Here we go, heading into 2026. Changes are coming at PR pros faster than they can keep up.
But, what should we really focus on? What trends deserve our attention? And which ones should we adopt a wait-and-see approach for?
My guest, Bill Byrne- PR Expert of Remedy Public Relations, is with me to discuss what to expect as we hurdle into the new year.
Whether you’re in B2C or B2B PR and comms, we cover the insight you need to get ready for what lies ahead.
Show summary:
In the final episode of 2025, PR Explored, hosted by Michelle Garrett, a PR consultant, author, and writer, features a guest appearance from PR veteran Bill Byrne.
The episode delves into the transformative trends in public relations, discussing the impact of AI on PR practices, the enduring value of press releases, the integration of thought leadership, and navigating the evolving media landscape.
Michelle and Bill highlight the importance of consistent PR efforts, the role of various media types, including niche media and Substack newsletters, and the need for creating credible, valuable content.
They emphasize building long-term relationships with the media and the criticality of trust in communication strategies. The discussion also touches on the challenges and opportunities posed by AI-driven search, the resurgence of press releases, and strategies to adapt to changing PR dynamics.
As the industry moves forward, the episode encourages brands to be proactive, stay informed, and embrace comprehensive PR audits to effectively target their audiences.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:28 Meet the Guest: Bill Byrne
00:40 Holiday Festivities and Personal Touches
01:30 Bill Byrne’s PR Journey
03:24 PR Realities: What Won’t Change
16:20 AI and PR: The Deep Fakes Issue
32:01 The Power of Consistent Content in B2B PR
32:28 The Importance of Building a Deep and Clear Trail
33:01 Creating News Beyond Product Announcements
35:20 The Role of AI in PR and Media Relations
37:10 Navigating the Media Landscape: Newsletters and Niche Media
45:40 The Resurgence of Press Releases in the AI Era
57:43 The Value of Thought Leadership in Building Trust
01:02:31 Final Thoughts and Future Trends in PR
Show notes:
Bill Byrne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbyrne/
Remedy Public Relations: https://remedypr.com/
Full transcript:
2026 PR Trends You Need To Know
Michelle Garrett: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to PR Explored. This is the last episode of 2025. I’m so like excited that we made it to the end of the year, but it’s the end of the year. Let me quickly just talk about what PR explored is. So PR explored is the PR podcast where we delve into trends and topics related to public relations.
I’m your host, Michelle Garrett, a PR consultant and writer, and I have a special guest today. Bill Byrne is back. Yay.
Bill Byrne: Hey everybody. Before we start, gonna throw out my holiday cat shirt, if you celebrate or like cats, I hope you love it. If you saw me on Instagram, I made a post that I would be wearing it.
I think some people didn’t believe me, but it’s the season.
Michelle Garrett: I can see. I’m so excited that you’re a Cat fan. ’cause I’m also a cat fan.
Bill Byrne: Oh yes. I love fur as weird as that sounds. Now. And also we gotta call out your [00:01:00] antlers, which are amazing.
Michelle Garrett: Yes. I might not wear them the whole time because who is going to take, advice or insight from somebody wearing this on their head?
But I thought we’d get a little festive today. And actually they’re driving my cats crazy ’cause they have bells and they, it’s when I walk around, oh my gosh,
Bill Byrne: I didn’t even think about that. That’s amazing. So quickly, those that don’t know me, I am co-founder and managing director of Remedy PR here in San Diego.
I’ve been in the public relations industry for 25 plus years. I began my career in Manhattan at two of the bigger firms in the world. Most recently one that was acquired by WPP. My experience ranges from. Active outdoor industries like snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing, yoga, to a lot of work in consumer tech, finance, and healthcare, among other things.
And it’s one of the things that I love [00:02:00] talking to Michelle about is I’m not afraid to say what’s working and not working in PR versus selling you on just some plain old bs. So whenever Michelle gives me the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is, or my foot in my mouth via PR explored, I’m always excited to be apart.
Michelle Garrett: This is the fourth time you’ve been here, right? So you are, like I said, you next time the five for the five timers club, like SNL does, we’ll have to get you a jacket or some special I’ll be waiting
Bill Byrne: And I went and looked. I don’t know if those are smoking jackets or robes e either way, at school.
I don’t know if smoking jackets are PC anymore. Some people might not even know what I’m talking about. Yeah, they don’t smoke. But it still would be cool to have one. Yeah. Yeah. So send it. I want the PR explored monogram robe.
Michelle Garrett: We’ll see. We’ll see how 2026 works out. But but I absolutely intend to continue doing this because [00:03:00] I love being able to talk to my smart colleagues and friends.
And so I am just thrilled to have you here again, and I appreciate you spending time. ’cause I know everybody’s busy and it’s the busiest time of year, right? So we have to try to make time if we work in communications and pr and marketing to think about as we head into the new year, what are we going to be?
Kind of keeping an eye on. And of course we never know for sure. But we’re gonna talk about a few things today and I would love for people to weigh in if they have thoughts, what they’re keeping an eye on, if they have questions that we can, talk about, please post. Yes. Awesome.
We could chit chat, but I’m gonna I’m gonna get started. And I know we wanna talk first about things that won’t change because I really have a lot of thoughts on this and I know you do too. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Tell me what [00:04:00] you think is going to stay the same
Public relations is a long game – and educating clients matters
Bill Byrne: off the jump.
Any potential client will ask. Not any, most potential clients are going to ask us. Can you get me on? Blank. And in the tech world, in the B2B world, it’s often tech crunch. Can you get me on Oprah’s website? Can you get me on the Today Show? And I’ll be the first to tell you that we’ve got a portfolio full of success stories there, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
And clients don’t typically want to hear that. You have to buckle in for the long haul. We’ve got case studies of landing that brilliant placement overnight as do you, Michelle. But if you’re really gonna put effort into landing those stories, you’ve gotta realize that you’ve gotta buckle in for more than a few weeks [00:05:00] to launch a PR campaign worth anything.
Michelle Garrett: It is not something you can do overnight. And that’s the thing I hope that starts to sink in. And I think for companies that are successful with the PR effort, they understand that it takes time. It’s not about chasing the shiny objects, it’s not about last touch attribution. It’s really looking at the big picture and playing the longer game with all of these efforts,
Bill Byrne: yeah, definitely. And I think you bump into this a lot too, is you’ll get questions on relationships and do you have certain relationships and how good are they? And this, we have great relationships, but just because we’re friends with a journalist doesn’t mean they’re gonna drop everything to cover your story.
Michelle Garrett: No. No, not at all. No, not at all. And I feel like that’s, I feel like there are just, it’s an education issue often because I just feel [00:06:00] like people don’t know or don’t understand. And once you’ve been in the trenches like we have been, I think that’s part of every conversation really, even before we start working together, is.
What really, what are your goals? What do and you can tell from the questions that they ask or the conversation, even the initial conversation, what they are thinking and their level sometimes. And sometimes people say, I don’t know anything about this. ’cause I’ve found myself using the term earned media.
And they asked me what, and I should never assume that people understand what earned media is. So that is on me to explain. But then if that’s why they’re, and that’s really why a lot of companies go after PR in the first place, is to get media coverage, which is also known as our media.
So
Bill Byrne: that is the downside of what we do for a living, because so many that are not experienced and think that it’s as easy as sending one email to [00:07:00] somebody we have a relationship with and they’re gonna cover the story. Yeah. And right or wrong, educated or not. Most of the time it takes more effort than just sending a press release via email.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No it’s a longer game. And it’s not an overnight that’s why when somebody contacts you, it says I have a launch next week. What can you do? And I’m like,
Bill Byrne: not a lot. No. And that, that is something that probably won’t change next year either, is the fly by night, we can guarantee you x, y, and Z placements overnight.
Fake PR firms that we know don’t deliver, won’t get picked up by ai, but they’ll take that money on versus yourself or here at Remedy. I don’t want to take on a client that we can’t be successful with. Charge them anything. Knowing that we’re going to fail. Other teams are fine with that.
Michelle Garrett: And
Bill Byrne: we’ve had brands come to us, say they’ve been burned by PR teams before, [00:08:00] and when we kick the tires, it was a bad plan. They didn’t give it enough time, or they didn’t give it enough budget. Typically, all three. And I’ll tell them, I would’ve not have taken that on. I’m like, here’s what you should do.
You don’t have to work with us.
Michelle Garrett: But
Bill Byrne: here’s what you should have done. Here’s what I would do if I were you. And sometimes it’s not taking on a PR team yet, because really all you’re doing is you’re selling a mouse in another shade of white. And that’s not much of a story unless timeout, I think Pantone color of the year is off white or something like that.
So white, what do I know?
Michelle Garrett: Not sure what they were thinking with that,
Bill Byrne: but that’s a, oh, there’s a lot of chatter. There’s a lot of chatter online about it.
PR shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an investment
Michelle Garrett: That’s another that’s another podcast topic for another day. But yeah. No, it’s interesting. So let’s talk about, sometimes they’ll say, [00:09:00] why does PR cost so much?
Or why, why does this, proposal, what, why is what’s, what is it about the pricing or why? Let’s talk about that a little bit. Because I, a, I don’t think it has to cost an arm and a leg but also it does. It’s not like you can just throw a little, something at it and be done.
Bill Byrne: Exactly. Part of it has to deal with, has to do with the experience of the people on your team. Someone with 20 plus years experience might cost more than someone with 10. And you look at some bigger firms where you’ll meet with someone who’s got 30 years experience at the front, and then they give your work to someone who’s got one year experience and they can charge less, but, a lot of it is, PR takes time and effort. So depending on your brand and how deep of a pool of media outlets you’re going to go after, how broad?
It’s [00:10:00] going to take more time. Like we can look at footwear, right? Do you make hiking shoes for men? Okay. That’s one target. Do you also make them for women?
Okay. That’s a whole other subset of media, right? Do you make basketball shoes? All right. Now we’re adding in more effort. Do you have a good B2B story? Do you have a technology that you’re trying to license to other footwear manufacturers? These are all. Areas where it’s going to take more time, but also it’s more than just sending out that one email.
It’s monitoring for trends. It’s targeting different journalists and staying on top of them. And you know this, you do so much with trend stories to make sure that they call you, because often journalists, Michelle Garrett and Bill Byrne aren’t the only two great PR people out there. And as memorable as we are, sometimes they forget about us and we need to stay on top of [00:11:00] them.
And we don’t just go for that one tech crunch story. Because also that one story might not do it. If you’re the, if you’re the customer, I don’t care if it’s a B2B customer or B2C, you might not click to buy right away. So you need to be in, yeah, tech Crunch is great, but all these other places that we can talk about later, so that.
You resonate and you stay top of mind.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. On the pricing question, I just wanna say that, there are different situations. So if you’re a big company, if you’re Apple, if you’re Adobe or whatever, you’re gonna, you’re gonna work with a lot of agencies, right? Bigger agencies are gonna be a better fit.
But a lot of my clients are 500 to a thousand employees. What is really termed as a small business and they have a one person marketing department, so they’re not gonna want or need to hire a big firm. So somebody, a [00:12:00] smaller boutique agency or a consultant is a better fit and a more cost effective way to tackle it.
Bill Byrne: Y you nailed it. It’s what do they really need? Often we see brands look at firms that are massive, which have value, but that 500 person agency. You are not getting 500 people on your team.
And but before Remedy I was a consultant and I’ll throw the receipts down. That did great work for certain brands.
Brands that, people know very well because they didn’t need 20 people on an account, often. Yeah. An account needs one to five maybe, depending on what you’re doing. If your brand is massive, then Yeah. Or something you and I do not do a lot of as events where you just need manpower.
That’s something different. You need a team that has enough, what I call prime time hours, meaning, between 8:00 AM East Coast [00:13:00] to three, right? And it doesn’t, we go up against on the consumer side, PR teams that are one person. That do phenomenal work.
’cause they’re good at their job. Sometimes all you do need is one person.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And then you know who you’re working with. That’s what I always say to my clients. I’m not gonna hand you off to somebody, with less experience. You’re gonna work directly with me. So that to me, that’s, that can be worth something because we don’t waste time or it’s a little bit more.
They can, and then so a lot of the things that they, a lot of the reasons they hire me are just so that they can have somebody to bounce questions off of when things come up. And honestly, as we head into this first trend we’re gonna talk about they’re gonna need, they need somebody they can trust.
They need a council, a trusted counselor to, to turn to with questions and issues and yeah,
Bill Byrne: debate and switch in PR is so real where [00:14:00] they’ll meet with someone, your level or mine. And then be D off to someone who is 22, 23, cutting their teeth, learning PR on the client’s dime. Yeah. And I understand why that happens.
You and I were at one time, 22, 23, learning the ropes.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Bill Byrne: But brands don’t realize that happens. And you should ask anyone pursuing a new consultant or a small agency like ours, who is my day-to-day contact, because that is going to matter. Be wary of PR firms that have new business teams where they’re very good at selling you.
And then this is who you’re working with over
Michelle Garrett: there. No, you should know, you should ask that and meet them ahead of time, I think before you make a decision. Okay, so that’s
Bill Byrne: enough. Talking about what’s not gonna change.
Michelle Garrett: Let’s get into some trends because, and I think, these trends are probably not going to shock anyone.
AI and PR – let’s talk about deepfakes
So the first one that [00:15:00] we’re gonna talk about, ta-da, is AI and pr, right? So who is it talking about that? But let’s, I don’t know. Let’s, I don’t know. Let’s give it a go here.
Bill Byrne: Definitely. Do
Michelle Garrett: you want to start with the deep fakes issue? That’s been my biggest trend that I’m watching because I feel like the technology’s getting to a point and we’ve all seen it where you can’t tell the difference, right?
In a lot of cases. And so if your company, your execs are out there and maybe somebody wants to come after your brand and they want to try to put something out that looks like your CEO. Giving remarks that, may or may not probably are not gonna be what you would have him actually say if he were there.
Talking live it’s going to reflect potentially poorly on your brand and you’re gonna have to be [00:16:00] prepared to address that. And this has to be part of your crisis planning, but I think also just building your reputation. And we will talk more about some of these things as we go, through thought leadership and being the trusted expert in the space and just being out there in front of your audience so that they know they can tell the difference, right?
You’re if you’re out there and they trust you, they’re gonna know when it’s you. So that’s my biggest issue with AI and PR right now.
Bill Byrne: You’re nailing it. In a general level, similar to financial literacy we need much better media literacy in. Our world, people are not educated enough on where their news comes from.
And I don’t mean politically left or right, I just am getting into, people see something and because it’s online, they take it as gospel. Whereas if I just wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it on the street and said this, he’d be like, who’s this crazy [00:17:00] guy? But it’s so easy to hide online. So yeah, media literacy with AI is really important, but brands need to getting into the deep fakes, be ready to respond, and it’s important that they’re, monitoring for that, but also proactive and have a digital paper trail where the customer, whether B2C or B2B can go and check what, we can call it a blog, we can call it a newsroom, whatever it is, have a stance on that.
The same way that. You might see from your bank put out an Instagram story saying, Hey, we’ve been told people are getting random text messages trying to enter into your account. Do not do that. Whatever. Yeah. Brands need to be ready to say, that’s not our CEO because it’s very easy for me to start an Instagram account saying, Jim Smith’s, CEO underscore
Michelle Garrett: And
Bill Byrne: through various [00:18:00] tools, say things that Jim Smith would not want to say legal. No. But we know it’s happening, whether it’s overseas or domestically. So brands need to be ready before that, that spins out. So be in the loop, have that trail
But also proactively monitor to. And if you don’t.
We can get into Reddit and other places too. Like you’ve gotta be ready to respond before these things spin out.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, and the sad truth as we know is that whether or not it is true if it goes, if it gets out there, and I don’t wanna use the term go viral, but I will if it catches, fire on social media and starts to get spread around, then whether or not it’s true, it’s out there and it’s, it’s gonna take you a lot more time and effort to squelch it than it would if you were on top of it [00:19:00] from the get go.
Bill Byrne: And that’s another issue we’re going to have with AI in terms of AI based search, which is huge for discovery and B2B and B2C, right? That if the story gets, goes viral, gets a lot of traction, that’s what the LLMs and GPTs are going to pick up. Not the small retraction. Somebody made later. It’s the head, if the headline’s awful and like the newspaper retracts it later, they throw it on the back page.
So yeah. The same thing with these deep fakes. If you don’t nip it in the bud, now you know, these, the gpt of the world are pulling the things that seem to be reputable, whether or not they’re factual.
If it’s got popular opinion, then it must be right. But it’s not
be proactive in your monitoring, especially in the age of ai.
Michelle Garrett: Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s the thing. It’s if you don’t have anything set up to know what is being said, ’cause you can’t [00:20:00] possibly, monitor every platform unless you have tools to do that. So I think that’s really important to make that part of your budget and, it’s.
And make sure everybody’s in the loop. ’cause I feel like silos are still a thing. ’cause I interviewed two weeks ago I had Brooke sell on and she’s a social media expert and she was talking about how from a social media perspective you would manage a crisis. And part of it is you have to work together.
Obviously you’re gonna work with your legal team, but you’re gonna work with your PR team. And I just feel like that there’s a kind of a wall there sometimes. So I feel like we need to be working together and we can get a lot more done. And obviously if they already are using the tools, they can clue in the comms team if something is on the horizon out there.
Bill Byrne: Yes. Yes. And side note, you mentioned tools. That’s where AI has helped a lot. Yeah. But still brands need to budget to use these tools and I know they [00:21:00] can be expensive. Yes. And that’s one of the things that we tell brands already. I’m like, Hey, listen. This is what the tool costs. We’re not getting revenue outta that.
This is a third party service to use that otherwise you risk disaster.
So your call
Using AI in your PR efforts
Michelle Garrett: yeah. I wanna stay on just AI and PR for just a second before we move on. ’cause there is the next trend is really important too. But I know a lot of people are wanting to use AI to do everything for them.
And it can be useful, I feel like, for research and things like that, maybe. But if you’re using it to do your writing and automating your outreach, because again, I know I have seen it as, I’m listed in a meeting database because I’ve done some freelance writing and I get pitched and I can tell.
When something is automated and when it’s not. And then also the follow-ups and sometimes it’s three follow-ups in two days. And I’m like, automation has its place, but let’s, be careful [00:22:00]
Bill Byrne: if a story is being written by a human. Do you think that human wants to be contacted by a machine to pitch them?
Because I get the same LinkedIn dms You do, and I’m gonna shout out my friend Jeff Sipe. He’s got an office in our building. He’s a former Google recruiter and an interview coach, and he gave me a great hack in that if you go to my profile on LinkedIn, my first name is actually listed as Bill Byrne hyphen, and then my last name as pretentious as it might sound, is PR expert.
And the reason I do that at the bare bones level is the DMS I get now that I know to write off. As fake, or not fake, but written by bots. The email comes from, or the dm, bill Byrne comma, which no one would ever use. Oh, who’s a human? And it’s clear. Cool. You just sent me this block archive. Yeah, you’re done.
And yes, you nailed it. [00:23:00] AI helps often with research. We all know it. Hallucinates though. It’s like a teenager who tells you what you want to hear,
Michelle Garrett: right?
Bill Byrne: Sometimes. And you start kicking the tires. I’m like that’s not where you were last night. But looking at what a journalist has written and tailoring it, a deep tailoring that AI can’t do right now.
Plus mentioning relationships, plus pulling from other things. That might be a factor. It’s just, it’s not there. So humans wanna be spoken to as humans. And as we get into that, I do see. In the future, AI is here to stay. But we definitely have AI fatigue and much like in food and other worlds where like organic is preferred, there’s going to be a lot of people that don’t want to deal with an AI agent.
It’s [00:24:00] helpful in certain things for sure. But there’s going to be people that want their content created by real people. There’s going to be people that want to interact with real people. Yeah. And
Michelle Garrett: yeah, I think we’re starting to see, I feel like it’s, there’s I just, I feel like I’m living in two worlds most of the time.
With many things. However, with this, it’s there’s the camp that’s all in, and then there’s the people that are eh, I don’t know, maybe being drug in reluctantly, and then there’s people who just are out. Not no, no way. No. How I feel like we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle, but a AI
Bill Byrne: makes for a great headline, right?
You can’t deny AI makes for a great headline right now, but, and as somebody who mentors a lot of startups it is having its moment to an extent, right? What you used to pitch five years ago where the Uber of this, or 10 years ago, right? Oh my gosh, we’re the AI of iced coffee.
Okay, cool. Let us invest in your company. That’s, it’s gonna be a [00:25:00] feature, less of a product.
The role PR plays in GEO (AI-driven search)
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. I think this dovetails right into the next trend, because obviously I think PR is having a bit of a of a field day because of all the, I’m gonna use the term GEO, some people call it a AEO, we’re talking about AI driven search.
We’re talking about searching, using Chat GPT or Perplexity or whatever platform you prefer. And how earned media coverage can help your company show up in these searches, because they come up at the top of the page E for Google, they come up, right? So you wanna be in those sources because a lot of people are not even gonna look below that is, that’s the, I think, the school of thought on that.
So let’s talk about this a little bit.
Bill Byrne: Oh my gosh. You’re nailing it. And I’m trying to coin the phrase now. I know we talked B2B, we talked B2C. I’m going to. Try to make the term popular B to me, [00:26:00] because AI driven search pulls from everywhere. And your customer now, let’s go back to our earlier days in PR where trade publications were printed.
Michelle Garrett: And a lot of them
Bill Byrne: still are, but the end customer often didn’t see them except on the B2B side.
Now it’s all accessible, right? This week in Consumer Electronics, AKA Twice, which is a B2B publication, anyone can find that. And AI driven search, like you said, AO Geo, whatever. We are now creating through pr, that first page of Google ranking that everybody so desperately wants and what brands aren’t investing enough in yet.
Is working with their PR teams to ensure that, yeah, we want the clicks of performance based ads. Those clicks are wonderful.
But it’s hard to compete there. [00:27:00] But if you’ve got a long trail of PR hits, not just a new trail, a right long trail Yep. That AI pulls from that’s how to get into those LLMs and GPTs.
That’s
Michelle Garrett: what, see, this is what bugs me about it. Okay. So it’s it’s, first of all, it’s great for those of us who work in pr. I think it’s, I think it’s helpful to us and in getting people to pay attention to something they should have been paying attention to all along. But the thing that drives me nuts about it is I see a lot of people in PR kind of saying throw out your playbook.
Let’s just, no, because what was working before will continue to work now it’s just, if you weren’t doing it. Before you’re gonna be behind the people that were doing it, the companies that were doing it. So I think that’s what it is. You either have to double down on what you’re doing.
You might have to make a few tweaks, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in a [00:28:00] few minutes. But if you’re not doing PR at all, like you’re not doing any earned media, any media relations, any media outreach, whatever you wanna call it, to get media coverage, you need to be doing that.
Bill Byrne: So you nailed it.
Gosh. Like you said, don’t throw out the playbook, if anything, double down on your training. But we look at again, B2B, B2C, B two, me, whatever. What is your customer reading? Who’s the decision maker? So in the case of AI driven search, A OGO, whatever, what are the LLMs and GPTs reading? Where are they pulling their information from?
Okay. Make sure you’re in those places. Not, it’s not brain surgery if your customer reads X, y, and Z cool. But if they’re reading this also cool and Right. Often we’ll have [00:29:00] clients ask us to get them into media outlets that they think they should be in. But that’s not what their customer reads and Right.
The, you really need to look at where your customer is consuming and we’ll talk about that too, because they might not be reading what gets the most eyeballs.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And I will say, if you’re not coming up and you see the sources that are, that are being cited. Then maybe you try to pitch a story to one of those sources or look at your competitors and see where they’re being covered.
Are they being, are those publications being cited? Are your competitors coming up? So that’s the kind of thing that I think you can obviously and should be looking at. But I will tell you that often it, for my clients in the B2B space, it, they’re, they are featured. They are there because they are on YouTube and we are getting trade media coverage.
And those two things together can be really powerful for clients. At least again in the B2B space. That’s [00:30:00] what I see.
Bill Byrne: And you’ve built that trail, which is so important because while being new to the scene can work as a PR pitch the AI driven search, whatever you wanna call ’em, they want that trail and they want that trail to be deep and clear.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And it can’t be, again, it can’t be something that you just do once and just then, don’t do anything for six months or a year. It has to be consistent. And that’s why I like to pull in customer case studies, thought leadership contributed articles, those kinds of things.
Because obviously not every company is gonna have a new product or solution to announce every time you turn around. Most of them don’t. But if you rely only on that type of pr you’re going to find yourself missing the boat a little bit. I think
Bill Byrne: you, you need to be out there.
You need to be found and top of mind. It’s, buying one [00:31:00] ad like the other side of, marketing, if you will, versus earned media. You don’t just buy one ad. I know there’s brands that buy a Super Bowl ad and that sometimes sustains them the rest of the year, but that’s, that’s a sports center play.
That doesn’t always work. So you need to have more, whether it is like you said, YouTube content, blog content, customer case studies to yeah, keep it, create news. And it’s not always going to be groundbreaking, which is why you don’t pitch it to a journalist, right? You don’t tell a journalist that Journal, Jane Smith wrote a glowing review of your mortgage company.
No, that’s not, a pitch. But you need to constantly be creating something to draw the eyeballs to your brand. You don’t just do it once. It, it is sales to an extent.
Michelle Garrett: It’s credibility, it’s proof points, and they all add up. And it’s not, again, it’s not, this is, again, with the attribution, it, you can’t just attribute it to any one thing that you’re [00:32:00] doing.
And that’s why I think brand authority is really important. Again, it lays the foundation. You ha it’s not, again, it’s not like we can just do this one thing one time and expect it to be the end all, be all solution for our marketing or PR or communications needs. It’s all, everything together.
And again, get rid of the silos. Look at it holistically, keep at it consistently. It sounds like the same old advice and it is. I, I, because it works, I.
Bill Byrne: But also don’t forget about ai.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yeah. That, and that’s the thing. It’s I think a lot of people think if you’re not like all in, you know you’re gonna get left behind. And I’m like but if you’re not already focused on the fundamentals and you don’t have that foundation I don’t know that AI is gonna really answer your, your be the answer to your issues.
And I know journalists absolutely do not want you to use AI [00:33:00] to draft your answers and send them in to a q and a type of request.
Bill Byrne: No. And I’m seeing feedback from journalists too on LinkedIn, other places where they’ll say, if it looks like your response was drafted by ai, yeah.
Not only am I not gonna pay attention, I’m going to block you.
Michelle Garrett: Same with articles, sometimes clients will use the AI to generate, a thought leadership contributed article type of. Effort. And I’m like yeah. They’re gonna know. And they, a lot of them have on their, in their guidelines, we will not accept or publish AI generated content. So you’re not really getting anything over on anyone. And if you think you are, you’re gonna, you’re gonna find out, it’s not really helping your credibility.
Bill Byrne: No. And one thing, one trend that I am gonna see for next year as we get into that too, and I don’t want to diverge too much, but I’m seeing already a rise in these fly-by-night agencies that are selling AO geo packages to guarantee the chatbots and LLMs are going to pick you up.
And [00:34:00] don’t do it. It’s not gonna work. If it was that easy, the biggest brands in the world would work with those companies.
Including the right media on your list
Michelle Garrett: And they’re not. So let’s talk a little bit about the media landscape because I, again, I do not believe clients should just be throwing out their media list and their, what they’ve been doing. However, we are seeing newsletters, substack, for example, becoming more important in some sectors. So let’s talk a little bit about maybe more niche media, more media that has maybe a smaller audience, but if it’s your audience, that’s where you need to be
Bill Byrne: so important, right?
It’s similar to trade media. It might not have the most eyeballs, but it has the right eyeballs. Yeah. And that is more important than anything else. And we’ve seen this throughout our career with the media landscape shifting, expanding oh, [00:35:00] print is. Contracting and online went huge. Now online’s contracting, and there’s just a mix.
We’re going to see that with Substack.
Michelle Garrett: Whereas
Bill Byrne: there’s going to be a lot of those journalists that start Substack. I know one of them in particular where they on Substack stories, they couldn’t place elsewhere. So they’re already working with other publications and then oh they’ve got their substack for other stories they wanna write, and they’re highly followed by the right people.
We, we deal a lot in the consumer tech space and there’s small sub stacks and small YouTubers that it’s followed by. An amazing amount of people that are, it’s not the biggest audience, but it’s important. I, we just saw this with a client CNET did a story on them that, they ran a quick story on Instagram and YouTube reels, or not your YouTube shorts, excuse me.
And [00:36:00] there were some comments that said, oh, okay, this is cool, but I’m gonna wait and see what says, who’s this smaller content creator? Because it’s the right eyeballs. I think Substack is gonna be massive. And also that’s where maybe why pr I don’t say costs so much, but takes time.
Instead of just going after a tech crunch in three other publications, there might be 10 sub stackers you need to hit.
It’s, they’re the new blogs. It’s really what they are.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, I think for a long time, some publications have also had newsletters and of course, like industry analysts, firms have newsletter.
So appearing in those can all, be as important as appearing in what sometimes clients think is really important, like a Wall Street Journal or a tech crunch or whatever. I use those examples, but there’s, you could Forbes, gimme in Forbes. So yeah. So I think it’s just, again the biggest thing is just to be aware of where your [00:37:00] audience is spending time, and then that’s where you wanna be.
And then again, it might not, you might not get there overnight. It might take a series of pitches or announcements or touches outreach to get in front of them. So that’s the other thing. I know people who will do, one pass at it and be like PR doesn’t really work, doesn’t work for us.
No, it just, it’s again, it’s getting to the right people and then consistency and just over time, just taking the time, giving it time.
Bill Byrne: You should look at PR as a fitness regimen and going to the gym once you might see some results, but not the results you want. Definitely doesn’t happen overnight.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Bill Byrne: Regarding Substack though, I do see. Something’s going to change or give similar to what we saw with streaming, because I’m going through my substack, which is free. The Daily Burn if anyone wants to check it out. Substack is a minimum fee if you’re going to charge for your [00:38:00] content is $8 a month.
Okay. That’s going to add up a lot very quickly. And if you look at other I look at San Diego Magazine here, which I get in printed online, that’s less than 20 a month, right? Wall Street Journal, I’m sorry, less than 20 a year. Wall Street Journal is less than 60 a year, so $8 a month, there’s only gonna be so many substack
That people can subscribe to. So I’m, I think I’m going to see soon Substack allowing sub stackers to bundle. Their subscriptions with others where perhaps I can say, Hey, link my substack with these three others for $10 total.
Michelle Garrett: So I
Bill Byrne: get a piece of that 10 versus hoping someone pays eight.
Doesn’t [00:39:00] Substack take some cut?
Michelle Garrett: I believe they do. Yeah. So it’s not that’s my issue with it. And I think I’ve seen other people talking about that too. I don’t know,
Bill Byrne: one more, one more reason why mine is free, and truthfully, it was just easier for me to launch there
Than doing another blog.
So I’m like, oh yeah it’s seamless, but I have on mine that I don’t want your money. If you wanna buy me a cup of coffee, there’s a link to donate a dollar. But other than that. No, but Substack is definitely going to be a place people need to look at. From a PR perspective. But also, you’ve mentioned YouTube a bunch of times.
I don’t think, and forgive me if we’re premature, but I don’t think we talked about Reddit yet, which a lot of the LLMs are pulling from. Yeah. Do you have a Reddit presence that you won’t
Michelle Garrett: No, I would put that in this category of things to look at [00:40:00] beyond your traditional media outlets. Which many people say are gonna just go away entirely.
Now I don’t know if that’s gonna happen. Not with trade media, I don’t think, but
Bill Byrne: No it, but it makes for good headlines, to say everything’s going away. Oh, wait, turns out we’re going to see this before. It’s almost like when people work from home in mass.
Michelle Garrett: We’re
Bill Byrne: never bringing people back to the office.
Yeah. You can go back and check receipts. See what, yeah. See all the CEOs that said we’re gonna be remote. Yeah, no problem. This is it, Michelle, go move to Costa Rica. It’s cool. We’re never gonna want you back nine months later. Hey, we want you in the office four days a week. So you can either fly from Costa Rica or whatever, it’s, yeah.
The media is here to stay. It’s going to ebb and flow. ’cause that’s what
Michelle Garrett: happens. Yeah. I think if you spend any time in the PR community on LinkedIn, you just, [00:41:00] you have to decide who you’re gonna listen to and then, because honestly, it could drive you crazy. And I speak from experience because it’s sometimes it’s really not good for me to go too deep over there because you just see some crazy takes and things so
Bill Byrne: Much like other platforms.
There’s so many people in the PR space that are writing for the clicks. They’re writing that headline to get the attention and get the eyeballs. Yeah. And that helps with the algorithm, right? That’s the game you, and I don’t love playing that. I’m not just going to write a salacious
Michelle Garrett: no post,
Bill Byrne: no on the death of media and what your brand needs to do for PR because I don’t believe it.
Michelle Garrett: No. I’m not playing that game.
Press releases aren’t dead – and they help with GEO
And speaking of the death of something that press releases, [00:42:00] that’s the next trend. And I know that’s a great segue. Gonna be like, they’re dead, they died. Guess what? They’re they’re back.
Bill Byrne: Definitely. And I think you can speak a lot to this because they’ve, I don’t know if they’ve ever fully gone away in the B2B world but you tell me, and I can give you my take on that after.
Michelle Garrett: No. I just, we’ve seen that AI is pulling from them. So if you’re, if you wanna show up in AI based search in G-E-O-A-E-O, whatever you wanna call it, press releases are a way to do that. And there’s even, there are even some experts and that would say, go as far as just to write the press release just for the LLM now.
I don’t suggest that necessarily, but I think if you wanna show up, press releases and actually is issue issuing them on a wire service, which also I would’ve said before, and I still would say, case by case basis, we don’t wanna just because it can be expensive, just to be honest about [00:43:00] it I would not say put every single announcement on the wire.
However, I saw a couple of stories about notified Globe Newswire being a source that’s very highly cited and regarded by LLMs. So that is something to think about. Now, I think we don’t have all the data yet, maybe, but I don’t think press releases. I’ve always seen a lot of value in press releases and I’m glad that others now are perhaps understanding that they’re valuable in this way as well.
Bill Byrne: You nailed it with a lot of points there. First, we don’t have all the data and. Q2 of next year. Might be different than Q1. But press releases are definitely having a glow up. And I agree with you. You shouldn’t just write them for the LLM, but that’s why it’s so important to have content.
So you’ve got the press release that you put over the wire. [00:44:00] Do you have a news section on your site somewhere where it’s also going to go? Do you have a blog section where we often see brands make big mistakes when they write the press release? Maybe it’s too on brand. Maybe it should have been a blog post versus something that’s going to be digested by a journalist.
So maybe you need a few different versions where you put it on your. Yeah. News section of your site. Yeah. And then on the blog it’s a little different. You have a, B2B section
Of your website if you’re a consumer brand.
That talks about that. But press releases are having a moment. I would agree with you.
Wires for a long time I was not down for them because they weren’t getting picked up by journalists. And now they’re getting picked up by a different audience. Yeah. That matters. So yeah, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta pivot as the [00:45:00] kids say, yeah, you’re gonna start doing more press releases.
’cause I’ll tell brands I don’t need them for a journalist, but Right. You might need them to be discovered.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, I think, I’ve written extensively about press releases ’cause I think they serve a lot of purposes, and I’m not gonna go into all those reasons right now. However, the first contributed article I ever wrote was on the death of the press release, how people were saying it was dying.
That’s probably, I don’t know, at least 10 years ago. Anyway, it’s back. They’re not dying. But also, I think trust is a huge issue, right? Because everybody wants to know who to trust and they don’t know who to trust. Back to the AI generating deep fakes and just back to, misinformation, disinformation that can spread about your brand or your products or whatever it might be your executives.
This is a way for companies to speak in their own voice, right? This is from the company. I guess you could pretend to be the company and issue a press release, but the wire services actually do verify and they [00:46:00] really take, go to some length to do that because they’ve run, there are cases where back in the day that would be an issue that it would be somebody proposing as a company.
So now they take a lot of steps to make sure it’s actually the company. So if you’re paying the wire service, they’re gonna confirm and verify that it is actually the company issuing the news. So you can trust that. And I say that I’ve always like when I say, you could trust it a hundred percent, I’m like, but honestly, I think it is a trustworthy way for companies to talk about themselves and share with their audiences and get out their news and announcements.
Bill Byrne: Definitely. And it’s another reason why you do have to have. A digital newsroom creating that paper trail as well. Yep. So that someone who’s not sure about fake news, no politics here.
They can go to your site and verify it. Oh, michelle garrett.com. Okay. This is what, this is her statement on the matter. She’s not saying whatever the heck. I said, [00:47:00] is it foolproof? No. But Right. It will definitely help if you have a place that your customer, B2B, B2C, B two, me. Can go check. Sorry, I’m the worst Dad.
Jokes.
B2B companies should consider YouTube as part of their content strategy
Michelle Garrett: Oh, dear. I also think that another trend is just we talked about it a little bit, but just going beyond thinking about, and I know a lot of companies don’t wanna start a podcast. They don’t wanna be on YouTube. They think it’s gonna be very time consuming, inexpensive. It doesn’t have to be any of those things.
And I do think, while it’s not for everyone, I think it’s something to think about and consider, because I feel like when you add these things up, that’s what kind of gets you seen and gets you surfaced by the LLMs and also by your audience. So YouTube is very hot. You talked about Reddit. I think that’s another place [00:48:00] to, to think about being present.
I think anytime you can add more content that’s valuable now, not just slop, we’re talking real valuable content, I think that is something you should consider. And with clients, if they’re asked to be on a podcast, or even if it’s a podcast that isn’t in the Top 10 podcast it’s a good thing to do it because it all gets fed into the LLMs and it does all add up and help, I think e
Bill Byrne: Exactly.
It’s very difficult to sometimes put a direct correlation
On something like that because you don’t know what’s going to be fed in. And maybe it’s similar to just us as users, as people where it might take 15 times for you to say, Hey, you know what? I think I do want to try that cereal or buy that car, but you don’t know if that decision was made because you saw [00:49:00] the podcast that what we’ll call B level in terms of size or a plus, right?
Was it the New York Times article on this that made you buy, or was it the weekly newspaper that gets chucked on your driveway? Because it all resonates. We remember, and you and I talked a little bit offline about billboards, same thing. Good luck thinking that you can figure out that billboard made me buy whatever, if you advertise elsewhere.
But it, it matters. The shingle on the door matters. If you don’t believe that, take down your signage. Get rid of your logo, get rid of anything, like at a storefront. So you don’t know what is going to drive that decision maker.
Similar to the, to Theis, they might only show four or five articles.
Do you know what else is in the backend informing those or, yeah. Often we see this on the consumer side where journalists will look at B2B [00:50:00] coverage for thought starters. Or they’ll be lurking on Reddit. Things and see trends. So that’s what they’re picking up from. They’re, B2B can help a consumer journalist
Validate a story.
Michelle Garrett: It’s repetition too because I’ve talked, I’ve had a couple guests on who just talked about, when you think you’re, when you’re sick of hearing yourself say the same thing over and over again, that’s when you know you need to keep saying it more often because we really, we can’t say it enough.
And I know, I think we are our own worst critic in that way. We’re like, oh my gosh I’m so tired of talking about this or hearing myself say this and, it sound like a broken record. That’s what it takes. And so then again, it’s like some of your audience won’t see your LinkedIn post.
Some of them won’t see you at the trade show. Some of them won’t see the article in the trade journal. Some of them may not see the ad. But together, these things are supposed to work together and that’s why I think, you can’t attribute the [00:51:00] purchase to any one particular touch along the way.
’cause it takes a lot of touches.
Bill Byrne: Yes. So repetition again, the gym, right? But also nutrition will help get you in shape, but you nailed it. Why do we need more touches? Because we’ll use earbuds as an example. These are skull candy. You, we’ve gotten so many glowing reviews for this product, but if you don’t need earbuds today, you don’t need earbuds today.
Done. So you might not be in the market to buy new earbuds for nine months from now, two years from now. It’s like cars, right? I don’t buy a new car every year. You need to stay in front of me so that when the time is right for Bill Byrne to buy a new family. Truckster Griswold referenced, if anyone knows that I’m thinking about it, it’s, you [00:52:00] need to stay in front of whoever.
B2B, B2C, whatever that person is.
More, more than just once. Otherwise someone else will be, and it’s it’s harder to recover awareness than it is to gain awareness and hold it. The grants forget that it, pr is, other people have made this analogy better than me, but PR is more of a fire than a light switch.
Michelle Garrett: And
Bill Byrne: it takes time to build that fire up. Resources help. Yep. There’s various, you can buy a fire starter or we can just do it with the sticks. I wasn’t a boy scout, but you don’t rely on me for that. But once that fires out, it’s hard to get it going again. And the people that you want around your fire are gonna move on to the fire that’s warmer over there.
So now you’re gonna rebuild your fire. Yeah. And hope they come back. Yeah. Why [00:53:00] would they come back?
Thought leadership content continues to play an important role in PR
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yep. No. You got it. I know we’re running outta time. I just wanna talk about thought leadership, ’cause I think it’s really important. And then we’ll wrap up and if anybody has a question or a thought they wanna share, please do that because we’re almost outta time, and I know everybody’s time is valuable.
But thought leadership to me is going to help companies build trust. Putting the subject matter experts out there, they don’t always have to be from the C-suite. Positioning them, getting them out there, getting them talking and writing and sharing their knowledge and expertise is going to help build trust.
And again, it’s another way to help draw attention to your brand and help you in those peaks and valleys those valleys when you don’t have any announcements or news going on. So that’s something you can just do continually throughout the year and I would really recommend it. And it does really help for a number of reasons.
Again, won’t go into [00:54:00] them all right now, but.
Bill Byrne: There’s not much I can add to that besides saying yes and do it because the challenge of anything in marketing now is it takes more to do the same. Yeah. So you, with our friends in the performance ad space, they’re spending more to get maybe the same return as before with PR efforts and earned media.
Those contributed articles when they’re genuine and when they have a true thought leadership component. Not just another shade of gray, not just saying how great your brand is. Give whoever it is, that’s your customer, a reason to find and trust you because you don’t know when and where it, it’s going to resonate.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, and I think it comes off as just a lot more credible than, say an ad or something like that. [00:55:00] But I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use paid media ’cause I do think that’s part of it too. I really believe in the PAYSO model, paid, earned, shared own. I really believe in that. But anyway, yeah, I think I see a lot of people talking about thought leadership and again, I always feel like sometimes it’s if you work in pr you’ve always known content matters.
You’ve always known thought leadership matters, influencers matter. These are all things that we as PR pros have done kind of since the beginning of pr So
Bill Byrne: com completely, PR now in the future is going to be just targeting the audience that matters to your end customer And at the moment that audience is going to be.
Wherever it is that the L-L-M-G-P-T whatevers pull from, and it’s going to be different based on if you’re using Claude or Chat GPT or whoever. So I would [00:56:00] implore any brand, any space to do a really good PR audit and not just say, talk to me about Joe’s coffee, right? Say who makes the best coffee for X, Y, and Z?
You can do this audit on your own. You don’t gotta pay a service for it, but then also start doing long tail. Who makes the best organic coffee in this space? Or who makes the best X, Y, and Z that tastes like this? Really, you’ve gotta
Michelle Garrett: Go
Bill Byrne: deeper because there are these articles and that’s how people search.
You look at AI driven shopping. Which is hot right now with the holidays.
What do you get for Hanukkah for your stepbrother’s girlfriend who’s allergic to cats who you don’t like very much, and lives in Rhode Island? Go, and it’s going to be diving into that. So it’s why you need more content [00:57:00] than ever.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. But it can’t be AI generated slop.
Bill Byrne: Oh dear. Word of the year. I feel like that might have been a Merriam Webster thing. Maybe not. I
Michelle Garrett: didn’t know. I did see it. And now there’s the article about storytelling that’s going around, and I’m like, again, PR with storytelling. I’m like, I don’t know. I, for me it’s this is just what we do. These are things that, these are just things that we do.
You don’t need to throw anything out or hop on a bandwagon or chase a shiny object. It’s, work with somebody who knows what they’re doing and understands how it benefits you over time. So I think that’s, what do you wanna leave people with?
Bill Byrne: That’s what I wanna leave. I think the trend in 2026 is PR is going to have a glow up.
As brands realize, if you’re going to be in the places that matter to AI driven search, [00:58:00] you’re going to need more earned media and a little less advertising ship. That budget
Michelle Garrett: Just a little. Yeah. ’cause pay can definitely support, help get you on the radar for earned, I think. And it’s those two work really well together, but
Bill Byrne: definitely,
Michelle Garrett: yeah, you don’t wanna throw it out entirely.
But yeah, I think that PR should get a little bit more attention. But of course I would’ve said that anytime you ask me, right? So I just like to see a little respect. We need a little,
Bill Byrne: the PR industry is not very good at earning the extra dollars versus our friends on the ad side. And some of that is just last click attribution where, oh, I’ve read all these articles on X, Y, and Z, and then you see the ad B2B, B2C, whatever, click.
Okay. Hey, we caused that. Did you really?
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, I know. It’s, that’s, it’s hard. [00:59:00] Fighting this about a long time, my
Bill Byrne: friend.
Michelle Garrett: I am so happy we did this and I am always thrilled to have you and I appreciate all of your insight and I thank you for being here and spending time
Bill Byrne: do one more shot of my shirt or my sweater.
Sorry. Thank you Michelle. I hope you have wonderful holiday and an excellent new year and to everyone else who tuned in, thank you. Really appreciate you spending the time. Thank
Michelle Garrett: you so much everyone. PR X four will be back in January and I hope everybody has a safe and relaxing holiday season.
Thanks so much. Bye.
About the host: Michelle Garrett is a B2B PR consultant, media relations consultant, and author of B2B PR That Gets Results, an Amazon Best Seller. She helps companies create content, earn media coverage, and position themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Michelle’s articles have been featured by Entrepreneur, Content Marketing Institute, Muck Rack, and Ragan’s PR Daily, among others. She’s a frequent speaker on public relations and content. Michelle has been repeatedly ranked among the top ten most influential PR professionals.
Learn more about Michelle’s freelance PR consulting services here. Book a no-obligation call to talk about your needs here. Buy Michelle’s book here.
