#35 Using HARO To Navigate The Expert Economy with Brett Farmiloe

Steve:
Welcome to the Digital PR Podcast, where today me and Lou are very excited to speak to Brett Farmiloe. Brett is the founder of Featured, an expert insights platform that connects subject matter experts with publishers to create content. And in April of this year, he also led the acquisition and relaunch of HARO, Help a Reporter Out. And he’s here today to talk to us about getting experts featured in the media in the AI era. Welcome, Brett. Thanks so much for joining us. It’s a pleasure to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Louise:
I’m just going to go straight in with the first question. You obviously, or HARO, has seen loads and loads of pitches get sent via it. What makes a great pitch from one that gets easily forgotten?

Brett:
Yeah, I think that it comes down to the acronym itself of HARO. And so it’s Be Helpful, Be Authentic, Be Relevant, and Be On Time. And so just to break down the HARO aspect, Be Helpful, is it’s not about you. It’s about the journalists. How can you make their job easier? Be authentic means don’t just copy paste an AI response and put it out there. I think journalists want to feature real humans and real human insights and so you’ve got to step up above the bar on that one. Be relevant means don’t just treat it as a numbers game, really treat it as a quality side of things where Oftentimes we see people pitch for every opportunity and that’s not the way to get it done. It’s really, do you have the credentials and the expertise to comment on a query? And if so, respond. If not, resist pressing that send button. And then the O on time, it’s a very much a speed game. Journalists are working against deadline. Oftentimes responding quickly with insightful information is the best way to get featured.

Louise:
Hit nail on the head there, just covered up all those key points and HARO hits the acronym as well. When it comes to, you kind of said, a lot of people sending a broad spectrum of pitches, is that just because people get maybe just a bit too excited and they’re like, I want to be involved in that, I want to be involved in that. Like you said, it’s just better to kind of focus your efforts on where you think you’re going to be the best fit?

Brett:
Yeah, I think that there’s just a big incentive to get featured in the media. And people are really driven by that. And they’ve read in blogs and heard on podcasts that, hey, it’s a numbers game and respond to as many things as possible. Because if you do that, then you’ll get featured more often. And oftentimes that’s not the case with platforms that are looking to connect journalists with expert sources.

Steve:
This is so true for all of PR, really. We talk about it a lot at Propellernet, is the scattergun approach, where you just fire out as many pitches as possible, whether it’s pitching an expert or a campaign or a story. Obviously, we don’t do that at Propellernet, and the best agencies don’t, but you can see the temptation, get it out to as many journalists as possible, and something’s going to stick. But Brett, I want to go back to not necessarily the beginning, but you acquired HARO in April of this year. What made you want to acquire and kind of relaunch the brand? Like, what opportunity did you see? You’re obviously an expert in the field with featured, etc. But like, what did you see that made you want to do that?

Brett:
Just going back in my personal story, so I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I used HARO while I ran that marketing agency to get clients featured. Founded featured.com in January of 2022 and had been running it for three and a half years. When HARO was discontinued, it was rebranded to Connectively and then Connectively was discontinued in December by Cision. Basically, I was like, hey, HARO is the most well-known expert insights platform. Most of the expert insights platforms that exist today are positioning themselves as an alternative to help a reporter out. Why not just bring it back? And so that’s exactly what we did. I severely underestimated the enthusiasm that people would have for HARO on both sides. I think that journalists in particular for the last 15 years had grown accustomed to using Helper Reporter out to get connected with sources when they are in a time of need. At the same time, sources found it incredibly helpful because it’s a free service that, you know, three times a day you get an email with a summary of different requests from journalists and you’re able to respond to that. We brought that back in April. We’re about three months in the enthusiasm for it’s been really high.

Steve:
How is it going so far? Apart from the enthusiasm, you said you’d almost underestimated the passion for bringing it back. But what are the biggest challenges of reviving a brand like that? Because it’s gone through, as you said, a lot of changes. How are you finding it so far?

Brett:
Yeah, I think that it goes back to the reason why I was discontinued in the first place. I think that just to shine a little, like, personal opinion on it, I think that, and from what I’ve heard from people who used it, is that quality and trust kind of eroded, especially in the last few years that led to its discontinuation. So the challenges for us is just reinforcing that quality and trust is at the core of everything that we’re doing. What does that mean? There’s a lot of different initiatives that we’ve done to focus on quality and trust, and by no means we’re not entirely there yet, but the product roadmap, you know, three months in is ahead of schedule. Some of the different things that we’ve done in terms of reinforcing quality and trust is giving reporters community reporting tools to say, is this helpful? Is this relevant to your pitch? Allowing them to flag irrelevant queries so that our team can look into it independently and I decide if there’s any action that needs to be taken. There’s certain things that we’ve done on sign-up to reinforce the quality of sources. And then we’ve also recently announced a partnership with an AI detection company named Pangram. And that’s been incredibly helpful to help us really surface and weed out what is quality, what is information that should be trusted, and how do we take appropriate action as a platform to make sure that those connections between journalists and sources are going to be good ones.

Louise:
Interesting, because I guess the perceived drop in quality, that was happening obviously before your time and before kind of the AI effect, is that right? So obviously this is a whole other level of challenge now that things like ChatGPT are out there, easy to use, good and can provide a lot of fake expertise if you prompt it to. So is that an additional challenge basically that you’re trying to mitigate?

Brett:
Yeah, I think that it’s certainly added an acceleration component and some new curveballs. Unfortunately, you know, there’s tools like Pangram that are able to help us realise and detect what is AI, what’s not. We’ve also heard from journalists about is AI important in terms of weeding that out and separating it? And I find that it’s actually pretty split. Some journalists are very anti-AI, and some are like, look, I just want to get connected with the right source, and I’m going to do my work independently and follow up with that source to verify them, to get the quote that I actually need. It’s still some dust needs to be settled. And I think at the end of the day, transparency is the best approach to it, where journalists, you can basically display, hey, what do we know as a platform about this pitch? And displaying that information for a journalist to then determine what actions they should take with that pitch.

Steve:
So for our audience, I’ve obviously used HARO before, I think Lou you have as well. For our audience, which is largely like a PR audience, how do they go about using it for those who don’t know? Can you explain to our audience if they wanted to kind of get involved, which I’m sure they will, like how do they do it?

Brett:
Sure. So HARO is a three times a day email newsletter. It goes out morning, afternoon, and evening. I think the morning edition goes out at 5.35 a.m. Eastern Time. That’s the 12.35 p.m. Eastern Time and then a 5.35 p.m. Eastern Time. And so what that looks like, it’s an email that goes out to everyone who’s subscribed to HARO, it’s the same exact email, with a summary of journalist requests. And you read through the different summary, you click on the one that you want to respond to, there’s a masked email that you send email pitch to, and that goes directly to the journalist, and they’re able to now connect with you if they want to get engaged with your pitch. And so it’s essentially a way to get connected with journalists who are working on stories at the time that they actually need to. So it’s basically just a way to A, identify an opportunity, and then B, actually send your response directly to that journalist.

Louise:
I mean, it’s a vital thing that all journalists need because expert voices and commentary is so key to so many different articles. You can see why it’s so popular. It is really interesting. I would say in the last six months, there have been a number of journalists talking openly about the fact that some of the comments, not necessarily getting them through HARO or any of these other tools, but just in general, the proliferation of what they found out to be fake people. Fake people, either someone just saying that they are someone that they aren’t, or just using AI to just get all that information. When you said around a journalist kind of verifying the source, is that advice that you were giving pre-AI? So, you know, you should be calling up your source, you should be Googling them, finding their LinkedIn, things like that. Or is that something that that advice has just been ramped up in the most more recent times?

Brett:
Yeah, I think it’s always been a best practice for newsrooms where they always have to verify a source before they go to print. And since AI has come about and since some of these, you know, research studies have surfaced, I think that’s been underlined twice in terms of, you know, the workflow from a journalist. So us as a platform, I mentioned our product roadmap with HARO and with Featured. That’s been a hundred percent where the focus has been for the last, you know, three months plus is how do you have profile verification? so that journalists are able to, when they receive a pitch, have a little blue check mark next to the source to say, hey, us as a platform, we’ve already researched this person, we’ve verified them, versus someone who’s not verified and having that still be delivered. That by no means should be taken from a journalist and say, oh, my job’s done, let me just copy, paste, put it into the story. I think that you’ll still see journalists verify, but it gives them an extra element of confidence and goes back to that quality and trust. components that we’re trying to reinforce.

Steve:
I was hoping, and I’m hoping you can, and obviously you can only say what you can say, but like pull back the curtain on HARO. So like you’ve explained it really well, like why it’s useful and how our audience can use it. It’s obviously a legacy platform, but like what are you thinking of changing? You’ve got years of experience in the industry. Is there anything that’s kind of coming up that you can point to? We’re finding so much is changing in the digital PR industry. Journalists are talking quite a lot about the things they need in the era of AI and how it’s changing their workflows. Like what have you got planned for Haro is ultimately the short version of that question.

Brett:
Yeah. So I think that, you know, we’re still really, really early into the journey. And our first phase is just bringing back what made HARO great. And so HARO was already awesome. Like part of my motivation for acquiring it was that it had product market fit. So, and that’s really rare. Like it’s really, really hard as a founder to find product market fit and to have the opportunity to acquire a product that has that is great. So really my first, our first job is how do we bring that back? and address a lot of those different problems. So that’s what we’ve been focused on. It’s hard to see what will be beyond that, because again, like if you have something that has product market fit, it’s going to grow, it’s going to accelerate. And then it’s really around how do you expand. One thing that I’ve heard really frequently from a lot of folks is, how do you get more UK-based queries into HARO? 70% of our audience is in the US, 15% is in the UK, another, I think, 5-10% is Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. So how do you start to make this more global? If it is a product that has product market fit, how do you make this useful to UK journalists? How do you make this useful to UK sources?

Steve:
Are you dealing, this might seem like an obvious question, but we use a fair few tools at Propellernet and just a lot of agencies use a fair few tools. I’m guessing the competitor set per country is going to differ quite widely because there will be sort of similar-ish services in the likes of Europe and we use like ResponseSource a fair bit in the UK and HARO as well to complement that. But how does the competitor set differ kind of around the world?

Brett:
I think that you’re spot on. I think that right now there might be like a go-to source for every, you know, different region. And, you know, I think that there’s a network effect to this. The reason why HARO works is because of its size. It’s the largest expert source directory that exists. And so if a journalist is going to put out a query, I’m not joking when you can almost get connected to anyone in the world within the next few hours. And it’s because that community that we’ve built up with HARO is they receive the response. If they’re not the fit, they’re going to forward it to someone who is, and that person’s going to get connected through the ease of use of the service, just sending an email. And so I think that if you’re looking at the geographic expansion, and it really comes down to that list size of are you able to enter into new different markets? And is the 15% of HARO comparable with response source? If we were able to just start to have UK-based journalist queries go into HARO, which service is going to be more effective in terms of making that connection?

Louise:
Which ones do you have to start with when you’re growing your base in the UK, for example? Are you growing your journalist connections and getting their awareness, or are you growing your PR and expert credentials so that they’re ready to go when the journalists do arrive? Which one is chicken and egg?

Brett:
It is not a simple question. I’ve flip-flopped back and forth on it for the last three years. I think that where I stand here, middle of 2025, you’ve got to have the expert sources so that you are able to get that first journalist query and make that really successful. I think the hard side of the market, as you know, is there’s limited opportunities in terms of journalist requests and wanting to get featured in the media. So, as a platform, you’re always focused on how do I get more journalist requests, but from the chicken and the egg scenario, you need the experts and the readiness for experts to comment before you could actually fulfill a journalist request.

Louise:
And I guess also that made me think the change in the online media just full stop must be, you know, that affects your business as well. So for me and Steve as PR people, we’re thinking about, OK, where are we going to get our stories covered? The fact that publications are shutting down, journalists are being made redundant for various reasons. People are kind of making their pool of journalists smaller, that obviously would be a concern for you guys as well because that’s going to be less people to be using your product. Do you have any thoughts on the kind of state of the online media at the moment, either just in the US or globally, however big you want to take on that answer?

Brett:
I think it just goes back to the problem, and the problem is not going away, and that’s that businesses need to build visibility with their customers. And wherever their customers are hanging out, whether it’s a podcast, whether that’s social, whether that’s online publication, businesses want to be in front of those, that audience. So how do you do that? And what does that look like in 2025? I think that we’re seeing some of the evolving landscape with that of how and where people want to be featured is changing. People want to be on podcasts. People want to maybe be in an email newsletter. They want to be on a popular sub stock. So it’s getting more fragmented in terms of the different channels. And I think that as PR professionals, it’s about measuring what works, doubling down on what does work, and then getting your clients featured and using platforms as a way to accelerate that.

Louise:
Yeah, that’s so true, because I think sometimes you think of these services as, you know, a quick way to get a brand mention in an online publication, maybe in the next two days. And it’s like that kind of quick turnaround thing. But yeah, if it’s a podcast or something like that, that’s going to be a longer lead time, but potentially is going to be even more impactful, but requires more effort and more kind of work rather than that quick fix.

Brett:
I was going to say as well, like the one channel that we’re not talking about that needs to be talked about is just how do you appear in all the AI engines? How do you get into ChatGPT and others? And I think that’s probably going to be the most interesting growth area, especially for PR firms. and looking at people who are just a source and wanting to be recommended in these AI engines, that’s a space that I think is really, really interesting. And I think that’s a space that our platforms can play in and can help service because it’s an unknown at this point. There’s a lot of firms that are promising to do it. We know that the audience is there. And going back to the problem that businesses want to be visible in places that their customers hang out, where customers gravitating to today, it’s AI engines, so how do you appear on those AI engines? I think that platforms like ours are definitely going to play a part in the years ahead.

Steve:
Yeah, I was going to ask you on that. So I went to a really good conference actually a couple of weeks ago, and there was a freelance journalist who’d written for a lot of the UK nationals, and she was talking about the newsroom she works for that are always turning to AI to find an expert. If they’ve got a story, if it’s health or fitness or what have you, so they’re asking ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever to find an expert. So I think you’re right on what you’ve just said, but how does HARO fit into that? I know it’s still early days, but obviously you’re gonna want to appear yourself and be like a trusted source for these journalists. So you’re gonna wanna come up in those answers rather than just the expert themselves. Like, do you have any, I may be just asking you too much about your marketing strategy, Brett, but like, what do you think about that? How are you gonna combat it?

Brett:
Yeah, the thing that we’ve seen so far with like ChatGPT and Perplexity is that they value brands, and HARO’s a really, really strong brand. And so if you take what makes HARO unique, which is the sheer quantity of sources, now how do you take that information and feed it into a quality way, into AI engines, so that it starts to surface and journalists are able to still fulfil the mission of what HARO’s seeking, which is getting connected with sources. And so if you’re able to help a source not only just send out the opportunities of the day, but also get them featured and help present themselves in a useful way that’s useful for journalists, useful for search engines, useful for AI engines, that’s an opportunity that I think exists for us.

Steve:
Yeah, and that’s so right. That’s why, as you said, that’s one of the reasons for acquiring a brand like HARO is that it is a really known brand. And what we know about AI so far is that known brands are going to be prevalent. So yeah, you’re in a good sort of starting position anyway. There’s a lot to figure out. We had Rand Fishkin on the podcast last time and I asked him this question. I’m going to ask you the same question, Brett. Do you get any anxiety about the future with so much changing or do you just feel like it’s exciting, you’re super confident about it? You know, you’ve got a couple of companies, you’re an entrepreneur, like what’s, how do you feel about the future?

Brett:
I’m excited for it. Yeah. Like I would say 95% excited, 95% anxiety. It’s like there’s tons of opportunities. And if you look at the size of our company and what’s ahead of us, like we’ve got nothing to lose. So that’s what’s exciting about it. I would be frightened if I did have something to lose. If your business was threatened, if it’s established, if it was founded 15 years ago. It’s a hundred million ARR business, and now AI is threatening that business. That’s where I would have a lot of anxiety. But for us, we’re an eight-person company out here in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is prime time for someone like us to catapult ourself into the conversation and make it so that it’s helpful for whatever’s next in the AI internet type of era.

Louise:
I like that. I think it’s also nice to be a bit realistic about, you know, there’s a small percentage in there that can still be a little bit like, oh, I’m not sure about this. But because that’s being human and it would be silly to just say like, I’m feeling great about it all the time. But yeah, it’s like you said, we’ve got nothing to lose and it’s a good mindset to have.

Steve:
What are your percentages, Lou, by the way? So Brett said 95% excited, 95% anxious. So I’m going to have to do the maths on that at some point if that adds up. But Lou, what about you? I haven’t asked you this question.

Louise:
My percentages fluctuate. I used to be a lot more worried, but since learning more about it, I think that’s what I find. I get anxiety when I don’t understand something and I can’t work out how I’m going to adapt to it. But by learning about how things like AI search works or just LLMs in general, that’s then calmed me down. Like there’s still elements of it which is like, oh, that’s a big shift or that’s going to change things quite a bit. But by understanding it a bit more, I get a lot calmer. So I would say I’m like, yeah, 75% non-anxious.

Steve:
What about you? 76%. I’m just gonna go one better. But it comes back to HARO as well that the beauty of it is its simplicity. So it’s like the ease of understanding and use is really stands the test of time, right? People want to get featured in the media, you’re offering them a platform to do that. And it’s just there’s quite a lot to navigate as things change. Well, how do you see the expert economy evolving? Like we talked a little bit about HARO, but do you think anything will change drastically there or are we going to sort of, you know, let’s say three to five years time, let’s give you that ballpark. Are we going to sort of have a similar way of working or is it going to change drastically?

Brett:
I’m really, really bullish on the expert economy. I have to be because we have two horses in the race. But if you look at some of the external stuff, Substack just announced $100 million Series C raise a few days ago, which is a huge win for the expert economy. And you look at just like what you think intuitively is going to happen. And you have AI that has established this new baseline in terms of what’s acceptable. And how do you get above the baseline? And the only way to do that is human knowledge, human expertise, human experience that AI can’t really make up. So that’s how the expert economy can add on to what’s being created. That’s the scary part, is that the bar significantly raised in the last three years, and now, but like, we still have the bar as humanity to add our knowledge, add our own expertise, experience, to go one step above that, and that’s where the expert economy, I think, has a place.

Louise:
Could I ask a slightly different question? How would you feel about your customers, whether they are from an SEO background or a PR background? The reason I ask is because there’s been a couple of articles recently in the UK, and I think there’s been similar ones in the US, around, I’m just going to say it very bluntly and without any frills, SEO people using things like experts, whether they’re fake or not, in a spammy way. In a way that’s not authentic, not useful, but on the surface works. Whereas it is sometimes seen that PR people are using it in a more authentic, genuine way. That’s a complete blanket statement.

Steve:
This is controversial.

Louise:
What are your thoughts on that and who your customers are and what they’re using it for? Do you see yourself as an SEO tool or anything like that? Like, yeah, where do you see it?

Brett:
We see ourselves as a visibility tool and that is used by both SEO firms, PR firms, everyday experts, in-house marketing teams. And the truth of the matter is, is that it’s abused by everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re an SEO firm, if you’re a PR firm, I think that in general, SEO firms get a bad rap. And so you’re going to see more of a general statement like that to say like, you know, SEO bad, PR better. But the fact of the matter is that we see bad behaviour from PR firms and we see great behaviour from SEO firms. So the core thing that’s critical in this is to just have the safeguards in place, have the different things to detect that behaviour, and then to take appropriate actions, whether that’s a warning, whether that’s just a permanent ban. The thing with HARO that’s been really exciting is that because the business model, where it’s free for both sides, fully supported by newsletter ads, is that, quite honestly, and this might come off as the wrong way, but I don’t feel like we owe anyone anything if there’s bad behaviour, and we could take a much more aggressive action if you’re not being helpful to the community, if you’re detracting from that. So that’s given us a little more leeway to take action so that we could have and reinforce the quality of trust.

Louise:
And that’s, I think, music to so many people’s ears, like not just the journalists, but also SEOs and PRs who are looking to maintain a good reputation, that rules and regulations means that you’re going to have a better tool, but everyone gets good stuff out of it. And it’s like everyone’s playing by the rules. And I feel like we kind of mentioned how there’s competitors or people might still use Twitter or X to get their kind of expert sources. But having a place where there’s a bit more verification, a bit more kind of not retribution, what’s the word? Retribution. When you’ve crossed the line, you’ve kind of broken your terms of service, you might not get to use it again, or you get banned for a certain period of time, whatever it is, that’s only going to raise the profile of your tool to be like, okay, let’s just use this one because this is where the good stuff is. There’s no AI spam or very, very minimal or they act on it. I feel like that’s going to be good to hear for people and reassuring because it can, like you said, you hear all these horror stories basically of where no one’s happy from the PR side and the journalist side.

Brett:
Yeah, it’s therapeutic, I would say. And it’s also something that we celebrate internally, like when we’re able to detect something that wipes out an entire network of people, when we’re able to detect that there is a fake persona that’s posing as a certain doctor or something like that and spreading misinformation. This is stuff that we celebrate internally, so I think that it’s like I said, three months in, it’s a very celebratory time for us because we’ve implemented these safeguards, we’re seeing that they work, but we’re also seeing that because it’s a no barrier to entry, that there’s constant innovation that’s happening. It’s on us as a platform to keep up with that innovation and try to stay two steps ahead of it. That’s the challenge with HARO. I think that you’re going to see us succeed in the next couple of years because we’ve got the right mentality. I think that, you know, we’ve got nothing to lose with it. And overall, pretty exciting time. So what I would say, though, is like, you know, that’s anyone listening, especially in the UK. UK, shout out to the UK. Y’all are innovating out there. I went to Brighton a couple of years ago, and I was really, really impressed with the level of innovation that’s happening. The thing that I want to send an open invitation to is if anyone’s got any insights, commentary, ideas on how to improve HARO or Feature.com, feel free to send me a note, bread at Feature.com, I’m happy to implement it.

Louise:
That’s a great invitation, yeah.

Steve:
That is, that is, and definitely do that, everyone listening, because, you know, that’s how stuff gets better, ultimately, and it is great to hear you’re doing that and thinking that way. Lou, I was going to ask you, because you sent me something on Slack earlier, about AI spam. Have you, have you kind of, do you feel this question’s answered?

Louise:
Well, I feel bad for Brett. I feel I’m just like, AI spam, AI spam. That’s all I’m talking to you about. But yeah, there was an article shared just this morning in the UK. I’ll share it with you, Brett, as well after this podcast. And it was a company, a PR company based somewhere in Europe, who had created a kind of AI tool that basically automatically spammed these kind of expert tools and ways of putting in your experts. So I think not just the expert themselves were just something made up with AI, it was very much a tool that just sent out hundreds of those kind of emails and stuff. So just on a grander scale. It’s being quite widely reported about and actually I think we’re going to get the journalist who wrote the article as a guest so we can discuss it more because it just seems to have really peaked in terms of people realising it’s happening, writing about it, working out ways to try and mitigate it, whether that’s like you said, going back to your sources and really thoroughly researching who they are. But yeah, there just seems to have been a flurry of instances and that was our most recent one this morning.

Brett:
Super interesting. And I do think that it’s a collaborative solution. Like, I think that you’ve got to have the platform involved. You’ve got to have the journalists involved. You’ve got to have certain agencies involved to figure out collectively, what is the approach to this? And I think that going back to what I think the solution is, I think it’s transparency. I think it’s source verification, you know, from a profile perspective. And I think it’s community reporting tools to detect this behaviour. And if you’re able to do that effectively and with the right business model, I think that you could tackle it.

Steve:
It’s as you say, that there’s a collaborative approach is definitely the best one, but it’s like, because AI has emerged and people, I don’t know why we do this as humans. It’s almost human nature. We sort of take this tool and then, you know, spam it in some way.

Louise:
It’s why we can’t have nice things.

Steve:
It’s why we can’t have nice things. But then journalists we know are time pressured and they need stuff quickly and you’ve got a great service that helps them with that. But to sift through everything that they’re getting is a challenge for them and you’re obviously doing a lot of work with journalists to continue providing what they need. I find it a fascinating ecosystem because we’ve been doing expert comment for as long as we’ve been in PR and it’s so incredibly useful and will continue to be so, but it just feels like yeah, like it’s changing or has changed that little bit and the game has changed and it’s exciting. I’m with you. I’m bullish about how good it will continue to be, but collaborative approach to try and help solve and iron out these new issues is definitely the way forward. Yep, absolutely. I wanted to ask you one more question, which is not about AI, but is about sectors that you cover. And I’m just going to tell a little story about my past, my first job in PR, which was a very good job, but had the horrifying element, which we don’t really do now, of just cold calling journalists to try and get expert comment involved in their articles, like try and build a relationship. And I’m not going to name names, but I had a list of people to call. I was very, very junior. And I called one of the UK national health editors. And she said, I have my own bank of experts. Why would I talk to you? And just put the phone down on me. Now, the reason I asked this question is because she may have sourced experts through HARO or response or, you know, one of the services in the UK. But she kind of had her own experts, but she was in the health sector. Are there any like sectors that you find more difficult to crack where you get like less journalists putting inquiries out, or less experts being put forward, or is it quite balanced? Because there’s so many different sectors out there, so many different verticals. I’m just quite interested in the challenge you’re facing really.

Brett:
So I think that if you put yourself in the shoes of a journalist, You go to platforms when you’re almost out of options. So going back to exactly that phone call of, I’ve already got my own Rolodex of experts, why would I talk to you? That’s the same mentality of why would you use HARO? Why would you use feature.com? It’s because you need a hard to find expert really fast and it’s not existing in your Rolodex. And your Rolodex has already been exhausted. You’ve already reached out to them four times in the last four months and they’re like, look, I don’t work for you. You know, like that type of thing. So which industries have really, really hard to find experts? It depends on the nature of the query. I think that healthcare is one that continually people go back to of like, hey, doctors are generally hard to get a hold of and are in high demand and have great insights to share. So I would say healthcare is generally pretty hard. I’d say that business is much easier and you see a lot more queries that are a little more leaning towards like certain professionals, not so much like CEO and founders, which is the tendency for a lot of PR firms and a lot of in-house marketing teams to say, Oh, spokesperson, we’ll put our founder out there. And the fact of the matter is that’s the most common job title that exists on, on featured.com. And so you want to hear from HR managers, chief people officers, your CFO, your CTO, your IT manager, people who have really distinct insights on particular queries. So I always recommend to companies if you’re looking at an expert commentary type of strategy, you almost have to enlist a lot of people on your company to be readily available to provide comments so that you can help fulfil those journalists requests.

Steve:
That’s such a good tip. Yeah, it’s easily forgotten because, yeah, as you say, founders often front and centre, but finding those niche experts who are going to sort of be able to give you sort of or give reporters, journalists a more rounded insight into what they’re writing about is absolutely ideal. And just to round off my story, the last laugh was with me on that occasion, because I actually did have it was my approach. It was a cold call, but I did have a really niche expert. And in the end, she did end up covering him and the story I had because I just pitched it via email. So, I just wanted to say that for the benefit of the listeners. Lou, do you have any more questions for Brett? I feel we have quizzed him on AI and Haro and all of the above.

Louise:
I did, off the back of what Steve just mentioned, you might not feel you’re the best person to answer this, but I think as a PR person, when you’re trying to get comments sometimes, a frustration might be that your client doesn’t give a very interesting comment, or they’re not saying anything new, or they’re playing it a bit safe. Is there any advice that you might have seeing so many comments in your career, I’m sure, of how to tackle that?

Brett:
Hearing you ask that, it reminds me of when I was running my agency and when we had 50 or so clients and we were trying to pry these comments out of them, what we found worked the best was providing them commentary that basically it’s like, hey, they’re really busy, so How do you get out of the writer’s block of just sending them the query and then saying, here’s a blank thing, write your answer. We would attempt to write an answer for them. The key to this strategy is essentially the client would receive this, but this sucks. This is horrible, this is garbage, whatever. And then they would be like, I’ll show you and write an answer that would be even better and then send it back. That was the best way we got responses out of people. We rarely, if ever, use the response that we wrote. It was a matter of getting people engaged and having that visceral reaction to be like, I don’t want myself represented like this. I’m going to one up you and send it back. So that’s how we got good commentary.

Louise:
That’s like psychologically very great. I love that. And yeah, sometimes it’s saying like, we could do this, and they have to force themselves to be like, absolutely not. This is actually what I think.

Brett:
And I think that agencies are in a unique position to do that in combination with AI, where you could develop a knowledge base for that client. You could interview them, have a good knowledge base, import all their blog content, all their PDFs, whatever they want to provide you, and then have that AI-based visceral response, and then like what we’ve talked about on this podcast, using humans as a way to add their expertise, experience, to go one level above what that bar is initially set with.

Louise:
Lovely. Love to hear a positive use out of AI as well. That’s exactly a great use of it, to have it as your starting point, your jumping off point. Something where you’re not going to probably be able to read everything that this person has ever written or said, but an AI can solidify it and give their tone of voice and their general opinion on things quite easily. So it’s nice to have a positive use for AI.

Brett:
Yeah, absolutely. And just I know we’ve talked a lot about kind of the anti-AI aspect, but AI has a huge place in terms of identification of the right opportunities for the right person. That’s how we’re using AI with Featured.com is we’ve got, you know, all these experts, we’ve got all these different questions, how do you match up the right opportunity with the right expert and put that in front of them so that they can provide commentary and then add value for that journalist? So I think that’s probably one of the strongest use cases of AI today is in analysing and identifying and then making that match even more seamless.

Louise:
Love it.

Steve:
Makes sense. I have one final promise, one final, final question for you, Brett, before we wrap up, because I know it’s early in Scottsdale and we appreciate you joining us early so we could match up the times. But I noticed on your website, obviously you’re incredibly entrepreneur and have done many things in your career, but one thing that stuck out, and obviously it does because of the name, but am I right in thinking you started a company with Hugh Jackman or you went into business with Hugh Jackman? Can I ask you about this? I’m quite intrigued.

Brett:
I was involved with the launch of Laughing Man Coffee and Tea and so I was by no means a partner or co-founder or anything like that. I was just running the tweak deck back in the day and it was me, Hugh, co-founder David and a barista named Queenie and I took it from from zero to not launch to you know, being on Rachel Ray and launching it. And probably the best surprise with this is that I don’t know how many years later, but the company was acquired by Keurig and I was in a Costco with my kids and I was walking down the coffee aisle and boom, there was Ducali’s dream right there in Costco, this big box and Keurig cake cups. I’m like, oh, great. This is cool to at least see.

Steve:
Yeah. Oh, amazing. I saw it on your website and I was like, I’ve got to ask Brett about this because you just had such a varied career and you obviously understand marketing and PR like inside out.

Brett:
That was a fun ride. It was really, really enlightening to see what works and what doesn’t when you have an A-list celebrity that’s running the marketing side of things. You’d have this big PR event, you know, invite all these influencers and it doesn’t move the needle. You could be on The Chew and give away a coffee bag to everyone in the audience, doesn’t move the needle. But this little niche podcast or whatever, you know, really does move the needle. So going back to measure what works, double down on what does, and then keep it moving. I think that’s true 20 or 15 years ago. It’s true today.

Steve:
That’s it. That’s just smart marketing. Brett, thank you so much for joining us. Before you go, could you just let people know if they want to use HARO, how they do that, so we can make sure as many people in the UK are aware of it and sort of signing up to it as possible. And then just again, your email address if people want to contact you with suggestions once they’ve started using it.

Brett:
Yeah, definitely a call to action here. Go to helperreporter.com, input your email address on the homepage, and you’ll start to receive a three times a day, harrow newsletter with opportunities from journalists. Step two is if you don’t want three emails a day and you want to monitor some of the activity and input, you know, a couple of keywords to monitor, you go to feature.com forward slash alerts. And you’ll get alerted when there’s a Hero query that matches whatever you’re monitoring. So, because Featured owns and operates HARO we’ll cross-post a lot of those queries over to Featured, and that’s a good way to monitor Hero without having to open emails three times a day. And my email address is [email protected].

Steve:
Great stuff. Thanks so much for joining us, Brett. Absolutely love chatting to you and learning all about HARO and everything you’re up to and very insightful for our listeners as well about how to get their experts in the media. Thanks again.

Brett:
Thanks for having me on.

Steve:
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop us that five-star rating. It helps more people find the show. Got an idea for a future episode or want to be a guest? Drop us a comment or email us at dprpodcast at propellernet.co.uk. We absolutely love hearing from you. See you next time on the Digital PR Podcast.