319 - Changing the Game: How AI is Shaping Modern Communication Strategies with Axia Public Relations' Jason Mudd

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Jason Mudd, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of a company called Axia Public Relations, which can be found at axia— A-X-I-A— appr.com. You're based in Amelia Island, Florida. And as we were talking before we started recording, I've been there once, gave a talk at the Ritz-Carlton there, one of the more beautiful places in the Southeast, I think. Thanks for joining me today.

Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for the opportunity, Doug. Yes, I love it here in Amelia Island. Most of my team is in other places across the US and even across the globe. In the current marketplace, we can live wherever we want. And my wife loves this place. So she, she wanted me to move back to what's my hometown., and we just love it more and more every year. You— we say we can get anywhere we want within 7 minutes, and that's something that most people can't say at all.

That's true. And what's remarkable to me is that you're a native of Amelia Island.

Yeah, that's right.

That was a very small demographic in, in, in Amelia Island and in the United States. Not many people hail from there.

I, as a teenager, I bagged groceries at the grocery store and I tell people there used to be a time where you knew everybody who lived there when they came in.

Right.

And you knew who was visiting. There's just that divide right now. Now you don't recognize hardly anybody when you go. So we've had a lot of growth here in my lifetime.

Let's start off and learn a little bit about your backstory. You've been in public relations, but I think what's really interesting is you were at the cutting edge of Web2 and e-commerce back around 2000, and maybe we can start before that, but Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting stuff. We don't know, we don't talk to many people who are dinosaurs like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I prefer to call myself a pioneer, not a dinosaur. There you go. I'll take that. Uh, yeah, I was an aspiring journalist and working on a story, and the research slash librarian at the news outlet said to me, kind of a cub reporter, I would go on the internet and do some research on your story. That's where I would get started. And I said, what's the internet? And she kind of points and there's this computer over there, right? She's like, it's connected to the internet. And I'm like, okay, can you show me? And so she showed me and we've all had these moments in life where we're doing something that we're so enchanted by that time flies by. And so literally I remember somebody tapping me on the shoulder, hey, we're closing the building. Are you done here? What's going on? And I was like, oh my gosh. So I just fell in love with the internet and I literally couldn't stop thinking about it. So I don't know if it was that night or later, but I just started writing down all these ideas.

Is.

And it was at that moment where I knew my career was pivoting in a different direction. And I'm like, okay, I'm a storyteller. I love telling stories. I love knowing things that other people don't know yet and then sharing it as news. What a platform this could be. And fast forward, I found the only guy that I knew, or that I could find. I forced him to teach me how to build a website. He did not want to teach me. He wanted to hold it to himself. And I just nagged him and nagged him. Because I couldn't figure out how do I get my files from my local computer into what we now call the cloud. And he's, oh, you just FTP it. And I'm like, what does that mean? And you couldn't just Google like how to FTP, right? So I finally forced him, bribed him to show me. And then fast forward a few months later, people started recognizing me at restaurants as the guy that has a website. And then a few months later, strangers were contacting me saying, I want you to build a website for my company or whatever. And boom, I started a company building website for people and pivoted outta journalism.

Hand coding HTML, huh?

Oh, that's the only way to do it, I think. Yeah, no, that was fun. That was back when email didn't have graphics and it was all text. And I miss those days. In fact, I was playing around with ChatGPT this morning and I said, one day we're gonna miss how elementary it is because eventually it's gonna have all these features and stuff. And it's getting there right in front of us. But back in the day, your email was like a ChatGPT. GPT session, just text, nothing fancy.

Yeah.

And, and I miss those days.

Things were a lot simpler in those days, although I remember doing over the telephone lines at 2K baud, right? And yeah, pretty darn slow in today.

You couldn't do the graphics back then cuz the connectivity was so slow.

And that's right.

Like Gary Vaynerchuk says, marketers ruin everything. And yeah, we start thinking, let's market an email client that can add images to it. And that's nice and helpful and I'm glad we have it. Sometimes we just need basic text conversations, right? Just like text messaging, right? There used to be a time, Doug, where text messaging was text messaging, right? Where now people are sending emojis and GIFs, everything.

Exactly. So you got into, you got on into the internet early, then what happened?

Yeah, then what happened? So strangers are calling me, asking me to build them websites. I realized quickly, Doug, that I'm a good marketing strategist or communicator. I'm not a graphic designer, I'm not an art director. I'm certainly not interested in being a programmer, right? Or, or a coder all day long. And so quickly I looked at my skillset and I said, I'm gonna take this book of business I have, I'm gonna go sell it to a company that wants to do website design. And simultaneously they offered me a job running their web design department because like you were talking about earlier, it was an ISP, an early adopting ISP, right? Who had high-speed internet and things like that. But they, people were saying, hey, build a website for us. So they were trying to figure out how to make money building websites. I don't know how I did it. I was pretty young. I came in and I took this organization that was in debt, meaning they owed companies websites that they hadn't even started working on and they had already blown the budget on them. And so I had to turn around several dozen websites and get them live before we could start making money again. But within 6 months, 3 to 6 months, we started becoming the most profitable group within the organization.. And I remember going to my boss and saying, hey, I've been here a while. Are you happy? Do I still have a job? And he's like, where else would you go? I love it. You're— and that's when he finally told me, you've turned a business we couldn't— a business line we couldn't make profitable into profitable. It's now some of the highest margins we have. Plus the marketing work you're doing is growing the other sides of the business. So yeah, I need you to stick around. And then ultimately, just a quick story, our PR efforts, our visibility was so good. We ended up attracting a venture capital company. To come in, knock on our front door and say, we want to buy you guys.

Wow.

And my boss said to me, you caused this problem. You meet with this guy. I've got other things to do. I met with that guy for about 5 minutes and I went back in. I said, boss, if I owned this company and I were you, I would run to that conference room because he's got cash and he has a deadline. And the other guy who was one of our competitors, he's given him the runaround and he's frustrated. He had his investors gave him a deadline to buy. An ISP, and if he doesn't buy us, I think he might be in trouble. And yeah, my boss's parting gift to me was to tell him, hey, if I were you, I'd put Jason Mudd in charge of this company. I'm out. And he's like, I thought Jason Mudd was a really good marketer. And he said, he is, but he's smart. I've taught him. He can learn the business and I trust him. And that's the greatest compliment you can get. But about 9 months later, I got tired of being in internet operations.

So how did you pivot into PR?

So I was a journalist. I found, got on the internet, fell in love, and started wanting to help other people tell their story online. And the, and people started calling me, asking me to do that for them basically. But at the end of the day, what I loved about being in the news business was hearing things first and being able to share it with my audience. And ultimately the opportunity to be a strategist and a business person of helping companies Instead of reporting other companies' news, I was now helping companies craft their own agenda and, and their own direction, and then sharing, then amplifying that through my contacts, connections, and know-how, which just became very powerful. And as the internet blew that up even bigger to give us even more tools at our disposal. With great power comes great responsibility, and we see that through websites, the evolution of mobile phones, the evolution of text messaging, email marketing. Social media, and now AI, right? And so I tell people all the time, PR communications hasn't changed. People say it's changed so much. Hasn't changed. We've just got more powerful tools, and then we have to be even more responsible with them. And so you still want to hire somebody who's got a strategic mind, that's a good communicator, both orally and written communication, who can do well on video. Those fundamentals still remain, but now there's just a ton of tools you got to keep up with in this 24-hour, 365-degree, not only news cycles, not only news cycles, but also social media channels and web content and things like that.

That's right. And I think what I, from my perspective, what we've seen is the vast fracturing of the media world. In the old days, we had print magazines, we had television, radio, and that was it. Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe some newsletters and stuff like that.

Yeah. Maybe you have some. Newsletters, maybe you do direct mail and stuff like that. Today there are thousands of different ways to go to people and people are no longer aggregated in, in one place.

Yeah, yeah. Clients still want the home run of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal. But what they don't realize is the average consumer, the average business person doesn't consume those.

That's right.

So there's still tier one, there's still high profile, they're still very credible. But there's smaller outlets that will actually get you right in front of your true buyer. And so I'm a big fan of diversity when it comes to those types of things and trying to— I'd rather get you in front of 1,000 people who are ready to buy than a million people who will go, oh, that's interesting to know.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So you've been doing this for a while. What gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

Ideas and innovation. The mornings I wake up like, oh yeah, I just woke up with this idea, or I'm enthusiastic about trying out this new thing. That's what gets my feet on the ground first thing in the morning and with enthusiasm. And if I'm not feeling challenged, maybe I want to go enjoy a walk on the beach or something instead. I love what I do and no two days seem to be the same. Last year was really a year of, at our agency, just coming up with more efficient processes and leveraging new tools. And our team really got enthusiastic about a lot of the improvements that we made throughout the year. This year, my kind of personal mission statement is, is a little bit of massive action or, or sense of urgency is what I've actually landed on. So I'm trying to have a sense of urgency across our entire company about everything we're doing.

So how do you see artificial intelligence changing your business?

Yeah, it feels those early days of the internet, right? It feels we're all pioneers. Some people are choosing to be on the sidelines and we're galloping as fast as we can and headed in one direction as a firm. So AI is a great conversation starter. We're really enjoying the opportunities we're spending with it. Trying to deal with what I describe as this overload of quick and easy content at your fingertips that you can be creating. But are you using it strategically and are you remembering to go back and get it when you worked on it, uh, kind of thing. But we're leveraging AI as much as possible. About 2 years ago, we put out an AI policy for our company. We put out an AI use communication for our clients, and not a week goes by that somebody's not asking me for help with those types of things and how we're doing it. So it's a little bit feels like the Wild West of like when the internet first came out, you know, kind of thing when social media first came out. But it's a powerful tool. I tell people all the time, you know, that I don't think chat or I don't think generative AI will take your job unless you are sitting on the sidelines. And then you'll be like the mom and pops and other companies who didn't embrace the internet. And next thing you know, the internet's eating their lunch and taking their business away, right? From them. And I've met people who just refuse to use it. I'm not gonna train something to put me outta business. And I'm like, you're gonna be put outta business, right? Because somebody else is training it right now. And I think that's really important that, that people really, if you're not using AI today, you're making a huge mistake. Even if you have to baby step and start using it slowly, start using it, get comfortable with it. And the other, uh, thing I see people say all the time is I can tell when somebody used AI. And I said, yeah, you, you can when it's obvious. I can, I can tell someone's not been educated by how they write. But once you train an AI, generative AI tool, or now we're talking about AI agents, right? As you train them and you invest in training them, just like an employee, if you will, if you train your people, you give them professional development, you give them insight and exposure, and you set preferences and guidelines, you couldn't tell I generated something by AI.

That's right. Yeah. The other thing I've learned about AI is that if you want intelligent answers, you've gotta be intelligent yourself.

Absolutely.

You cannot, you've got to have enough knowledge and experience to look at the results you get from a prompt and make and discern whether or not this is really, when is it accurate? Is it true? And is it, does it make sense? I believe that AI is gonna cause a resurgence in the liberal arts education. I don't think we're not gonna need coders.

Yeah.

'Cause AI is gonna do the work. But what we do need are smart people who have a broad, dispersed knowledge base, which you get in a liberal arts education, who can become prompt engineers, who are smart enough to be able to draw from different parts of human knowledge to ask questions.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

And I, yeah, there're gonna be a lot of people that are gonna maybe find themselves out of a job, but I think there're gonna be a lot of new jobs created. It's gonna require a lot more intelligence, a lot more basic knowledge, human knowledge, than is put at a premium right now. I think that's gonna be really interesting.

I like that viewpoint a lot. That's an interesting perspective. And going back to what you said earlier, I'm gonna nerd out on this, but go ahead. Every day, 2 or 3 ways I realize I communicate a certain way that I assume people know what I mean and people are able to figure, humans are able to figure out what I mean. But the AI agent takes me very literal.

Right.

And I realize I'm misusing a term just a little bit. To where it turns it off or points it in the wrong direction. But if you and I said it to you a certain way, and I'm blanking on a really crystal clear example of that right now, Doug, but if you and I were talking, you'd know what I mean and we'd just move on. Yeah, exactly. And my example from yesterday is I was having it prepare a communication to an internal person after having it prepare a communication with me. And the keyword is with me, not for me, but with me. For an external person, then I wanted to convert it into an internal person. And it was still— it wrote the communication, "Hi David, my name is Jason Mudd." And I'm like, this is a guy I talk to every day. But it didn't understand because the nuance of the language I used was not so specific enough. It just thought I was talking about some random guy named David who didn't know me. And I was like, that's not going to work.

Exactly. And I agree with you about the training. I've been using both Gemini and ChatGPT to write my book. I gotta say that I've gotten more done in 6 weeks using AI. It would have taken me a year, right, to do what I produced so far. It is—

wow, it's— yeah, I wrote a book one evening using ChatGPT, but— and I was amazed. But then as I started going through it, I saw there were so many mistakes, so many assumptions, and you have to do a lot of editing.

And what I've learned is that it will they will not write a whole chapter for you. What you do with the way my process, what I've learned is one, brainstorm.

Yeah.

Then once you get a brainstorm down, have it do an outline, refine the outline, and then take one section at a time and, and prompt it to write and then continue. Just iterate. No, that's not right. I want you to do it this way and define the parameters of the style you want to use. It's really amazing.

Yeah, it, it is amazing. And I mean, I can't under— I can't overestimate how much I use it.

And, oh no, daily.

And the people I interface with who are just, oh yeah, I don't really use it. I'm just like, oof.

I know.

You know, you're missing an opportunity and you're working too hard and you're not working. It's not just working smarter, cuz I can see where sometimes it's a struggle, but you're not working on it today so that when it's ready and you're ready and you can prompt engineer properly, right? Then you can just take off.

That's exactly right. Yeah. So I'm curious, you've got this agency, you're obviously pretty much a remote organization. You've got employees all over the world, people all over the world you work with. What is it, Jason, that's unique about you that has made all of this work, that has made your business so successful?

Yeah, I think work ethic that I got from my parents. I was the first person in my household to go to college, and if I could be candid, I have no complaints about the work ethic they provided, they performed to provide for our family. But I looked at it and I said, I think I want something different for myself. So I don't want to do— my father's one of the hardest working guys I know. He worked manual labor his entire career until he physically couldn't anymore. And at an early age, again, a very, I've a huge amount of respect for him, but he would come home smelly, dirty, sweaty, et cetera. And he was out in the heat of Florida all day long. And when here I am, a high school student working at a newspaper. Not even having to wear a tie, but having to wear a collar. And, and then secondly, in the air conditioning and using my mind kind of things. I had that blue collar work ethic example throughout my whole life and, uh, just aspired to, to, to create something different for myself. And that required a lot of hard work, figuring out a way to get myself to the University of Missouri School of Journalism, a state I'd never been to before, a state that I had to double check where it was on the map before I started going there kind of thing. And then I got there and I knew nobody. But I knew the people who saw my work, my body of work, and who, once I expressed interest, the tables turned. I expressed interest and then they started recruiting me. And very thankful that I made that, I'd made that leap. I met my wife there and my life has changed from that experience. But ultimately I think it's, one of my early editors said to me, again, I was in high school writing for the daily newspaper in Jacksonville, Florida, which is pretty rare, right? And I remember my editor said to me, he said, I'll never forget this. You're not my best writer, but you write more than anybody else does. You write more stories than anybody else does. And that helps me fill the, fill up the newspaper, right? Fill my quota. And I remember thinking to myself, I was a little butthurt, you know, I'm not his best writer. And he wasn't wrong. I just was too naive to know better.

Right.

But I was willing to outwork everybody else. And, and so to that end, when I showed up at college, I was already writing for 2 newspapers. And I had that great clipbook or portfolio, and then I had to pay my way through school. So I worked practically, if not full-time the whole time I was there, whether that meant having 2 or 3 or more jobs and going to school full-time. And when I graduated from college, I walked into a management— a marketing director position because I had all that experience, because I had a portfolio of clients and work.

Wow. Yeah. People don't talk much about hard work. I was a trial lawyer for 22 years.

Oh, okay.

And what made me successful was I outworked every other lawyer.

Yeah.

And I won more cases that I shouldn't have won because I overprepared the cases.

Nice.

So I understand, and we don't hear people talking about that today, the importance of being able to really knuckle down and do the hard, tedious work that nobody else wants to do, right?

Yeah, 100%.

How do you create that value in your organization as a culture?

The best thing, I think, and I could be wrong, trust me, Doug, I think you find the people that have that fire already in them. You find those people that were raised the right way. You find those people who have maybe that blue-collar work ethic to inspire them to be different as well. And that doesn't always work out. I've hired people who I'm like, this guy's hungry, this guy's eager, but he lacks some of the skills that we could not seem to teach or that could stick to make this person be successful. So I was really, I took one of those hires where I'm like, I met this guy, I'll just be transparent with you. He was my Uber driver. He didn't finish college. He wasn't well educated because of his family situation, but I saw this potential and I saw this drive and this passion. And we tried for a couple years, it just didn't work. But it doesn't mean I wouldn't do it again. It, it, it doesn't mean it couldn't have worked out differently. You really look at the character of the individual. We can teach most people most things that they need to know. What we can't teach is hunger. What we can't teach to a certain extent is, uh, character and integrity.

Right.

So we look for the right attitude and the right character and integrity. And then obviously the right experience is important too. But I just told somebody this the other day, the more experienced people are that I hire, sometimes the bigger pain in the butt they are, right? Yeah. Because they're stubborn. They already know it. They've always done it one way, and we're trying to show them a different way. The, the difference is we know our way works, and it takes a special person to be able to come back and say, hey, I didn't want to do it your way, but now that I've done it your way, now I see why it works, and I'm committed.

Exactly.

But if they can't see that or admit that early enough or be humble and hungry enough to learn, they usually don't work out here.

Interesting. So let's pivot to listening for a second. How did you learn how to listen?

I'm not a very smart man, as Forrest Gump says. But I've learned to, I've learned to read and learn from others and borrow ideas from others. And one of my favorite things as the chief executive at my organization is I love— I didn't love this. I used to get annoyed by— I always wanted to say the answer's so obvious, I'd just throw it out there. But then I realized nobody's contributing when the owner was speaking or the chief executive speaking. A quick story is one time we were hired to do a focus group of the executive team of an insurance company. And so we got there and we did our folks here. We had our questions, we went around the room. Everybody in there was a director or VP in the organization or higher. The CEO wasn't there. And so we got started and the rest of the room was like, oh, we usually wait for him to get— we shouldn't get started. He's not here. And I'm like, we got a commitment to start at 10 AM. It's 10 AM, we're starting. And so we went around the room, we were having a very productive conversation. And I can't— we were supposed to be there for, uh, from 10 to 11 to noon. And my goal was to get done 11:30 or 11:45. 5, because I knew these were busy people. I like to under-promise, over-deliver. He rolls in at 11:30. So if you think about it, that's what, 90 minutes later? How could we have done that efficiently with his tardiness? So he comes in and the whole room shifts right now. When we ask a question, he answers it first and then ask other people what they think. And no, oh, I agree with you is all we heard. But before we got there, we uncovered so many things that were broken or that where sales is saying this and service doesn't, didn't even know it. And we're uncovering, unpacking all this value. So around 11:45, I say, okay, I'm gonna try to release you back to your busy day a little bit early. And we've got, we've covered everything we need to and, and we did it. We got great feedback and input. And the CEO says, we, I just got here. Like, we're just getting started. Right. And he wasn't a big fan of in that moment. And so he actually asked me to, to follow him to his office so we could talk about it. And so from that experience, I learned very quickly when the leader speaks, everybody else agrees or goes silent. And so I adopted in my organization, now in meetings, I go last. I start with the most junior person and/or the newest person to our company to one, get them to warm up and feel comfortable, because most people don't want to talk first. And then I also identified the people in my organization who are quick to talk, quick to speak, can't wait to not to say something.

Yeah.

And I usually make them go last just so they can learn some patience. But the ideas that have come forward from just sitting back and listening is one, amazing, and two, you really let people feel like respected and they can speak their mind. You have to pay— you have to practice this. You have to build that trust. But some of the best ideas come from the people who are the most meek or quiet because they're intellectuals. They're not— and when I write down the ideas and then I try to acknowledge after each person speaks, I go, hey, I learned something, or thank you for reminding that, or whatever it might be. Once I started doing that, Doug, it was game-changing for me, like completely eye-opening. And I used to be the kind of guy like, I already know the answer. I'm just going to blurt it out, especially if somebody was taking forever to answer. But now I just, you very humbly and respectfully either correct them. And a lot of times when you give them that chance to speak first, they'll say something that was wrong.. But you want to let, at least give them the opportunity to say it, and then you can coach them up or give them some more background and insights.

Absolutely. You've discovered one of the great secrets of leadership.

Yeah.

Yeah. And, and that's what is Listening with Leaders is all about, is learning how to listen and not talk. It, it takes a lot of humility and a lot of self-confidence to be able to let go of your hand of control and let other people give their ideas before you contribute your own. That— and that takes— and that— it also takes a lot of discipline that a lot of leaders can learn from.

We're not a big company, so doing that has been game-changing for absolutely our culture and my value and positioning as a leader.

Yeah. Wow, amazing. Good job.

Yeah.

One more question, I'll let you go. What So Jason, what's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Only one thing, huh?

That whatever, what it might be, many things, whatever it is. Yeah.

You do enough like networking and what do they call those icebreaker type things and you have some of those in your repertoire. I would say just rapid fire. One of those things is I was born at home. My mom went to the hospital. Wow. And they turned her away. She was a young. Young expecting mother, they turned her away and said, you don't know what you're talking about. Just go home. You're not due yet. And then about 2 hours later, my grandfather was, I don't know what the right word is, inducing or delivering me right on the living room. So I was born at home and around in the mid-'70s, that was unusual. I'm about to finish visiting all 50 states. Wow. And let's see what else about me. When I was in, when I was in college, I would, well, when I was in elementary school, I was a finalist on, there was a TV show, was it called Putting on the Hits? I can't remember, but it was a lip sync competition.

Oh.

And I was, I was one removed from going. I was only in third grade and they just thought it'd be easier to take adults cuz they hadn't quite figured out that people like to watch kids do that stuff yet. Yeah. You know, they catered to me a little bit cuz I tried really hard. And if you know me, I'm not naturally a performer at that level. And then one time in college I was doing, one thing I can do is name that tune like nobody else can.

Okay.

So in college they had a game show show up from MTV or something, and finally the producers had to come over and say, hey, we can't have you be the only winner. It's 'cause Jeopardy, you just keep coming until somebody beats you. And finally they just said, hey, we've gotta let you go. Uh, and they're like, no one has stuck around this long for this many episodes ever, and we want to have some other people play. And so I was like, I should probably get to class anyway.

Good for you, Jason. It's been, uh, a, a lot of fun and very interesting talking to you. Thank you, Doug. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

Same here. I hope our paths cross again, and I hope this episode was helpful to your audience. Absolutely.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com. Com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.