huge shift because it used to be how do we drive people to the website, and then we can capture their information. If they're not coming to the website anymore, how do we capture information, and how do we ensure that we stay top of mind with the people that need to know about us? Right? It's a huge, huge shift because our audience is now getting answers without ever finding us. It's a fundamentally different problem than the one that we're used to solving. And third, by the time someone is ready to choose you, whether that's a customer deciding to buy, a donor deciding to give, a journalist deciding who to quote, that may they may never even call you. They may just take stuff from your content or an AI summarizing your space, the shortlist is already made. Right? So the obvious answers are already in the room, and so that makes the discovery game harder and structurally different, and it has completely changed the way that we do our jobs. So the real question and the one I want you to sit with for the next few minutes then well, while during the time that we spend together is this. How do the large language models know to surface you in AI answers and recommendations? I'll repeat that. How do the large language models know to surface you, your brand, your company, your product, your service, whatever happens to be, in its AI answers and recommendations? Here's what's interesting. AI and human beings are looking for the same things. Is this clear? Is it consistent? Is it specific? Is it backed up? Do credible sources confirm it? And that one's important. Do credible sources confirm it? Sure. I might make an impulse buy. I might see something on TikTok, be influenced by TikTok every once in a while, and buy something there from a just from an impulse perspective. But if I've seen several influencers talking about it online to help me along, it's probably gonna be more of a thing. Right? The new Tarte iShaper makeup. I've seen that all over the freaking place. And finally, I was like, let me go see what this is at Sephora. Like, it's not completely an impulse buy, but it is not something that would have been on my radar had I not seen lots of influencers talking about it. So that's what we wanna think about is even if we're making impulse buys, we're still relying on influencers, creators, journalists, podcast, hosts, newsletter authors to kind of lead us in the direction that we're that we wanna go. So are the people that I follow, and are the people that I trust online talking about it? And if so, what are their thoughts? Right? So all if all of those signals are thin or worse inconsistent, you're operating at a structural disadvantage. It doesn't matter how strong your internal story is. It doesn't matter how strong your brand messaging is. It doesn't matter how strong the product or service is. If no one is talking about it, the market can't verify it, and the machines can't find consistent patterns to trust. So that means when the decision gets made, when the answer is is surfaced in AI, you're invisible, which brings me to the concept that I want to introduce you to today, visibility engineering. So I introduced introduced this probably, I would say, like, late last summer, maybe last summer. And it's the idea so visibility engineering is the idea that you're building authority and trust in a way that humans, search engines, and the AI systems can recognize, validate, and surface because the signals are consistent across the places that people and machines look for proof. So let me say that one more time. You want to have signals that are consistent, and consistent is key here, across the places that the people that human beings and machines look for proof. It's what happens when you stop treating channels as separate plans and start treating them as parts of one entire system. So right now, most teams, not everybody, but most teams are running own media over here, earned media over there, some social in a third lane, and maybe some paid in another in another silo. And each has a different dashboard. It has different metrics. It has different assumptions about what success looks like. That's not a strategy. We know that. Right? It's four separate programs that occasionally bump into one another in the hallway. This isn't content marketing. This isn't media relations. In an AI shaped market, volume doesn't win. Signals win. Credibility wins. Consistency wins. So you don't need 200 blog posts. You don't need 80,000,000,000, gazillion, trillion, million impressions. You don't need advertising equivalency that equals a trillion dollars. You really wanna think about evidence that people can lift, quotes that analysts, journalists, influencers, and creators can reuse, and definitions that the machines can safely surface without hallucinating. That's where the consistency piece comes into this. So today, while I'm a big believer in using a fully integrated PESO model operating system, we're only gonna focus on two engines today, owned and earned media. And I wanna really focus on how they work together as one system because that is how you're going to engineer the visibility so that you show up when you're when when AI is searching for what is the best what's what's the best lawn care service in Chicago, or what's the best nonprofit for me to donate my money to if I'm a cancer advocate, or what's the best b to b organization for manufacturing plates? Like, you wanna show up in those things. Right? So we're gonna I'm gonna show you how to use owned and earned to to engineer that visibility so that you do show up. Now owned media is your foundation. It's where you establish what's true about your expertise, and you prove it like you mean it. So I'm talking about themes that you can defend, authority that anchors what you can repeat, what your subject matter experts repeat, what your leaders repeat, and proof that you can stand on. So is somebody else saying it too? And that's where earned will come in. So the owned media is is your home base. That's where you have to start. And then earned media, as you well know, is validation you can't buy. It's the credibility transfer. So when someone outside your organization, someone your audience already trusts, when that person or group of people or influencers validate something that you've been saying all along, that's the external yes that turns your own truth into something that travels. You cannot buy that kind of validation. You cannot buy that kind of credibility. Yes. There are opportunities for pay for play and things like that. And and I'm not saying ignore that. I'm saying that that comes later. Right now, we're focusing on the kind of validation that makes AI and human beings think, oh, well, I trust this person, or I trust this influencer, or I trust this journalist. If they say it, it must be legit. And when you have those two work together intentionally, all of a sudden, the system starts to compound. So each earned media, yes yes, strengthens your owned media, and stronger owned media makes the next earned opportunity easier. And because the story is now consistent across multiple sources, it becomes easier for both humans to repeat and AI systems to surface. And that's the loop. Right? You have that loop, which is the engine of visibility engineering. I joked about adding the legend status on Peloton to my bio. I did it for a couple of reasons. One, because I worked very hard for that, but also because I wanted to kinda test this consistency theory about it. And so I added it to my bio on the website, on LinkedIn, on all of my social media profiles. And anytime I've started to do anything like this, like webinars or podcasts or anything like that, I it's in that bio as well so that I have that consistency. And now when you ask AI, I probably added it, I don't know, I can't remember when they launched it, three or four months ago. It wasn't that long ago. But now when you ask AI, who's this Jenny Dietrich person, that's part of what it surfaces because I wanted to test that piece of it just to see. So it it was there intentionally to see if I changed that or added it if it would show up in AI answers, and it does. So the idea here is that it's consistent, and when you have that consistency, you start to build that loop. I know many of you are here because earned media is what you do, and I'm also gonna be preaching to the choir a little bit too. So earned media, talked about, is the proof that you can't buy. It has to be earned, hence the name. You can buy reach. You can buy impressions. You can buy many, many things, but you cannot buy the kind of validation that makes people make decisions and makes the large language model surface you in all of the AI systems. Systems. You can't buy that. That's credibility. And credibility is the difference between being visible and being believed. And I believe, of course, as a comms professional, I'm a little biased, but I believe we have a really huge opportunity right now because earned media is more valuable than ever in a world where AI decides who to trust. The machines are looking for credible, consistent signals from credible sources. That's literally what you create through earned media. So this is by far not in earned media is dead talk, not even close. This is a here's how to make earned media work 10 times harder talk, and here's how you finally get the credits you deserve for all of the hard work that you do. Finally. Here's the catch, though. Self published expertise, matter how smart, no matter how well written, will always have a credibility seal ceiling. Humans know you control it. AI systems, you know, you control it too. So owned media alone is you on your stage with your microphone talking about yourself. It's needed for sure, but it's still an internal story. And the flip side of that is that earned media alone, especially if it's random collections of hits that don't reinforce each other, create noise, not authority. So one story about your product launch, another about your CEO, another about your new hires, another about trends that you don't really own. Congratulations. You're visible. But you're not building authority. You're building a clip book. The gap between what brands say about themselves, owned medium, and what the market can actually verify, earned media, is the new credibility problem. And it's gotten worse than the last few years because AI has made it so easy to produce thought leadership that appears credible, meets SEO standards, and then quietly fades into obscurity. You may have already seen this, but McCrack has a what is AI reading study, and they consistently update it about once a quarter. And what they have found is that nearly half, 46% of AI citations on LinkedIn come from articles. So your LinkedIn newsletter, not from posts, from the actual article. So think about that from your perspective. 42% of AI citations on LinkedIn or on Wikipedia, I'm sorry, link to pages about processes and technologies. They don't want link to a brand's homepage. They don't link to our brand's sales page. They don't link to our brand's blog. They link to our brand's process and technology page. So when you're thinking about owned media, what kinds of content should you be thinking about creating? And AI overwhelmingly cites news sources. 61% of Newswire citations are coming from Globe Newswire alone. So when you think about that, even if you just throw a release up on the Newswire that's consistent to all the other things that you're doing, it's going to start to show up in AI Answers for that reason alone as long as it's consistent. So, yeah, I'm not a huge, Newswire user in general, but when you think about it from a strategic perspective to do it for that very reason, there's a really good opportunity for you there. So articles, news newswires, structured words work this, structured web pages about how things work, those are the things you already know how to create an influence. You already know how to write a byline. You already know how to work with newswires. You already know how to pitch media. The opportunity is right in front of you. The question is whether you're connecting these things intentionally so they reinforce one another or if you're just letting them float around disconnected and you're hoping for the best. Again, like, release about the product launch, release about your CEO, release about an event, release about new new new hires. That those are things are great, and I know that you're asked to do those things because we are too, but you have to connect them. Otherwise, they're just out there floating. And AI when a when the LLMs are looking for information, they're it's looking it's a robot. Right? So it's looking for patterns. It's looking for structure. It's looking for consistency. And if it doesn't have those things, it gets confused, and it just gives up. So now and and human beings do the same thing too. Right? Now we have really strong structure to say, we have to be consistent. We have to tell a consistent store story, and here's how we're gonna do it. So let's start with own media as your foundation. Yes. It is your stage, but it is incredibly important that you still continue to stand on it and pontificate. Owned media is not your blog. It's not the website as a whole. It's definitely not whatever we posted last week because somebody needed something to share on LinkedIn. It may live on those things, but it's not the foundation. Owned media is your home base. It's the place where you decide what's true about your expertise, and then you prove it. Structured expertise. That means themes you can defend, authority anchors you can repeat, and proof that you can stand on. So you want your website to be the source of truth. Places like LinkedIn and Wikipedia become your satellite references where you rent your expertise to reach more people and allow the LLMs to scrape, and you can rent it out for sure, but you have to have that home home base. The brands and the experts that keep showing up as the answer in AI results on shortlist, in conversations, and in recommendations, they're not publishing more than everyone else. They're publishing with intention around a small set of themes, very small set of things, like one to three set of themes that they can defend, they can repeat, and they can reinforce without contradicting themselves every time the algorithm changes. You do not need more blog posts or webinars or white papers or podcast episodes. You need an Anchor Hub. An Anchor Hub, we used to call cornerstone content or pillar content. It's the evolution of those things. It's a deep, defensible page on your website that sort of functions like a reference entry. It's it's built for both LLMs and human beings. So you wanna think about it as an evidence library for one topic. You start with one, and you could build from there. It has clear definitions. It has methods, findings, and copy and pastable quotes that analysts, journalists, creators, influencers, and AI systems can safe safely cite. Your job is definitely not to publish more. Your job is to create the page that people and AI quote. It's a reference shelf for your expertise. An Anchor Hub is built around one topic. It frames the problem. What is the problem that you are solving with your product, with your service, whatever it happens to be? It defines the term, so it it helps you define what that solution is, how you're the solution. It shows your method, and then it publishes outcomes that AI can safely reuse. It is that evolution of what we used to call a pillar content or cornerstone content, and it's specifically designed to be useful to both humans and machines. So start with one, one anchor hub, just one. Make it the very best page on the Internet for your topic, and update it as you have new information. So let's say you create the anchor help or you already have something that's really good that that that serves the purpose of answering a question that people ask all the time. When you are doing your earned media and you have you have placements, you can steal quotes from those, placements and put that on your your page. When there's a new subject matter expert, when they do a a webinar or they do a they go on a podcast or they do a speaking engagement, You can take quotes from those things and add it to your anchor hub. So you're constantly refreshing it and updating it. And the more you do that and the more consistent it is, the more likely that it is that you're gonna show up in in AI answers. That is a much more useful goal than the days of old where it was like, publish three blog posts a week or comment on LinkedIn every single day. Not so important anymore. Consistency, creating patterns, answering questions. That's what you wanna focus on. Then once your own foundation is solid, something really interesting happens with earned media. It stops being just about pitching and placements and starts becoming your credibility engine. So you're thinking about it from the perspective of how does this provide third party validation for my anchor hub topic? Credibility starts to compound when others start to repeat your message in a trade publication, on a podcast, in a creator's newsletter, on a partner's blog. When the market starts repeating what you've been saying and pointing back to you as the source, that is the result that you wanna have. That is the outcome. Not number of placements, not number of that share of voice, not message pull through. All of those things are important to track, but the outcome is, is the market repeating what we've been saying, and do they point back to us as the source? So let me give you three practical ways this works. First, newswires. We talked about that for a few minutes with the Mucrex study. Whether or not news releases are dead has been debated for years. One thing is clear, however. Newswires are accelerating your visibility in AI answers. The key is to treat them as accelerants, not the endpoint. Issuer a release only after your Anchor Hub is live. Link the release to that anchor hub page, not to your home page, not to a product page, not to a sales page, not to a landing page, to the anchor hub page. That way, anyone who picks it up points to the page that you control, and it trains the large language models far beyond the news release. It trains them to also point to the page that you control. Second, bylined articles. Every bylined article contributed content that you do should map back to specific buyer question and a specific anchor hub on your website. Not a random thought leadership topic, a deliberate extension of all the work you've done over here on your owned media foundation. Third, pitching analysts and trade reporters. We all love, love, love, love, love, love the big tier one placement. But pitching analysts and trade reporters will extend your reach even further with the LLMs. For some reason, they like that content better than the big tier one national pubs. Each earned media, yes, that you place strengthens your owned media. So stronger owned media makes the next earned opportunity even easier, and stronger owned and earned is how you engineer visibility so that you show up in AI answers and recommendations, and people make decisions based on those recommendations. Okay. So I'm gonna walk you through a couple of examples. Two versions of the same scenario so that you can see how this works in practice. Version one is what I call the trophy case. Let's say a comms team lands a front cover feature in a trade publication. It's on message. It links back to the website. It quotes the team. It's the best placement you've had all year. Everyone's happy. It gets shared internally. Maybe it gets posted on social. It even gets concluded in the next board update. And then the inevitable question, okay. That was great. When do we get what's next? When do we get another cover story? What are we doing next? The team, of course, is recovering from all the work they just did to land that placement, and now we're moving on to the next one. Here's the problem. There's no through line with that. There's no connection back to a real buyer question. There's no reason a human being or an AI would recognize that article as a part of a bigger story about how you solve a problem. A month later, someone asked an AI tool about this topic. Your article might appear somewhere in the mix, but it's one disconnected mention among many. There's no pattern for the AI to recognize. There's no consistent signal across sources that says, these are the experts. This is the solution. This is the answer. The coverage was real, of course, but it didn't build anything lasting. Now let's look at version two, which is the credibility loop. Same team, same expertise, but this time, we're gonna connect everything. First, we've built an anchor hub on the website that answers a real buyer question in-depth. The the framework, the data, the method, and quotes from experts, and even some recent placements. It is the best page on the Internet for this topic. Not the flashiest, not the prettiest, the most useful, the most citable, and the most complete. They've assigned a named expert, a subject matter expert to that topic. That person's bio, title, and bylines all reinforce that this is in their lane. Neither the Internet nor a buying committee ever wonders who actually knows this. Now they pitch a bylined article to a trade publication, but this time, it's not random thought leadership. It answers the same buyer question, references the same solution, includes a simplified example, and links back to the Anchor Hub. A few weeks later, that same expert appears on an industry podcast. The conversation centers on the same topic. The host links to both the trade article and the anchor hub on your website in their show notes. Then a creator picks up the theme in their newsletter. They quote the expert and link back as further reading. Now someone asks an AI about this topic. What does the AI see? The same person, the same idea appearing consistently across multiple domains, your website, a trade article, a podcast episode, a newsletter with links and citations connecting those mentions back to owned content. That is a very strong signal for which definitions to use, whose framework to cite, and which examples to surface. That's how you build the credibility loop, and that's how you start stop shouting into the void and start building the kind of external proof that actually gets you chosen. Now I want you to understand that one of the things that we're not trying to do is drive people to the website. They're not going to do that. We're including the link to all this stuff really to train the AI so that they know that this brand, that this company is the expert on it because it's both in on their website, and it's being proven through third party credibility. Right? So we're less concerned. We used to be really concerned about driving people to the website. We know that that's not happening anymore. We're more concerned about just showing that credible piece of it so that it starts to show up in the LLMs. So you have the same media placement, completely different outcome. The weak version, the trophy case version, produces random earned media wins that create noise. The strong, the credibility loop version, produces aligned earned wins that reinforce what you want to be known for and make future yeses easier. From the outside, the strong version makes you look like you're everywhere on a small set of topics. And you may actually have people say, oh my gosh. I see you guys everywhere. When a competitor walks up to your CEO at a conference and was like and is like, we see you guys everywhere, that's a win. From the inside as well, it feels a lot calmer because you're not producing more, you're not doing more, you're not reporting on activity. You're actually doing things that create credibility and compound on its own so that you're reporting on outcomes. You're choosing the questions that actually matter to the business, to the organization, and you're building credibility around those slowly and systematically. The difference between those two versions is not budget. It is not team size. It's not talent. It's connection. It's intention, and it's deciding that every earned media win should reinforce your owned media foundation and build it accordingly. Okay. So there are three things you can do starting this week. Not someday, not tomorrow, not next week, not in a month, this week. Number one, today, ask AI about yourself. Go to your AI chatbot of of choice, whatever you use, and put it in temporary chat or incognito mode so it doesn't answer you based on your chat history. So you want it to be anonymous. Right? Just like you do when you're googling something, you don't want results based on what you're searching for. You want anonymous what other people would get. Ask it the number one question your quest your prospects ask before they buy. Do you show up? Does it recommend you? Then ask it about your category, your competitors, or the problem that you solve. Where are you in those answers? If you're there, great. If you're not, you know why now. The signals are thin, they're inconsistent, or they're not credible enough for the AI to trust. Don't panic. It's not a room for panic. It's just to give you a baseline so that you know where to build. And this is where you can start to build your visibility engineering and have that baseline. So if you show up, like, every three, your goal will be to show up every two, and then your goal will be to show up every time. Right? So you have a baseline. Excuse me. Number two, identify your first anchor topic. I'm willing to bet you already have these and you already have pages on the website that are started, you want to to build and create there. So pick one topic where you want to be the obvious answer and frame it as a real buyer questions in the words that real people ask. Not your internal marketing language, the way a prospect would ask it in a Slack channel or type it into a Google search or type it into a chatbot. Then ask yourself, do we have a page on our website that clearly and in-depth answers this question with proof? Something that we would be proud to send to our prospect and that an AI system could safely cite? If yes, you're ahead of most. Tighten it up. Keep it going. Refresh it every so often, and you've got you've got a good compounding loop going. Right? If the answer is no, now you know what your plan is. Now you know what work needs to be done. You do not need 200 blog posts. You do not need to publish three blog posts a week. You don't need to be everywhere. You do not need to be all things to all people. You need a small set of anchor pages that function like an evidence library, and you can start with just one. And number three, this is the one that ties it all together. So the next time you land a media placement, a byline, a podcast appearance, a newswire pickup, a quote in a trade publication, ask yourself one question. Does this point back to our anchor hub? If yes, great, then go. Does it reinforce the same story? So does the article or the podcast episode or whatever happens to be reinforce the same story as our anchor hub? And if yes, does it give AI and humans a consistent pattern to follow? If it does yes to all of those things, you're building a credibility loop. If it doesn't, it might that that story might be a nice trophy, but it's not engineering your visibility. And listen. Even if they don't link back to your anchor hub, that's okay. The LLMs are now smart enough to make the connection if everything else is there. So if your story is the same expert, the same bio, the same topic, the same solution as your anchor hub, that's what it's looking for. It's looking for that consistency. So don't stress if it's if you don't get the link in the article, we don't need to worry about that so much anymore. Make this a habit. Every earned media placement should reinforce your own media foundation. That one behavior, that just one behavior consistently applied is what turns your isolated media placements into that compounding authority. And here's the metric shift I would encourage. Stop measuring success by placement counts, by impressions, by AVEs. Start measuring reuse. Are you showing up in answer AI answers? Are you showing up at the top of a Google search in that summary? Are you showing up in all of the AI bots? That is what matter matters now. Not impressions, not number of placements. That stuff doesn't matter anymore. So here's where we land. In an AI shaped market, signals win and credibility wins. Owned media is where you prove your expertise. Earned media is where others validate it, where others say, yes. These guys are fantastic. Together, they build the kind of visibility that both humans and AI systems can recognize, trust, and surface. This is not about doing more. Most of you are already doing a lot. It's about connecting what you are already doing so it compounds and starts to work while you sleep. So each earned media placement builds on the last one, and your owned media content gives everything a place to live and grow. That is visibility engineering. That is how you engineer that you'll show up, and it's something that every one of you can start doing this week. Now we've been talking about building a system where your owned and earned media tell a consistent story, but here's the thing. If your profile says one thing and your pitch says another, that inconsistency is going to undercut everything we just discussed because AI and humans both need the same thing, consistency. So Shelby is going to show you exactly how to ensure your profile and pitches match the authority you're building, which is the execution layer, and I will hand it over to her. Amazing. Thank you so much. I feel like I just spent the last twenty minutes taking a lot of notes, and and learned a lot there. So, that was wonderful. So like I mentioned at the top of the call, mine will be pretty quick and painless ideally for you all. Hopefully, all of you are doing this. And and per I don't know. We talked a lot about, you know, like, your your social media algorithm there, and maybe it's my social media algorithm. But right now, all of my content is talking about habit stacking. That seems to be the the algorithm I've fallen into. And so going throughout this presentation, I just kept thinking about habit stacking, which is, like, the idea where you attach, like, small habits and actions to things that you're already doing. Right? So continuing to add those things and creating a habit over time. So you're already getting placements. Are you continuing to stack on top of them? Are you starting over each and every time was all I kept kind of thinking about. So it goes with our our viral social media trends there. So out of habit on my end, if you will, and if you are ever on calls with me, you know I love to talk about your quoted profiles. So bear with me, but Jeannie points to or Jenny points to a lot of areas where we just wanna reiterate how important it is that the profile is aligning with your other social presence, your website, and all of the primary talking points that you want to continually be contributing to. So whether this is your client profile that you're pitching or representing or it's your own profile in Quoted, there's a few key areas you wanna ensure are up to date and completed. So if you have not been to your profile in Quoted, please go to the top right corner, hit the drop down menu. There's gonna be a little button there that says my profile. And for my PRs, once you go into that page, you will have all of your source profiles. If you haven't created source profiles, there's an option to add sources, where you can add and put those that presence into the network as well. So first thing I wanna talk about here is adding coverage. So add coverage to your earned media section. Pro tip on this, when you paste your URLs, it will populate. It will kind of autofill the title and description that comes from that that article itself. So whatever that publication has autofilled, there will auto populate into that title and description section. The pro tip is you do not have to take that description. You can make that description more pointed or more geared towards your specific area of the article and kind of that that more specific point and, topic that you were contributing to as part of that article. The second piece here is your recent quote section. So very similar to up above, talking about the description and kind of tweaking the description to be a little bit more focused on that talking point that you really wanna be pointing to or kind of that anchor that you wanna be driving back into, your recent quote section, you can pull your exact quoted content and kind of share and highlight those exact comments. Another tip here is these do not necessarily need to be published quotes. Some of you have never been featured in an article before. So maybe you contributed something. Maybe you have something you've said in the past. You really, really like that content you wanna recycle, kind of reuse. You can showcase that on your profile as well. So you can just pull up a quote. It might seem small, but this is actually one of, like, a very high level of, like, leverage in the platform itself to help pull you into very relevant searches that journalists are doing. But it also is now showcasing that expertise directly on your profile, and it's not buried within an article. It's structured, and it's immediately visible to anybody clicking and viewing within that profile as well. The last piece here is thank the journalist. This is really nothing to do with your profile, but it's really helpful to just build that relationship over time. Thanking them is also, another way you can thank them is in the form of sharing their work. So this is how you can become kind of that go to source for the topic, reminding them that you are a regular person who can contribute to that specific topic. So rather than being one of many, you are one of one on that specific area that they wanna use as a go to moving forward. So that is all we have to share there. I am also gonna have my colleague, Liz, join us here because she's gonna help us filter through. There was a lot of questions that came through throughout the chat. My personal favorite to kick, off is, Jenny, who's your favorite Peloton instructor? That was the first one I saw. not nice to ask, Matt Wilpers. Yeah. Oh, to pick favorites. You know? Yeah. Definitely Matt Wilpers. Alright. Well, we've got a lot of questions. And by far, there were so many questions about Anchor Hubs. The Gina Chung asked, can you provide us with an example of what an Anchor Hub would actually look like? And. Veronica asked that. So can you dig more into Anchor Hubs? What are these? Like, talk to us about that. Okay. So let's see. It's kind of like I'm trying to think of a really good example that's not gonna come to my brain right now. So you have your headline and your subhead on the page. Right? And you know how on lots of of sort of newer websites, they have the frequently asked questions that accordion, They might have a video. They have some poll quotes. They have some logos, that scroll or images that scroll. The they might have a a a bio at the bottom. It's it's that. It's like all of those things. Right? So you're really thinking about how like, it really is. How do I create the very best, most informative page on the Internet for my topic? So, like, the PESO model page that we have on SpinSucks does all those things. Right? It has, you know, here are all the universities that are accredited to use it. Here are brands that have used it and are certified to use it. Here are freak frequently asked questions. And if we didn't answer your question, you can link over here to more questions. So you're you're creating the journey for people, and you're really creating the journey since most people don't come to your website anymore. You're really creating the journey for the LLMs so that it can zip go, oh, okay. Here's all the information about the PESO model. I actually didn't get all of my questions answered, so now I'm gonna go over here and get more. And then I'm gonna go over here because they've got more content over here, and it you like, you've led them through. So it's really right now, how do you create that very best page on the Internet and then start to bring all of your expertise into that? And keep it refreshed. Keep it, you know, really fresh. And for those of you who don't see it in the chat, Travis shared the Peso model page on SpinSucks. Let's move over to talking about LLMs for a minute. Do first off, how do paywalls impact LLM visibility? Yep. I think they do because they can't get behind it. Right? So just like humans, they can't if you can't get behind it, you can't you can't crawl it. There's lots I've been kinda tracking, you know, all of the lawsuits, especially from the big media that are not that don't want the LLMs to crawl. I think we're probably getting past that pretty fast. I think the the horse is already out of the gate, and we we can't get it back in. So we're we're gonna start to see a lot of those lawsuits sort of either get settled or go away. And, I mean, this is where we are. So, yes, to an to directly answer the question, it can't get behind the paywall just like we can't either. So if you've got stuff behind a paywall or you've got stuff behind a a gated landing page and it's content that you want out there, I would really reconsider that. Okay. We're getting more Anchor Hub questions, and so I am gonna pop back to that just so that we can keep. all of it together. Jennifer asked her website's no longer needed, now just Anchor Hubs. And, no. No. Yeah. Yeah. I used to website. Yeah. Sorry. I interrupted you. No. I I agree. So so Anchor Hubs are a page within your website. Correct. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. And is it crucial to have the same experts cited in your Anchor Hub as quoted in the published quotes or bylines for podcast guests? It is crucial because what the LLMs want is that consistency. So you're going to have more than one anchor hub on your website. Like, you you you already for all intents and purpose, you already have anchor hubs on your website. You may not call it that because you don't have all the extra stuff. You don't have the frequently asked questions. You don't have the quotes, but you do have pages on your website that describe your products and services. Those, for all intents and purposes, are our anchor hubs. You want to refresh them. You want to add expert quotes. You wanna add, you know, third party credible quotes. You wanna add all of that stuff to it. So I would really think about those pages that already exist and how you're going to refresh those and update those, and those are your anchor hubs. But, yes, if you are if if I'll go back to the PESO model example. If I'm go if we're gonna pitch stories on the PESO model and the expert on that page is me, it needs to be me talking about it. If we're gonna be pitching articles on the PESO model certification certification and the expert on that page is the our chief learning officer, then all the articles should quote her. So it's really about who's the expert on the topic, who's the expert on your product or service on that page, and then make sure that that's consistent through the media that you're getting. That makes sense. A few people have asked about OKRs. And so when incorporating these suggestions, how can we prove the outcomes of doing them? What are the eight OKRs, hard. Yeah. and how do we obtain. them? It's super hard. I have not yet seen good software that will help you measure this. You kind of have to do it manually like I suggested with, you know, going into into the AI bot and asking. There are some things that are coming. I just haven't seen anything good yet. So I would venture to guess in the next three to six months that we have some software that will measure that will track all of this for us so we can measure it to an OKR. But right now, what I would really focus on are two things. One, I would figure out what where we're servicing or not right now for our products and services and baseline that, and then, you know, recheck it. I'd probably check it once a month. I would throw all of that into an AI agent or a project that I've created, and I would just have it track over time for me. Say, okay. Here's my baseline. Here's where we are thirty days later. Here's where we are sixty days later, and let it help you create that so that you can build up to that OKR. But right now, it's pretty manual, unfortunately. So what's the best prompt to put in AI or LLMs to see what currently the profile is that's being generated about you or your client? I think it's pretty easy. You can really just say, you know, what like, what is the best certification for communicators? And then I would want to see that the PESO model is one of the recommendations. Right? So I think it's a pretty simple prompt. Like, what is the best x in the market? Who is the best company in this industry? It's pretty those are pretty simple prompts. Yep. Yep. And do you recommend checking them monthly? Like, having the same. prompts, checking them? Yeah. I would if if you're consistently updating your anchor hubs, like, you're doing it weekly, then I would check it weekly. But if it's if it's not something that you're doing, you know, pretty consistently, then I would do monthly. What's the best way to see which media sites are often most cited by LLMs? There has been a lot of research that shows that it tends to be trade publications first and national news publications second. But we've also found that places like Wikipedia that, you know, aggregate all that content are really effective too. So to keep yourself up to date on that stuff, I would just pay attention. MuckRock does a really nice study that they update every quarter. I would pay attention to that because it's going to continue to to evolve and show you where to be paying attention. And just a side note since you said Muckrak. Muckrak does now have AI visibility on each reporter's profile, so high. AI do. visibility. Yes. They do. Newswires Jennifer Thomas says newswires might play into AI, but they're so expensive. What alternatives exist? And then with that, somebody else asked, they're so expensive. What what ones are worth the investment? Well, the mark the Muckrak study showed that 61% are coming from GlobeNewswire right now. So if you're going to invest, that's probably the one I would. I I actually joked with them. I was like, oh my gosh. You just sent a ton of business to them unintentionally because it's like 61%. That may change, but I will also tell you that you don't have to do that. Right? If you don't have the budget or you don't have the time or it's not a a strategic priority, that's okay. You can still engineer your visibility with your owned media and your earned media placements. It doesn't have to be on newswires. It's one option. I mean, we don't put our stuff on there. We put our some client stuff, but we don't put our stuff on there. So someone is asking about a quote page on a website. I'm having a hard time visualizing this. Is it, like, creating quote graphics and placing them on there? I mean, it definitely depends on how your website and the pages are designed. If that makes sense for the design of the pay of the website, absolutely. You can just use pull quotes. You can use you know, you could use the scrolling images that link to quotes. Like, there are lots of different ways you can do it. That's a design element, not necessarily a you know, I I will say that LLMs want the text, not an image. So that if you can do text, that's better, but that's a design element. I asked this question. What are your thoughts on advertorials, paid media, and their credibility? There hasn't been any research yet to show, you know, sponsored content or native advertising and how that affects, but I will say that, you know I mean, obviously, I believe in the pay zone model. Otherwise, I wouldn't have created it. But the more that you do with all of the media types, which does include pay for play, the the better off you're going to be. So 100%, I would not shy away from that. Just remember that when you're doing those things, it's about the consistency. So is it pointing back to an Anchor Hub on your website? Is it does it have the same experts? Are they talking about the same topic? If it does those things, then it's not going to matter that you pay for it as long as you have all of the other stuff working too. Makes sense. We've got time for two more questions. Celine. K. Hey, Celine. Asks, bylines that are about your solution and linked to your page are nearly impossible to place unless they're paid advertorials because they're seen as promotional. So how do you suggest getting around that challenge to keep reinforcing the content you want? I don't think you need to worry about it anymore. I mean, it's great if you can get the link, but the LLMs are smart enough now to go, ah, I can make this connection. Human beings aren't that smart. So, you know, it was it used to be really first of all, it was it was necessary for SEO, but it was really necessary even just three years ago to have that link so that you could you could build that that trail for people. The LLMs don't need that. So we when we do bylines, we include the link. If they take it out, they take it out, and we're not like, it's not a big thing. But if they leave it in, even better. So I wouldn't stress about it, but and and know that if it's in there, it's better. And if it's not, the LLMs are smart enough to figure it out. Okay. So here's a big question. K? I'm confused as to the value of landing an AI search. I can't recall a time when I made a query on a topic with AI and then searched for the reference content. What am I missing? I would be curious how you're searching for information. Yeah. I mean, that's all I do. That's all I do. Yeah. It I think I think it really has to do with if you're asking your your LLM for source links to back up their Yeah. their generation. Okay. Not as big as I thought it was. I'm gonna turn this back over to you folks because we've got a minute and a half. Look at us. Amazing. Hi, Yeah. Liz. Tons of questions, which was great. I will let you, Jenny, talk really quickly about your certification course. Oh, thank you. Yeah. The PESO model certification we launched in 2020, which teach at at the time, taught people how to use the PESA framework. And one of the things that we find pretty consistently is people are like, yeah. We use PESA. We have some ads, and we do media relations, and we've got some content. And we, of course, are on social media, and we're always like, it's not the PESO model. It's really it's about integration and measurement. And so that was 2020. As you know, things have evolved and changed significantly, so we did a big refresh this year and launched it a month ago, and it's become an operating system. So we've we've it now teaches you how to use Peso, of course, but how to embed an operating system underneath all of this work. And so this visibility engineering that I just want you walked you through is a big part of that, and then it brings in shared and paid as well. Amazing. Yes. Well, I know it was shared earlier in the chat, but we'll be sure in our follow-up email with the recording to this session. We'll also include a link to your website so people can learn more about that too. Obviously, upcoming webinars, we do these every single month, guys. So if you have been here before, great to thank you for coming back. We're super grateful to have all of you here and all of you investing in taking the time to learn more about what's changing in this this crazy world, and we will pass out this recording in the next twenty four hours. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thanks, Liz. Bye, Shelly. Thank you.