#40 Future-Proofing PR: The PESO Model & Structured Trust with Gini Dietrich

Steve:
Today we’re thrilled to be joined by Gini Dietrich all the way from Chicago. Gini is the founder and CEO of Armant Dietrich, creator of the Spinsucks blog and community and the brilliant mind behind the Peso model, which has become one of the most widely adopted frameworks in modern communications. She’s an author, speaker and trusted adviser to organisations looking to integrate PR, marketing and digital strategy in ways that actually drive measurable business impact.

Welcome to the Digital PR podcast, Gini, and thank you very much for joining us.

Gini:
Lovely intro. Thank you.

Steve:
Thank you. I’m happy we did that first time for the listeners. First take. Thank you, Gini. Pleasure. Pleasure to be talking to you.

Louise:
Lovely to have you. I feel like a great place to start would be to talk about the PESO model. Would you mind just explaining it to the listeners?

Gini:
Sure. PESO is paid, earned, shared, and owned media. The idea behind it is that you take something from each media type and integrate it with the others.

We talk a lot about, you know, a lot of organisations, especially big global organisations, start with paid because it’s easy to measure. You know if it’s working, you know if it’s not working, and you can almost always throw dollars at something and have it work for you.

So almost everybody starts with paid. What we say is actually in a really consistent, integrated, measurable PESO model programme, you should start with owned. Because without owned, you don’t have anything to share on social, you don’t have anything to amplify through paid, and you don’t have anything to demonstrate what your thought leadership is, what you stand for, what your values are, all those things, earned to a journalist or to an influencer.

So we always say start there. If I were to rearrange the acronym, it would be OESP or OEPS, but that’s not easy to remember. So PESO was born. You don’t always necessarily need to start with paid, but really think about how they build upon one another.

Louise:
What was the kind of reason that you started this? Like, how did you kind of formulate it into this quite easy to remember format?

Gini:
Yeah, well, a couple of things were happening. So I started a very traditional PR firm, and we did reputation, we did crisis, we did events, and we did media relations, right? And as you both have probably experienced throughout your career, executives are great when you’re getting media hits and there’s lots of coverage. And then they’re like, so now what, when there’s not?

And nobody really understands all of the work that goes into media relations specifically. And they think you can just pick up the phone and call the reporter and say, “Hey, it’s Gini. I have a new client. Would you like to cover them?” That’s what they really think we do. And that’s like, no, it’s not.

So what we found is that as an agency owner, I found clients would continue to come to me and say, “This is great. You just got us in the Wall Street Journal. You just got us on the front page of the LA Times. You got us in the New York Times. All of these places are great. What’s next?”

They didn’t understand that we were doing all of the groundwork for what’s next. They didn’t want to pay for those things. This was happening, so I was trying to figure this out. At the same time that social media became available to companies and inbound marketing was a thing, WordPress launched, we could start blogging on our own. We didn’t have to wait for developers to post stuff to our website.

All of this stuff was happening at the same time. And my team and I looked at it and said, okay, is there an opportunity here to do more than media relations and sort of fill in those valleys so that our clients had more consistent work and results all year long versus just the spikes when we had coverage. And so we started to build that in.

Now, I would love to say that it was my brilliant idea to put it together into a framework, but I wrote about it in Spin Sucks, the book. And as you’re going through the editing process, which is a very, very, very painful process, you have lots of outside resources reading the content for you.

I remember my publisher coming back and saying, okay, there’s been some feedback on this framework that you talk about here, but it’s not a fully baked framework. And I said, well, no, it’s just this idea that we should fill in the valleys. And she’s like, but I think we should create a framework and that’s the feedback I’m getting from our external readers as well.

So she was the one who pushed it. Because it was in a book, we went back and forth. We went OESP, we went OSEP. I said, it’s really hard to remember, can we do PESO? And because it was in a book, they were able to get us around the copyright issue of calling it something that’s the same as Mexican currency.

So we didn’t have that issue. And then she said, now can you create an image? And so I went to our designer and was like, I need an image like tomorrow to go in this book, can you create it? And it literally was just the four bubbles. If you look at the 2014 version of the PESO Model Graphic, it’s very tactical. It has things on it like Google Plus and Vine, things that don’t exist anymore.

And as we’ve evolved it, it’s become much more strategic and less tactical. But that was the real genesis of it. We had to get this book published and I had to get something in it really fast.

Louise:
Sometimes you need that little bit of pressure and suddenly you have like a bit of a light bulb moment.

Steve:
You mentioning Google Plus and Vine certainly takes me back. It’s lovely to remember those things, but it’s been a while since you created the PESO model and obviously hasn’t escaped ours, yours, or any of our listeners’ attentions that like a lot has changed, right? Like AI has come about and things that existed back then don’t exist anymore. And you mentioned about it was more of a tactical framework. It’s now become more strategic, but in what other ways have you evolved it?

You talk about it a lot. We read a lot of your work, your newsletter, what you post on LinkedIn, which is great. And I’d urge our listeners to seek that out because there’s so much good stuff, so much inspiration there. But for you, like, how is it evolving? How is it changing?

Gini:
Eighteen months ago, we started to look at artificial intelligence and how that might affect the PESO model itself. And now this will tell you how fast, and we’ve all experienced how quickly this has evolved, right?, AI has evolved.

Eighteen months ago, it was very much like, can we use AI to help us figure out what kinds of content should we create? And can we help AI help us write some pitches? And can we have AI help us do this? Well, fast forward eighteen months, it’s completely exploded beyond just helping and productivity and more along the lines of what I’ve been calling visibility engineering.

So it’s really about how as communications professionals can we engineer visibility? Because what we’re learning is that the large language models are getting there, they’re being trained on our content, so things that live on our website, and they’re being trained from high domain authority websites. So media outlets, newsletters, podcasts… if you have show notes on your podcast, it’s learning from that kind of stuff.

Any content that’s consistent about your brand or about your organisation or about your thought leaders or subject matter experts, if it’s consistently the same across the website, across influencers, across media – that’s how it’s training to learn about you and that’s how you’re showing up in AI.

So we’re really looking at PESO now as: how do we engineer that visibility so that we do show up in AI? So that instead of showing up as one of ten blue links on the front page of Google, on the first page of Google, how do we show up as one of the two recommendations in ChatGPT?

Steve:
So it’s even more important than ever before really for paid, earned, shared and owned to work together for that consistency. And the million dollar question, Gini, you’ve talked about using PESO not just as a framework, but as kind of an operating system for comms marketing teams.

So could you explain to us and our listeners what that kind of looks like in real life? It sounds like the dream ticket and obviously many organisations are doing it well, but many aren’t. But how should it ideally work for you?

Gini:
I would say most are not. What we find is that most organisations choose tactics from each media type and call it the PESO model. And that’s not the PESO model. It’s very tactical.

And I will take some blame for that because, like I said, in the beginning, it was a very tactical model because we just had to rush and get it out. So I take some brunt of the blame for that because that’s what it was.

But as it’s evolved, it’s really become: how do we build this into our workflows? How do we create change management? How do we break down the silos?

And we all hear constantly, the lines between marketing and communications are blurred, right? I think they don’t exist anymore. The line does not exist anymore. A customer does not care if marketing did a programme, if comms did a campaign, if it was up to brand, all they care about is if the message is the same.

So if you see something on TikTok, for instance, is it the same when you go to the website to get more information? Or if somebody says something to you in person about something, is it the same that you’re going to find in a paid ad now that it’s following you? Because of course, our phones are listening to us.

So it’s about the consistency. So how do we break down those silos between advertising, marketing, comms, brand, in some cases sales, in some cases customer service, to be able to do this effectively so that the message is the same?

And if the message isn’t the same for humans, it’s confusing. And if the message isn’t the same for AI, we’re not going to show up in any answer from an AI perspective.

So how do we build that operating system to make sure that we’re all working together, that we’re not holding on to our fiefdoms and protecting our work, but we’re working together for the best of our customers?

Steve:
I love what you said about the customer doesn’t care because I’ve worked in digital PR or PR marketing for getting on for 20 years now. And I’ve tried to explain it to my mum many times and she doesn’t understand what I do. And I’m just trying to explain the PR part, let alone the kind of the whole marketing department part.

My mum’s a very intelligent woman, but she… it’s quite difficult to explain. So you’re right. The customer doesn’t care.

How do you get that consistency kind of in the first place? I suppose like it’s great if you can nail that bit and then get the four separate teams or, you know, four separate areas working together. In your opinion, there must be many brands that are not getting it right in terms of the consistency anyway. They don’t really know what they want to be consistent for. Like how can PR play a part in that?

Gini:
I think it goes back to what we do best, which is messaging and reputation. So if the messaging can come from the communications department and it infiltrates all of the other departments throughout the organisation, that’s usually best because that’s what we do best.

I mean, when I started my career, that was one of the things I did all the time was write messaging and make sure that everybody knew: these are the messages. And media train the executives so that they understood the messaging and they were saying the same things.

Now that needs to be infiltrated throughout the entire organisation. So, you know, we work with some really big global brands and what we find is that they have, usually they have messaging that comes from global and then it goes into each affiliate. So it goes to the US, it goes to Europe, it goes to Africa, it goes to Asia, it goes to all the other affiliates. That messaging goes.

And then it breaks down from there, is what we find. So it’s really, I think, up to comms to ensure that the messaging is correct and it is infiltrating all of the different departments.

But there’s somebody who sort of champions to ensure that you’re still staying on message. You still have pillars of communication that you have to hit so that you do have that consistency.

And I think it will become a really big pain point for most organisations in the next probably nine to twelve months because they won’t show up in AI.

This will be the reason, because their messaging is not consistent. So if we as communicators can start to lead that change, I think that that will save a lot of pain in the future.

Louise:
I feel like if you kind of mention AI to someone in a business, suddenly their ears prick up. So these might be things that you’ve probably been saying for years and years and years. And now you can be like, and it’s also really important for AI, and how you show up on that. Suddenly like…

Gini:
Right. Yes, use that to your advantage.

Louise:
Yeah, it’s quite helpful at the moment as a PR. The work that we do at Propellernet, it’s in the UK, but it’s also international PR as well. So we do pitch to US journalists. So we know that the media landscape in the US is similar to what’s happening in the UK, which is, you know, not hugely rosy. There’s a lot of publications shutting down and a lot of change.

You know, people are getting their news and their information from other places, not just online magazines and newspapers and things like that. A lot of change. We’ve also talked about AI. That’s a big change.

Do you foresee there needing to be a PESO 2.0, some kind of change to the frameworks, ways that you’re going to adapt it? Or do you think it’s got the core things within it that will be applicable despite the media landscape being quite changeable and things like that?

Gini:
I guess there’s really two ways to answer that. One is it constantly evolves. So we don’t call it 2.0. We just say there’s an evolution. We’re probably on PESO 6.0 right now, maybe 7.0.

So yes, we’re constantly evolving it to keep up with things. I still believe that paid, earned, shared, and owned are the right buckets.

I think that inside those buckets, things change. And that’s why it was so important to me to not have it be a tactical model, not to have a list of tactics under each, because it changes so much.

A friend of mine just forwarded this morning a Substack article from a former New York Times author who had just been let go because he was standing up to the tyrant. And he was fired and now he’s created a Substack newsletter and that’s where people are getting their information. They’re following the people they trust, right?

I think it was probably, gosh, we’re probably coming up on two years ago now that Axios published a report that showed at the time there were 12 disparate media bubbles where people were getting their information. I would imagine that’s probably exploded to 20 or more now.

Depending on what your values are and what you believe is where you’re getting your information, and there’s a bubble for you to get that information. So you might be getting information from TikTok, you might be getting it from Instagram. If you’re older, you might be getting it from Facebook.

You might be getting it from traditional media. Like my mum still watches the evening news. I don’t know anybody else who does that, but she’s of a certain age, right?

And so it just depends, I think, on who you trust and what kind of information you want.

So all to say that, yes, it’s completely evolved. We’re probably on PESO 7.0 right now. I should actually go back and look.

What we’ve really tried to underscore is that what’s inside each of the media types changes and evolves, and that’s what you should be worried about.

Steve:
You mentioned trust a few times there, which is obviously incredibly important in comms and PR. And you’ve also talked about quite recently, structured trust. So very, very interested to explore that in a little bit more detail.

So can we start off by you just kind of defining that for the listeners and then how you see it? How can a brand begin to build what you’re calling structured trust?

Gini:
Sounds a bit wonky, doesn’t it?

So I think it goes back to what I was talking about with engineering visibility. And it’s really, how do we not only ensure that we’re showing up in all of the places that people get their information? Not only are we ensuring that we’re engineering that visibility, but how are we structuring that trust so that people are getting the same consistent information about us, about our brands, about our products and services, about our thought leaders, our executives, in the same consistent manner.

So it doesn’t matter if I’m on social media, it doesn’t matter if I’m on LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter if I’m in a Substack newsletter, a trade publication, or national media, the messaging is consistent. And we’ve structured that trust in a way that people now see the same thing over and over again and begin to believe it.

Is the Cracker Barrel logo fiasco familiar to you all?

Steve:
I’ve heard about the Cracker Barrel logo fiasco. Okay. Beautifully put.

Gini:
So there was some research that came out end of September that said that 49% of the quote-unquote outrage was bot-created. They created a crisis for this organisation. The organisation lost 100 million dollars in market cap because of this, and it was created by bots.

Now what happened is the bots created it and they started to gain momentum and build the groundswell. And then humans started to see it. Trump saw it, he amplified it.

So the human beings started to amplify it, and that’s what created this issue.

So when we think about how we’re structuring trust and how we’re protecting the reputations of our brands, we have to really understand that some of this might be created by something that doesn’t exist, and how do we manage those things?

So when we think about structured trust, those are the kinds of things I want us to be thinking about: are we paying attention to whether or not it’s bot-created?

And we can tell, right? You can tell if it’s a bot because it’s usually a handle that was just created. It’s their tweets, for instance, that are all the same. They all say the same thing. They happen at odd hours of the day when most human beings would be sleeping.

So you can tell if it’s bot-created and you can start to mitigate that using your PESO model.

Start to educate and say, okay, we understand that everybody’s upset about the changes that we made to our logo, but it’s not actually everybody, it’s robots, and here’s why. So post that on your website and then go to a few friendly journalists and have them write a story about it.

Of course, share it on social and then amplify it through paid to your audience so that they’re seeing this message from you too, so that it doesn’t create this crisis that you’re going to lose 100 million dollars in market cap.

If we can structure the trust in that way, that’s where we’re going to start to win.

And I think that’s the big shift that we, as communicators, have to make now, we are now engineering visibility. We now have to be rabid protectors of the brand and of the reputation. And we have to understand what’s real, what’s fake, what’s misinformation and what’s not.

Steve:
That’s such an amazing example because I was going to ask you about how we combat, you know, spam and AI spam because it’s so easy for channels to be flooded with things that aren’t real. We’ve actually done a couple of podcasts on it where we’re talking about fake experts in PR. You’re not just competing against other brands, you’re competing against stuff that isn’t real. So that example is brilliant. You’ve given a really clear example of how to use structured trust to combat it. I didn’t know they lost a hundred million.

Gini:
100 million dollars.

Steve:
Scary thought that, for no reason really. I’m laughing but it’s scared laughter, stressed laughter.

Louise:
Can I ask a really naive question in that? The bots, who’s behind the bots? What’s the rationale to be putting these bots to kind of be pretend-annoyed? Because I guess they’re not real people. I’m guessing it’s not coming from a competitor brand. It’s not some sort of sabotage. Is there a knowledge as to why that’s happening?

Gini:
I like to believe the best in human beings, but I think that there are human beings that find that fun, that aren’t good people, that like to do these things. Maybe it’s Russia. I don’t know.

Louise:
I was like, maybe you have the answer.

Gini:
But I think that that’s what it is. There’s a young man in my seventh grader’s class who hacks. He hacks computers and he thinks it’s funny, and he’s gotten in a lot of trouble for it in the last couple of years. But like that, “because I think it’s funny and I can do it” is a reason.

Louise:
Yeah, kind of intense mischievousness in a way, but, you know, has quite real consequences.

Steve:
We used to throw water balloons around and knock on a door and run away. And now it’s like hacking websites. Wow. What a world we inhabit. It’s a great question though.

Louise:
Yeah. We’ve touched on it, I mean, it naturally happens. We’ve already spoken a lot about AI. But you’ve written articles around AI and PR and what that means for the industry. Is it opportunity? Is it peril? Hopefully there’s a little bit of opportunity in there. Are you excited about it?

Gini:
Oh my gosh, I love it. I think it’s fantastic. I mean, I will tell you that I am a big procrastinator, as evidenced by my story about having to get a graphic into my book literally at the last minute. Like, I procrastinate.

And it’s not because I’m lazy or I don’t want to do it. It’s just because I’m deadline-driven. So if I have a deadline and I know I have to get there, I will meet it.

I will wait until the last possible second to do that.

AI has completely changed that for me. So now, instead of procrastinating, I will say to it: I have this big project, I want to push it off, I don’t really want to get started on it, can you help me just lay out what you think I should do?

And even if it’s not right, it gets me over that hump. It gives me something to react to versus having to stare at a blank screen.

I haven’t procrastinated anything in two and a half years because of that. I mean, significant productivity.

It has also helped, we’ve had some really interesting, but I would say challenging issues with some of our clients, where they’ll come and say, “Well, have you thought about this?” And you’re like, “No.” And then you start to think about it and you’re like, “I don’t even know where to get started.” And AI can help you sort of just generate ideas to get you started.

I am a huge fan.

That said, I think there are some really scary, scary applications. And you’re not here in the US, but I’m sure you hear all about it, Trump has started sharing deep fake videos and AI-created videos about the Democrats, which aren’t real.

And I think those kinds of things are extraordinarily scary because you don’t know that they’re not real.

One that he shared a couple of weeks ago was his daughter-in-law’s show on Fox News. It was her talking, and it was talking about med beds, that you can have this med bed and you can go in and it scans your body to see if you have any diseases and automatically cures you.

Like, if you didn’t know that’s not true, it looked real. It was his daughter-in-law on her news programme talking about it. It was completely made up.

So I think from that application, it’s extraordinarily scary. I read a book, and I can’t remember the name of it now, but he talked about how people were creating videos of influencers and celebrities, putting them in positions that they’ve never been in, saying things they’ve never said.

And I think those kinds of things are extraordinarily scary.

So from a brand perspective, we have to be overly cautious about what we’re seeing, about what we’re sharing, and about how we’re mitigating that risk, because it’s a big risk to our brands.

Louise:
Yeah, well only a couple of days ago as time of recording, the app Sora was announced, which is the video creation one from OpenAI. And it’s where you can, with permission, but use likenesses of people to create videos of them.

And Sam Altman put his likeness up to be like, “Create videos with me in it.” And I think on the first day, there was someone who created a video of him stealing something from a shop and it was on a kind of CCTV style and it looked incredibly convincing.

Obviously that’s putting someone at a crime. But yeah, from a brand’s perspective, you could do all sorts of things in a particular store or something like that.

And you can get into this whole brand furore and it’s based on nothing, based on fiction.

Gini:
Kind of scary.

Steve:
But coming back to the example you gave at the start, not to make this overtly political, but I’m just genuinely interested because you gave the Cracker Barrel example and a really clear way of, you know, using structured trust to combat that.

But let’s take the example of Donald Trump posting these fake videos.

If you were the head of comms for the Democrats, how would you combat that? Because in a world where it’s difficult to ascertain what’s real and what isn’t, is just saying on your social channels, on your website, getting spokespeople in the news to say, “This just isn’t real”, some people won’t believe that.

Because you’re then sort of putting truth up against misinformation. How do you actually combat that when someone that unhinged and with so much power is doing that? Like, I’d be terrified to be head of comms.

Gini:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a very fair question. And I think it goes back to, what are the basics, right?

What are the basics to reputation management or what are the basics to crisis? The two things, like, crisis 101, is communicate, communicate, communicate. And you should be doing that before there’s a crisis. Before they’ve created a fake, before they’ve done this, so that people trust you.

Now, if I’m the head of comms for the Democratic Party, and I’ve built this trust, it’s likely with my people, right? It’s other Democrats. It’s people who lean left. It’s not the Republicans.

So the Republicans aren’t going to believe me no matter what.

So I think it’s just: how do I ensure that I’m continuing to communicate, and communicate consistently and the right messaging so that people understand like, “This isn’t real. It’s not real.”

And truth be told, I saw it on TikTok because Jake Tapper, who worked for CNN, now has his own TikTok channel, and he’s talking about it.

So you have to find ways to reach your audiences or audiences that are on the fringe, that may not be quite Democrat, but also aren’t quite Republican.

How do you bring those middle-of-the-road people over and use your relationships and influencers to be able to help you deliver that message really effectively?

It’s crisis 101, right? I mean, when you’re in a crisis, you communicate. You communicate often and you update as often as you can.

Steve:
That scared me. That’s thrown me a little bit. All this talk of fake videos, it’s like, is Lou real? Are you real? How do I know? Is Tom in the studio real? We just don’t know.

Gini:
Right? I mean, I created an AI twin for myself because we do so much video instruction that it’s really, as my organisation is growing, it’s really hard for me to keep up with that. So I created my own AI twin so that we can just go in and say, “Here are the changes to this video,” and have my AI twin record it.

We of course say, “This isn’t real Gini,” but I did a test of it. I was home a few weeks ago and it was like a 90-second clip and I showed it to my family and they were like, “Okay, why are you showing us a PR video?”

And I was like, “That wasn’t me.” And then everybody’s grabbing my phone going, “What?!”

I mean, from that perspective, it’s cool because it saves me a lot of time, but also you’re right, Lou, someone could pick that up and make it look like I’m robbing Target. Super scary.

Louise:
Yeah. I feel like at the beginning of your career, if we had told you we’ll be talking about this at this point, your mind would have been a bit like, “What?”

Gini:
What do you mean? What?! Yes!

Louise:
AI aside, you’ve obviously achieved lots and lots in your career so far. Is there anything that you would tell your younger self now about what was to come? Any advice?

Gini:
That it’s not as stressful as it seems. Everything’s going to work out. Everything will get done. And as it happens, nobody will die if it waits until tomorrow.

Louise:
That’s very, very wise. Do you have the phrase, “It’s PR not ER”?

Gini:
Correct.

Louise:
In America?

Gini:
That is very apt. I mean, there are certainly situations, you know, if you’re in a crisis and there are people who have died in the crisis, for sure. But most of what we do is not an emergency. There’s that.

Louise:
Yes, you can’t be on that level of emergency every day. Like, yeah, there are. But yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I think everyone can look back in hindsight and think, things worked out okay. I probably didn’t need to put so much pressure on myself or just give myself a little bit more space and grace, for sure.

Gini:
Yeah. I mean, I also think you’re right that, I mean, if anybody had said, “Gosh, this is what the world’s going to look like 20 years ago,” we all would have been like, “What?”

Steve:
And it feels like the pace of change, as you said yourself, Gini, has really sped up. So I wanted to touch on that and ask you an impossible question, but one we’re going to kind of force you to answer.

So a bit of future-gazing. And this is really important for our listeners who work in PR, who work in comms, who are trying to keep pace with all this change, which is difficult.

I think it’s fair to say, Lou, we find it quite challenging as well. It’s hard. But what do you think PR, marketing, comms will look like in, I don’t know, let’s say five to ten years. Let’s give it an arbitrary deadline. Let’s not go too far into the future where we’ll all be living in space anyway.

Gini:
I’ll be on Mars eating potatoes.

Steve:
Yeah. But what do you think, how can people, for want of a better phrase, future-proof themselves? Is it even possible?

Gini:
I think it’s challenging to understand where we’ll be in even five years. I think it’s challenging to know where we’ll be a year from now, just because it’s so fast.

I started using ChatGPT in November of ’22, so not quite three years ago, and just about three years ago. And the pace of change on how we’re using it and how it has evolved is insane. It’s just, you’re right, it’s hard to keep up.

So I think even just a year from now, we’re going to be in a completely different spot than we are right now. And we’re going to be talking about PESO 8.0, because I’m going to have to evolve it again.

I think if we think about future-proofing, it’s a few things:

It’s understanding the change that’s happening. And if not keeping up with it, at least keeping yourself educated on it.

And one of the examples I use all the time is this:

When I started my career, I sat in a cubicle right outside the men’s restroom, that will come back into play in a minute, and my boss’s office. She had an office right across the hall from me.

And so I would come into the office at 7 o’clock every morning because I knew that the CEO of our company, of our agency, used the bathroom at 7:20 every day. He would walk in there with the newspaper at 7:20 every day.

So I knew if I was sitting at my desk at 7am, he would actually stop and talk to me when he went in to use the bathroom. And then when he came back out a few minutes later, or a lot of minutes later, at the same time, my boss would come in at 7:30 every morning and she would say good morning. She’d get her coffee, she’d go into her office, she’d close the door, she’d put her feet up on the desk, and she would read for the first hour.

She read the trade publications, she read the business journals, she read the newspaper. She spent the first hour of every day reading.

I remember at the time, 22-year-old little-shit me, was like, “I can’t wait till I have time to read for the first hour every day.”

But what I began to realise is that she was coming in early to be able to do that.

So that when we were in client meetings, she could say, “I just read in blah-blah-blah trade magazine that this is going on, and this is going to affect you. Here’s what I think.”

And so she was able to counsel clients in a different way because she was spending that time reading.

So I use that example to help you understand that that hasn’t changed.

You still have to consume content. You don’t have to necessarily spend the first hour of every day reading, but you should be paying attention to influencers and media and reading Substack and reading LinkedIn newsletters and watching videos and listening to podcasts, so that you understand what’s coming. So that you know how it’s going to affect you.

So even if you can’t physically keep up, and most of us cannot, just understand what’s happening in the world around you so that you can future-proof.

Steve:
Yeah, I think that’s amazing advice because I don’t always make enough time to read. Like, I read a fair bit, but we share quite a lot. It’s prioritising that, right? Even if you have to come in a little bit early or, yeah, just making a bit of time in the day so you’re not constantly just doing the work.

Louise:
I really like what you said about making sure you’re learning and curious and reading, but not necessarily reading and keeping up to date with everything. Where is your curiosity? What are you still interested in learning and reading about?

Gini:
I probably, where I get most of my information is PRSA has a great newsletter they send every day, and it has a bunch of different types of content in it. So I usually start there.

I read a ton in my Apple News app because I’ve curated it that way. I read a ton on LinkedIn, a ton on LinkedIn. I get a lot of ideas from LinkedIn.

And I hate to admit this out loud… every night I scroll through TikTok, which I love.

But I’ve also curated that with, like, animals and little kids and, you know, funny kinds of things, but also industry-type stuff. So I get a lot of information, just like thought-provoking kinds of things, from TikTok.

Louise:
Isn’t that fascinating how your thing is animals, cute kids and industry information? It’s very specific to you.

Gini:
It is. I don’t want all the madness that’s going on because I only do that at the end of the day—like, very end of the day. So I don’t want all the world madness. I just want funny, cute, and stuff I should be thinking about.

Louise:
It’s great. I’m a big fan of TikTok. I do think it can get a bad rap because when you first open it, it can look absolutely mad. But once you kind of teach it what you like and what you find useful, I think it’s very, very valuable. And yeah, a nice variety of sources, which I always think is quite handy, what you’ve just referenced.

Steve:
I need to curate TikTok because I’ve said before, it overwhelms me because I haven’t curated it yet. So I go on there and it’s just a splurge of like, here’s some football, here’s a cat falling out of a tree that looks cute, here’s something really heavy that’s happening in the Middle East… you know what I mean? It’s that kind of thing. It’s too much.

I will curate. I’ll get some tips from you guys on how to do that, but not live on the pod.

Jeannie, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you.

Gini:
I’m so sad I’m not there in person. You guys look so comfortable and easy and I just wish I were there, but thank you.

Steve:
We wish you were here too. It wouldn’t have been feasible you being in Chicago and us in Brighton, but we really, really appreciate your time.

And I know I’ve urged people to read your writing and join your community, as I’ve done. I get your newsletter and go on your LinkedIn a lot.

Let’s just recap quickly, like, the best ways for people to read your work and get in touch with you if they’re interested in hearing more. Would it be LinkedIn? Or are there any other ways they should get in touch?

Gini:
Probably do SpinSucks.com because that has everything. We have video, we have a podcast, we have the newsletter, we have a blog, we have all the socials.

So it’s easy for you to figure out what piece you want from there and then go on your merry way with that.

Steve:
You know, I’ve noticed that you don’t do any cat videos on SpinSucks.com.

Is there going to be any change to that? Any animal videos?

Gini:
Maybe, because we just hired a new social media manager on Friday. So maybe. We’ll see what she says.

Steve:
Well, get on SpinSucks.com, follow Gini’s writing and her work. Lots of inspiration there.

And Gini, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining us.

Gini:
It’s been a pleasure with the two of you. Thank you so much for having me.