Episode #46
In this episode, Steve and Steph are joined by Stephen Waddington, professional advisor at Wadds Inc, PhD researcher at Leeds Business School, former CIPR president and co-editor of the new book AI for Public Relations. Stephen explains why AI is a major opportunity for PR, with large language models drawing heavily on earned and owned media, and why PR teams now need to treat LLMs as a separate stakeholder with their own media lists. He also explores the impact of AI on entry-level roles and the need to rebuild the career ladder and shares his PhD research on getting communicators into the room where decisions are made.
Have a listen or read the full transcript below.
Steph:
We’re absolutely delighted to be joined today by Stephen Waddington, a professional advisor at Wadds Inc and PhD researcher at Leeds Business School. His work focuses on management, corporate communications and public relations as a management function. Stephen’s CV is truly amazing. He’s held senior leadership roles in agencies including Metia, Ketchum, Rainier PR and Speed, and has advised organisations such as The Economist, HM Government, Intel, Microsoft, the Press Association, the NHS, Tesco and Virgin Media Business.
He’s also a former president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and founder of the CIPR AI in PR panel. Stephen co-founded Socially Mobile, a social enterprise supporting public relations practitioners from underrepresented and lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and has written or edited more than 50 publications on public relations and management, including the new AI for Public Relations, Brand Anarchy, Chartered Public Relations, Exploring Public Relations and Management Communication.
What an unbelievable career so far. Welcome to the show, Stephen, and thank you so much for joining us.
Stephen:
Thanks for having me, it’s a joy to be with you.
Steve:
I have to ask, because that is one of the most star-studded CVs and introductions we have ever done on the show. It’s quite phenomenal what you have achieved in your career. With the power of hindsight, how did you end up doing all of those things and where you’ve ended up now? Was it all part of a master plan or has it all happened fluidly?
Stephen:
No, it’s hard work and an awful lot of luck along the way. I originally started out as an engineer and trained in electrical engineering. The first two years after university, I worked as a consulting engineer on the Dartford River Crossing and I absolutely hated it, doing night shifts. It was awful. I was completely put off it.
One of the things I was good at though was writing up all the technical manuals and doing the documentation, and I realised I had this affinity for explaining complexity in language that people could understand. So I transferred at that point into journalism, initially writing about the electronics industry, a fantastic time in the 90s when it was completely booming, and then into public relations because I figured you could earn more.
Steve:
Worked out well.
Steph:
Sorry, I was taken with images of you on the Dartford River Crossing in your hi-vis vest. But to bring it back to your PR career and your life now, how does consultancy life compare to being in a single brand team or at an agency? What do you miss most as a consultant and what do you enjoy the most?
Stephen:
It’s the in-house agency question, isn’t it? I think the benefit of working in an agency, and you all know this from Propellernet, is that you get exposed to an awful lot of clients and an awful lot of situations. You’re also exposed to an awful lot of operating contexts and environments. That’s fascinating. You become an expert in a lot of different areas.
And that suits a certain type of individual. If you’re working in-house, you go very deep on a particular problem. You get to fix a certain situation. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the variety, completely thrived off doing different things in an agency context. One day you can be writing pitch documents and pitching for a piece of business, the next day you’re doing a sell-in. There’s a huge variety, whereas in-house you focus on solving a particular issue. There’s pros and cons of both, but I’ve always enjoyed the agency context.
Doing what I do now, I’ve been really, really fortunate to be at this stage in my career, with 30 years working, where I’m able to help from a very advisory position, both people working in agencies and in-house teams, and across the two, as well as being a researcher at Leeds Business School. So I just absolutely thrive on that variety.
Steve:
Stephen, we could, and in many ways would love to, talk to you about your career for the entire episode. I genuinely mean that, because I’m sure there’s so many fascinating things we could tease out of you. But I want to go straight to something incredibly recent, which is AI and PR. You’ve written a new book, AI for Public Relations. I read your newsletter every week and follow you on LinkedIn, and you’ve written that public relations missed out on SEO 15 years ago and a whole new discipline grew up to fill the gap instead. How are the current changes in the industry with AI different to that period 15 years ago, in your opinion?
Stephen:
Steve, I don’t think they have been. I’ll come back to my career, actually. I said I was lucky, and I have been really, really lucky at various points in my career in spotting an opportunity where there’s been a fundamental change in the media environment or the technology environment. I managed to get myself ahead of that to help brands and organisations, and ultimately from an agency perspective, understand that context and what it means from a reputation or marketing perspective.
I think AI is the latest example of that, but you can look back previously. In the 90s we had the internet, when we went from dial-up to broadband, and the whole explosion in web services. In the noughties we had the shift to mobile and then social, and now we’re coming into this AI era.
They’re all shifts in technology where, if you’re a smart practitioner and you do the work, you keep yourself incredibly busy, because brands and organisations need help understanding that complexity and what it means to them. So I’d say to any practitioner, if you want to ensure you’ve got a career, always try and get ahead of technology and media change. AI is the latest one.
I’ve been lucky to write a number of books over the course of my career. With this latest one, Ben Verinder and I, the co-editors, brought together a group of experts who we’d identified through our own networks on LinkedIn, and also by inviting people to participate. We brought together people we’d spotted were at the vanguard of figuring out things like policy, how you manage culture change within a team when you’re bringing in AI, and understanding the GEO perspective, and invited them to write chapters. We edited it, and it’s so rare that you get something so precisely right at a moment in time, but it’s flying. It’s absolutely flying because there’s such demand to understand this at the moment.
Steph:
There is. I think everyone’s so hungry to find out more. No one knows what’s going on. It feels very intimidating and scary. So to have experts like the ones you found help give some sort of benchmark and ground people has been really, really useful.
Your research shows that the majority of what AI models cite comes from earned and owned media more than paid-for content. You’ve also written about how PR professionals should be rethinking news as their main channel, which was a really interesting thought that Steve and I were discussing earlier. Could you expand on those two points and where your current thinking is?
Stephen:
Yes, it’s really, really exciting for public relations and marketing practitioners at the moment, because we recognised about a year ago that large language models were forming responses based on earned and owned media. There’s a lot of work being done to try and understand and benchmark exactly how large language models arrive at different answers. That’s almost become an art or a science in its own right.
In the agency environment, it’s a huge opportunity to help clients understand and benchmark that. Again, it comes about by getting ahead of the technology, being intellectually curious, and putting yourself in the right places where you’re exposed to conversations and technology that’s helping solve these issues. So anyone in an agency context at the moment who’s doing that is going to be incredibly busy. And that’s a great thing. So that’s the GEO perspective.
To come back to Steve’s point about missing out on the SEO opportunity. Propellernet aside, I appreciate you work for an extraordinary agency who were ahead of the SEO opportunity, but by and large the integration between media relations and PR and SEO was completely missed, and this huge market grew up outside the PR industry. It looks like in this instance that’s not going to happen, because the PR industry seems to have got ahead of it and is building the skills and has recognised the opportunity. And also because of that earned media perspective, clients are looking to PR teams and comms teams to help understand how LLMs cite. The early indications are really positive and the opportunity is significant.
The point about broadening beyond a media perspective has been an issue since the fragmentation of media we’ve seen over the last decade or so. Earned media isn’t as influential as it was. Just think about your own behaviour, your adoption of news media and where you get sources of influence from. It’s completely fragmented now. Whereas 20 years ago, we’d be buying national newspapers, and in PR teams we’d do a read of the national media every single day.
It’s not to say that mainstream media isn’t still important. If you think about the agenda-setting media in the UK, it’s likely the Today programme, it’s breakfast telly, and it’s maybe the FT. But the agenda could come, and does come, from anywhere. At the moment it’s as likely to be an influencer on TikTok who’s making an activist or political point. The market is so fragmented. From a planning perspective, you have to look at the audiences or publics you’re trying to engage, what their behaviours are and what media they consume. It’s good practice really.
Steve:
It’s taken me back to my start in PR, where I used to get lots of print coverage. I once secured a piece where I was aiming for print, but they said, we’ve put it on the website. I showed it to a client and they went, what on earth is this? This doesn’t count. That was about 20 years ago when I started.
You’ve answered that question really thoroughly, and it’s given me, and I think our listeners, pause for thought. But I’m intrigued by what publishers are doing as well and how they’re responding. I’ve done quite a lot of reading on this, the likes of Press Gazette, and we’ve had Rob Warren talking about some of his work there. You can see a lot of national newspapers are responding by investing heavily in their YouTube channels and social. So when it comes to a PR practitioner who’s got a story or is planning a campaign, how do they need to be thinking about building media lists, in your opinion? How much is it changing? Because it feels like it’s changed a lot for us at Propellernet already.
Stephen:
Yeah, it might even be that the media is not the right place to start, depending on the objectives of your campaign. It might be that you want to go and seek out individual influencers on Instagram or TikTok. So you’ve got to fundamentally rethink the notion of what a media list is, depending on your objective, because your sources of influence could be anywhere.
You make a really good point about publishers re-engineering newsrooms and their output because of this. You’ve seen individual journalists being given the freedom to go and create their own media. Increasingly they’re publishing across podcasts, Substack newsletters and a whole variety of different outlets. This is the issue with media fragmentation. You really have to come from an audience perspective, understand where your audiences and publics are and what their media is, and how best you’re going to engage and get in front of them. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is a great piece of research and a great place to start investigating these sorts of issues and what’s happening with the media.
There is one exception to the media list question, and that’s if you’re working in this emerging area of GEO. If you want to influence large language models, increasingly we’re creating media lists specifically for LLMs to ensure that the content we’re creating is parsed by the large language models. This is the GEO opportunity that I talk about that’s additive to public relations.
Steph:
I think it’s so interesting when we’re talking about a media landscape that is so fragmented. I’m nodding furiously along because I’m always so impressed when the whole nation knows the same news story at the same time. I’m like, okay, this is a big deal. So fair play to the Dolly Parton story. Even my husband and I knew exactly when it happened, and that’s such a rare situation nowadays when everyone’s getting their news through completely different channels.
But with no real uniform framework or common metrics established, have you got a specific measurement approach or framework you would guide in-house teams towards when they’re reporting AI visibility to the senior management team or making a reputation case to the C-suite?
Stephen:
The challenge is, Stephanie, there’s so many variables at play here and nothing is settled, and it could all turn on one algorithm change within a large language model. At a high level, there are two pieces of work that have been done. There’s the grandly titled Venice Pledge, created by the Global Alliance a couple of years ago to set standards for engagement with AI covering best practice and ethics. That’s one place you can go and look. The other is AMEC. It published a framework earlier this year for thinking about issues related to GEO and managing reputation through AI. That focuses on best practice, like having a repeatable method, how you report and things like that.
I completely recognise it, and this is part of the opportunity, but also the excitement. In the market at the moment there are so many aspects of this that aren’t settled, which means you cannot be definitive about any of this stuff.
Steve:
I really felt that when you said at the start of your answer that there are so many variables up in the air, because we’ve been having similar conversations internally, with our clients and with new business prospects. There’s so much to it, isn’t there? The personalisation of LLMs that learn more about you the more you use them, whether you’re logged in or not, different LLMs reacting differently. It’s not like-for-like with keywords and SEO rankings. So it will be fascinating to see how it pans out in the next couple of years or even beyond that.
You work with a lot of different brands and in-house teams, and we’re going to ask you to do a bit of future gazing. What do you think a GEO or AI role looks like in PR in the years to come? What we’re seeing is AI just slapped on a job title at the moment, and sometimes it doesn’t have much meaning. Everyone in the industry is trying to learn about it, but what would you predict as a role or a pathway for someone?
Stephen:
I think it’s additive to our role, so it’s new. I think it’s dangerous if we don’t treat it in that way, because we’re undermining our own value. I think the skills are complementary though. If you understand the media environment, if you understand SEO, you can transfer those skills into the GEO environment.
I think we are going to end up treating AI and LLMs as a separate stakeholder. You’ve sort of hinted at that already, or maybe Stephanie, you raised the point that different LLMs cite from different sources and appear to weight different media in different ways. If you want to influence Perplexity, you need to serve content in a certain way, in a certain media. If you want to influence ChatGPT, it’s going to be different. We need to work across those different LLMs and understand each context is different.
So it is an additional role, I think. You have the public relations role, where you’re engaging traditional forms of media, or fragmented forms of media as Stephanie raised. And then you’ve got this emerging opportunity around GEO, where some of the media may be the same, but you definitely need to create your own media lists for each of the large language models and recognise where their influence comes from.
Steph:
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The next area we were interested in discussing with you, Stephen, was nurturing and introducing the new generation of PR talent, which leads so nicely from what you were just saying, that it’s not so much that we need to change our roles or our skills, it’s simply adding to them. If you were to mentor someone starting out in the PR industry today, what skills would you tell them to build or specialise in from the off?
Stephen:
Yeah, this is really interesting. Alan Milburn published a report earlier this year, which I’d encourage people to go and look at, which seemed to suggest that AI was having an impact on entry-level roles, particularly in professional services at a graduate level. When Ben and I were putting together the book AI for PR, in the final chapter we tried to deal with some of the big issues like this, and we just could not agree on what the opportunity or threat was to the entry-level role.
On the one hand, we’ve just had a conversation about the emerging opportunity for AI and PR. But on the other hand, I started my job producing media lists, literally cutting out and sticking clippings, writing up contact reports and meeting minutes, and creating press briefing books for managers. In that entry-level role, all that’s gone. It’s completely disappeared. You can use a whole variety of tools now to do any one of the jobs I just mentioned. And that has to be a concern.
We’ve been here before and we’ve addressed these sorts of issues previously. My concern with AI is that it is such a universal, general technology, and it does seem to be having an impact fundamentally at the level of the roles that juniors or entry-level practitioners typically had. That is a concern. No one is doing the thinking about how we rebuild that career ladder, as far as I can tell, and there doesn’t appear to be any work going on to do that.
It really needs to be addressed, because otherwise we’re going to end up in three years’ time with a talent shortage. Exactly the same situation happened during COVID. We froze hiring for 18 months and suddenly we’re faced with a lack of mid-manager practitioners five years later. So it really needs a lot of thought.
Now, how do you get ahead of it if you’re a junior person or a graduate coming into the industry? First of all, do you need a degree? Is that the right preparation? I’d suggest getting experience is probably the best place to start, though that’s going to be increasingly hard to do. I’d suggest understanding the media environment we’re now operating in, because you’re going to be ahead of colleagues, either in an in-house context or an agency context, if you do that, because it’s changing so, so fast. If you’re a publisher of your own media, so a producer or content creator on networks like Instagram or TikTok, that’s going to put you ahead.
And then there’s a whole area of skills around critical thinking and how we actually apply and use these technologies within practice. This is why we wrote the book AI for PR, actually. We saw the industry was taking a hugely techno-optimistic attitude to this. That often happens with waves of new technology. We all jump on it, it’s a shiny new toy, it’s incredibly exciting, and that’s great, because that sort of curiosity and enthusiasm drives human ambition forward, doesn’t it? But it’s also a concern when you don’t apply critical thinking. As we’re finding, there are a hell of a lot of risk areas around AI as well, not least this impact on jobs.
Steve:
Why do you think there is that lack of critical thinking about the next generation of talent? Is it because things are happening so quickly that people are reacting rather than pausing and thinking about what they want to do with their agency, their brand, their business, and how they want to operate? I agree totally with you: shiny new toy, brilliant to be curious, brilliant to use these tools and experiment with what they can do. But everyone’s just reacting so, so quickly and trying to cobble things together rather than give it full thought. I think there was a question in there somewhere if you can untangle that.
Steph:
What came to mind for me on that point is that recently publications like Reach have been putting out on LinkedIn, publicly, how their strategy is changing. Like you said, everyone was jumping on the new shiny toy. They were using AI in journalism to create as much content as they possibly could, being very reactive. If Martin Lewis was doing something, they were sending out something like 60 articles across the regional news network that day about it.
Whereas now they’re taking a step back and being much more deliberate. Even corporations like Reach are saying they’re going to invest a lot more into thought-out features, step away from that kind of journalism, and if there’s an associated subscription cost with that, so be it. I think we’re done playing with the new shiny toy, and we all know now what we can take from it and what we want to move forward with. Again, trying to pick a question out of that, Stephen, I don’t know, but if you have anything to add.
Stephen:
I tell you what, shall I come back in ten minutes when you guys have figured this all out?
Steve:
I don’t think we’re ever going to figure it out, Stephen, that’s the thing.
Steph:
I’m on my soapbox now, but I was nodding so furiously when you were talking about your introduction to the industry being cutting out press clippings and sticking them into books. It’s such a loss not to have that kind of experience in your junior years, because it does seem menial and pointless, and yes, we can get a computer to do it now. But the point of that process was to absorb the media. You learn about each national’s tone of voice, the stories they produce, the headlines they write. You’re absorbing so much by osmosis.
It’s the same as you said with the COVID thing. Being in an office, even if you’re not having conversations around new business pitches or the revenue model of the agency, you’re being exposed to them and learning so much by osmosis. And that is all being taken away with remote working colliding with AI.
I don’t have an answer to it, but I’ll bring it back around to a question. Now that we have AI doing so much work for us, are there any skills that are genuinely irrelevant or not needed? Or should we hang on to them and invest a lot into giving our junior staff those skills, even if it takes a lot of time, money and effort?
Stephen:
So, two things. I think the first thing is this discussion reflects the state of the industry. And what you do through this podcast is really important, because you’re creating the space to have these conversations and reflect on what are big existential issues for our industry and the future of our profession.
Thank you for having me, because it gives me the opportunity to provide my perspective as well. We need to find these spaces to have these conversations. Why are we not having them? Because the industry moves so fast. We’re back to school now, and the next thing we’re going to be talking about is Christmas sell-ins, if you haven’t done them already. Before we know it, it’s going to be 2027 planning. There’s a relentlessness to it. It’s a relentless race. So I think that’s all part of the issue.
Stephanie, you raised a really important point. That issue of tacit learning is so important when you’re working in an office and you’re witness to conversations and part of conversations. Especially in an agency environment, you’re exposed to a whole lot of stuff across a variety of clients. In an in-house context, you’re exposed to different departments and functions and so forth. It’s a loss that we miss out on that. It’s really interesting that there’s a shift generally now to going back to the office, because of a recognition that we need to deliberately bring back those things, or deliberately design them in if we’re in a remote context.
Remote working is actually brilliant if you’re a senior practitioner at the stage of life where you’ve got space and your home environment set up for it. But for junior people, it’s suboptimal.
Steve:
I’m aware we don’t have tons of time left with you, Stephen, and I really want to ask you about your PhD research, so I’m going to jump there. Your PhD, and I’m going to read this verbatim so I don’t get it wrong, is looking at the optimal contribution of PR to management. Can you tell me, Steph and our listeners a little bit more about your research and the fundamental question or questions you’re trying to answer?
Stephen:
Yeah, so this came out of COVID. I did one particular project for the government during COVID where we looked at the role of professional communication within large organisations in the public and private sector. This was trying to learn lessons for future crisis events and pandemics. Then I did another project for the NHS where we brought together a community of senior practitioners who were literally on the front line of the crisis to understand and share best practice.
In both these contexts, I saw the most senior communicators in organisations were suddenly in the management room. They were sat alongside the CEO, and there was an elevation that I had never seen previously. It had been exceptional, but here it was universal, and these conditions were created because of the pandemic, where suddenly organisations realised we really need people who understand public relations and communication. Not just from a media perspective, but broadly across the board.
This is an issue that’s always challenged me through my career. How do you get into the room where decisions are made, or how do you contribute to those decisions at a strategic level, rather than being told to go and communicate something once a decision has been made? Because if you can get into the room, the value you provide and the recompense you get for doing the job you do is significantly greater. So that’s what I’ve been trying to solve.
A PhD is really, really difficult. I’m really lucky in that I’ve got a team around me at Leeds Business School. I went to Leeds Business School because the Dean of Research at the Business School has been a friend for a long time, and we got a proposal accepted, so I’ve been working on this. It’s undoubtedly the most challenging thing I’ve ever done because of the way it stretches you. The shift from being a practitioner working in the industry for 25 years to studying it at an academic level has been a complete mind shift.
But I’ve done two really important things. I’ve gone back and looked at theory from the last hundred years to understand why public relations as a discipline, in its broader sense corporate communications, isn’t respected or afforded the value that I think it should be. One of the issues is we can’t even agree on what the title is. And then I’ve created a series of experiments myself to test some of this theory and try and build on it.
I’m right at the stage of write-up at the moment, which is where you have to produce your dissertation, which gets submitted for examination, and I have to go and defend it. But I’ve answered the question. I guess it’s part of my career strategy. Again, it’s trying to stay intellectually curious and keep ahead of what’s going on in the market. And what I’ve done will future-proof the rest of my career because I’ve tackled one of the biggest issues in our industry.
Steve:
Amazing. It sounds like you’re right in the midst of finishing the PhD and you’ve given us the time. Maybe it was a welcome break from what sounds like a real challenge, because I know people who’ve done them and everyone says the same thing, that it really stretches you, as you’ve said. But important work.
Steph:
Will you be Dr Stephen Waddington next time we speak to you?
Stephen:
Yeah, I will, hopefully, if I don’t screw it up.
Steph:
It sounds like such a valuable piece of work, and I agree with the point you made about the fact that the wider industry can’t agree on a name, let alone some of the specialisms within digital PR or PR for SEO.
Stephen:
Yeah, do you know what, Stephanie? They don’t have these debates in accounting or finance or HR. They really don’t. It’s ridiculous.
Steve:
It’s mad, isn’t it?
Steph:
Stephen, you’ve written about the Post Office scandal as a masterclass in strategic communications failure, and separately praised how M&S and the National Trust handled their own crises. So what’s the pattern that separates the organisations that get this right from those that don’t?
Stephen:
Really, really good question. I think first of all, it comes down to leadership. Does the leadership of the organisation recognise the value of having a strategic communications person in the room when a decision is made? In the example of the Post Office scandal, it’s well known the communication function was excluded from management-level discussions and was asked to protect the brand at all costs, including ignoring a critical set of stakeholders, the postmasters and postmistresses that actually run the Post Office counters on behalf of the organisation.
That’s the strategic failure there. That really, really important cohort was judged to be fraudulent for a long time and criticised by the Post Office for all sorts of horrendous things, which we now know are completely wrong. The protection of the brand at all costs was the issue there. It’s an absolute human tragedy that it took so long to unpick. It was only because of the continued work of activists that it ultimately got the attention of the media, Private Eye, Computer Weekly, and then was made into the ITV drama.
Steve:
The drama, wasn’t it?
Stephen:
The drama, yeah. I wrote about M&S and the recent security issue it had. I went into a store right in the middle of it, and every single member of staff had been briefed. They didn’t know how long it was going to last. They didn’t know what the solution was. There were so many unknowns around it, some sort of security attack on the organisation at an enterprise level. But every single member of staff knew about it, had the lines about what the organisation was doing, and was apologetic.
I just thought it was a masterclass in completely linked-up, engaged communication. Naturally, any organisation in the public sphere going through a crisis like that is going to get criticised for its handling of it. But I thought in that case it was absolutely exceptional. Clearly, communication was put front and centre at the heart of the organisation, to the point that you walked into a store or went onto the website and it clearly had a position even when there were so many unknowns. Those two contrasts are really good, actually.
Steve:
Stephen, we’re going to end with some quick-fire wrap-up questions. The first one is: one thing you believe about the future of PR that most of the industry would disagree with.
Stephen:
I think PR does as much harm as it does good in society. I’ve always been optimistic and positive about the industry. I was president of the CIPR for a term. But through my PhD, I had to go and read critical accounts of the industry. Some of the stuff I learned around the way pharma has behaved, agriculture has behaved, the tobacco industry has behaved, and the use of PR for bad intent is pretty shocking. The cover-up around the Post Office was appalling.
Steph:
I do feel the problem with the board can be ego. Even at a micro scale, some people think they can do the PR bit, whereas they know they can’t do the more technical optimisation, for example. I feel like that gets magnified up to boardroom level, where they think they know what PR is and they can do it themselves, when they can’t. Anyway, back to quick-fire. One book, Stephen, other than your own, or research paper, that you think every PR person should read.
Stephen:
No one will read this, but they should. There’s a book written in 1995 called Strategic Communications Management: Making Public Relations Work, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It was by Jon White and Laura Mazur, and the two of them wrote this guide for managers on using communication. It’s a brilliant book, because it explains at management level the benefits of using good communication across all forms of media and all forms of stakeholder.
Jon has been a researcher all his career, worked at Henley and Cranfield, and he’s been a huge influence and support for my work. He sort of cracked it in the nineties, but we didn’t learn the lessons. Everyone should read that book. My next book, actually, one of the outputs from my PhD, is going to revisit that book and do something similar.
Steve:
Lovely. Stephen, the final question we’re going to ask you today is, if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?
Stephen:
My wife also works in the industry. She runs the PRCA, the trade association. We often get asked how the hell we manage our personal and professional lives when we’re both working in the industry. The way we do it is we never talk about work. We keep the personal completely separate from the professional. There’s also a busy family life.
The thing that really keeps us going is our allotment and a flock of hens. So we have a little homestead where we grow all our own veg and we have hens. That’s what keeps us going.
Steve:
Amazing.
Steph:
So that’s your alternative reality. If you weren’t a doctor in public relations, you’d be an agricultural specialist.
Steve:
Or we’ll send you back to work on the Dartford River Crossing where you started all those years ago.
Stephen:
It was so horrible. It was cold. The night work was just horrible. Antisocial hours, night work.
Steph:
Sounds like PR, to be honest.
Stephen:
Yes. This has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
Steph:
Thank you, Stephen.
Steve:
It’s been an absolute pleasure. Just before we finish, how can people get hold of your book, AI for Public Relations? Where should they go to get a copy?
Stephen:
Go to Kogan Page, the publisher, go to the Kogan Page website, or obviously go and get it on Amazon. PR books rarely break into Waterstones, but it’s done so well that Waterstones now stock it, so you might be able to get it in your local Waterstones. And follow me on LinkedIn or Substack.
Steph:
Well, huge congratulations.
Steve:
Yes, and that’s where people can find your newsletter as well, which you publish every Monday. I read it and I’d heartily recommend it. So do go and find Stephen Waddington on LinkedIn and sign up for his newsletter. Stephen, it really has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time and good luck with the rest of your PhD.
Steph:
Good luck.
Stephen:
Thanks guys. Bye.
