Are you worried that your PR job will be taken by AI?

problems, just give me a wave. Okay. Hello and welcome to the PR episodes with me, Jim James. I have got Gemma Flinders who's joining me today. Gemma, welcome to the show.

Hi, nice to be here.

Well, it's nice to have you because, Gemma, you are the PR lead at a company called Digital Bison, and you've got so much experience on tech and AI. Have I got that right?

Yeah, it's Brave Bison. And yeah, I'm like over 10 years veteran now in the digital marketing industry and probably about 6 or 7 in digital PR itself at this point. So I'm pretty old in this game now.

Well, if you're old, I'm, I'm a geriatric. Gemma, sorry, Brave Bison, my mistake. Now, Gemma, You're on the show today because we want to talk about whether AI is going to transform the PR person from being invisible to becoming expendable, right? So we've all been using tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Jarvis, and so on. And you're in a great position to help us to understand what that's going to mean for the PR executive, for the client, for the agency owner. So what I'd love to do is to ask you, first of all, to just tell us a little bit about your background and give us your overall theme of, do you think that AI is going to make your public relations executive invisible or expendable?

Yeah, so I think for me, I've seen the industry change massively since I started. I started when it was, it was pure link building, and you would buy links, you would do link exchanges, you would guest post, all of that, like right from the beginning, uh, to what it is now that it's, it's using these traditional PR tactics, um, to, uh, gain those links that are going to have an SEO impact. Um, so what I think is that for AI and how that fits in is to make us better PRs and not lazier PRs.

Well, and I think that one of the things that we'd love to do is to talk with you and get the view that you've got, because you just wrote an article about PR people being invisible. What did you mean about that? Because I ran an agency for nearly 30 years in Singapore and China and India called East West Public Relations. And being on the agency side, we might have felt a bit invisible in terms of the, you know, work with the client, but we certainly had a big presence as an industry. Do you think that PR as an industry is going to become, you know, even more invisible, going to fade away then because of AI?

I think it's down to individuals. So what I meant by being invisible and like the faceless talent is that in PR, particularly in agency PR or freelance PR, a lot of our work is white-labeled with the, the client's name. So we might put our heart and soul into a campaign that will go live, get loads of links, go viral, social shares, but at the end of the day, the client's name is on that campaign, is on that piece of work, and it's moving on to the next piece, and you don't really get the recognition. And I think that is why, uh, PR as an industry has a really bad rep for big egos and, and being very noisy and and just being a loud kind of presence, especially on Twitter, um, which can be kind of perceived as quite negative because it's a lot of boasting. But really it's just a lot of people trying to get recognition for the hard work, and it is hard work, um, especially because there's so much competition. And then you bring in something like AI that people are starting to use, um, to kind of replace the actual work, but really it's not something that can replace PR, it can just enhance PR. And I think that is the, the kind of difference we need to establish.

Okay, let's, um, let's dive into that a little bit. And maybe, um, if one of the Prowly team could put in the chat, you know, we would love to hear from anyone watching this, um, listening to Gemma Flinders speak, um, Let's find out what levels, how many years of PR do people that are watching this livestream have. If you could put that in the chat, how many years of PR experience you've got, that'll really help us to kind of gauge the level. I personally have nearly 35 years of PR experience, Gemma, so I'm at that— we used to send people faxes when I started PR, dating myself a little bit there. Gemma, let's go into A little bit of the detail. What can AI actually be used for in the agency or as a freelancer?

Yeah, so I think the, the thing to remember is to be transparent about your use of AI in your job. So it should never be, um, an excuse to kind of not do something to your ability. It should be used to kind of help you produce your best work. So for example, research. It's a fantastic research tool. If you're in an agency or if you're a freelancer with lots of different clients, it can be really hard to come up with ideas for every single client in all of these different industries. And it can lead to a bit of kind of idea burnout because you're constantly being asked for these ideas. So using AI as kind of a research tool is a really good application because you're not saying do the work for me, you're saying inspire me. Give me some ideas of something that I can produce using my knowledge, using my skill set. But it kind of gives you a boost. And as well, I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be experts in every industry because there's some things that, you know, you're not going to just grasp. So being able to know what's topical in certain industries that you might not have a lot of experience in is going to help you and help your research. So Um, asking ChatGPT, or, um, Distinctly have a tool called Headline Grabber, um, and you can put in topics and the client kind of niche or what publications you want to target and get it to feed back some headline ideas in order to kind of make your job a little bit easier and to kind of start you off on the right path.

Gemma, that's really, really excellent because in the old days we used to have to read through magazines from an industry to see what was trending. And when you got a new client, you'd spend the first couple of weeks just sort of researching.

Yeah.

Now, from what you're saying with AI, you know, you can turbocharge that down to, you know, minutes or hours rather than days and weeks. So that's got to be good for everybody, Gemma. What about the sort of content creation side? Because we all know that writing that press release and writing that pitch, writing that client bio, writing the case study, those take a lot of time, but also they're core skills of the agency copywriter. What role can AI play in, as you say, not replacing, but if you like, augmenting and enhancing the skill sets in the agency?

Yeah, so I think for me, what I've found is that it's really good for giving points to cover within articles, within like the campaign copy, or even like, I know there are tools out there that do this too, but different ways of presenting data, for example. So if you're bored of saying half of Brits do this or blah blah, like how else can you phrase that to make it more impactful? Maybe give it a list of like the headline stats and get it to pick, you know, which ones will work together, which ones are like more impactful as a whole, kind of helping with the narrative. And then when you have those pointers, you can structure your piece yourself. And I think as well, if you're a freelancer, for example, sole trader, you're on your own, there's not going to be anyone you can lean on for a fresh pair of eyes. I mean, you might have like a friend or a fellow freelancer, but of course, you know, if you've got similar clients and there's going to be a conflict of interest there, so you don't want to be sending all of your campaign copy. You don't want to be sending your press release copy to those people. So using it to kind of just go like, sense check this. Can you make sure this is grammatically sound? Can you make sure there's no typos? Because obviously you can spell words right in Word, for example, um, but it's the wrong word, or you've like put the wrong word and it won't flag as a mistake. And then suddenly you send it out and you've ended up sending 100 press releases with the word pubic instead of public. Um, and then, you know, you've got egg on your face, you feel a bit rubbish about it, and it can take a toll on your—

Yeah, absolutely. Especially with the case that you've chosen there particularly. I might have had another one, but, um, tools like Grammarly of course are very helpful for doing that. And I find using ChatGPT is good for a first draft, but I find I need to use Grammarly, for example, to make it local for British English, for example, to put the U's back in to words like parlor and color.

Yes, yeah, it should always be sense-checked. Don't take it as gospel.

Yeah, no, and Gemma, that's great. What about correspondence with the clients? Because we've talked about the research, we've talked about creating the copy. When you send content to the client, or if you are a client and you're receiving material from the agency, what's your view about declaring whether AI is being used? Do you leave it invisible? What's your view? Because handing content to the client creates, doesn't it, some expectation on the side of the client. They think they've paid top dollar for that work to have been done by a qualified member of the team. Tell us your view on how AI should be communicated with the client.

I think so. I, I don't think that AI should do all your content writing for you at all. I think it's using your kind of your skill sets as a professional, um, your knowledge of, uh, structure of what's going to be picked up by press, what's, um, if you have SEO KPIs, what's going to help boost rankings, what's going to be classed as helpful content to Google. and so on as well. But if you are in a position where you have used it, then I think transparency is kind of key. And I think that's across the board for AI. I don't think anybody should be hiding the fact that they're using AI in any aspect, because that is when, you know, we start to become replaceable, we start to lose trust with clients, with journalists, with fellow peers, for example. So I think the whole thing of AI is you need to be transparent about if you've used it, why you've used it. If you've used it for surveys, for example, there are companies out there that are offering AI surveys, so they won't actually ask real people. They will give a set of people based on demographics and will answer the questions as if, you know, it is being answered by people, but it's AI. And I think there's a few ways you can go about that. You can be clear and be like, this data was collected from AI, um, with these parameters. You can say— you can use it as comparison data with real people, like, this is what AI thinks is important to Britons, this is actually what they think. Or you can be deceptive. And I think that last one is what we want to avoid, um, if we want to keep reputation.

Well, and especially as we've seen the cases, for example, where ChatGPT was used and found legal cases that didn't exist, right? Sort of phantom content. And some of the content on the internet is not verified in the first place, right? As we've seen with like American elections, for example, or even around Brexit, there's a lot of fake content out there, and ChatGPT can't differentiate whether it was an original piece of content or, or something actually created by a bot.

Yeah.

Right? So we have to have some human intervention there. But Gemma, if you've declared to a client that you've used ChatGPT, let's say, or Jasper AI or AI Writer, for example, Peppertype, you know, there's quite a few of these guys out there now. What is stopping the client from saying, hey, you know what, this agency, I like the person, but I don't like the bill. And if they're using AI to create these pitches and do this research, I might as well just do this myself in-house and save myself the money. What's your view on that?

So I think it's important to remember that the client isn't just paying for deliverables. They're paying for the years of experience and, you know, our knowledge as professionals. Like, you can say to ChatGPT, write me a press release about this using these stats, and it will put a press release together. But is it going to know that it's going to be right for the, the target audience? Is it going to approach the right press contacts? Is it going to be in a way that's, you know, more effective? No, it's just going to have a look on the internet, find examples of press releases, and tailor it to be what it thinks the perfect press release is going to be. And then, you know, you might get lucky and get loads of results from that, and great. clients save some money, or it could backfire. You could have a negative response. They could find out that it is ChatGPT and lose that trust with the journalists forever.

So I think that's, that's a great point that you've moved, uh, the conversation onto, which, you know, I've sort of gone through the value chain of research to content creation to dealing with the client, and obviously the next part is dealing with the journalists. I'm not sure whether we've got any journalists listening in as well. Here we go. Is what do you think is the response of journalists to content created using AI? And let's move away from ChatGPT because it's not, you know, in itself the noun. I mean, it's one of the other, just one of the services. We've got all these others as well. What's your experience of journalists who are now under threat? Of course, I mean, jobs being lost in the newsrooms. On receiving material, pitches, case studies, long-form articles, bios that are generated by the agency using AI?

So I think it's really important to remember that one of the key parts of pitching is personalization. And if you are sending out an AI piece, like, how personal is that going to be? And is it going to, you know, raise a bit of a flag with these journalists? And I think as well, because of the threat of job losses and the fact that it is happening, like we have seen it with publications making loads of like redundancies and, and, and so on to replace with AI, um, there is going to be a personal kind of hatred of this AI and this like want to protect themselves and not really want to kind of engage with it. Um, and I actually found some stats from Digital Third Coast, uh, that asked journalists whether they know if they've received an AI pitch, and 3 out of 5 said they don't know, or no, not to their knowledge. But then when asked, you know, what would they think if they did or found out, and 100% of the journalists asked said that they wouldn't trust the PR again. So is it worth the risk to do that? I don't think so. I think our media relations, as much as it's less personal nowadays because, you know, they don't necessarily want to go out for lunch or have the time to go out to lunch, uh, we can't really pick up the phone, you know. Do we want to kind of break any of those small relations that we have with journalists? And it's just not worth it.

It's a really good point that you would start with the media with a position of trust And ideally of relationships. I mean, in my day, at the risk of dating myself, we used to go and meet journalists, you know, and hand them a transparency, you know, and we'd have a contact sheet of transparencies and we'd give them a physical transparency of a picture of a spokesperson, for example. So the relationship is still central, isn't it? And the position of trust that you have between the client and the media is absolutely central still to this role. Gemma, what about user-generated content where the clients can start to generate their own content and the agency can be creating content and publishing it on their own channels? We're talking about PR, but one of the aspects of PR now, and I'm sure that you guys are doing this now at Brave Bison, is helping clients to create their own content. What's your, your view on using AI, um, for text, audio, uh, video, uh, for client websites and client social channels?

Um, so I think it depends on what the content is for. Um, so at Brave Bison, we have something called the Bison Bot, um, which allows us to create thousands and thousands of product landing pages. where, you know, it's a very laborious task, um, because it'll just be about this thing, um, and it's very kind of top level, just the facts, and it doesn't need the personalities because it is just stating facts. In that case, you know, we are very transparent. The client knows what they're getting with that. They actually— it's a service that we provide that they kind of sign up for. Um, but as far as anything else, I think, you know, Google is quite savvy about um, AI to an extent. And I think, you know, with the helpful content update and this latest core update hitting a lot of sites, I think now more than ever it's important that there's the human touch of knowing, you know, is this going to be helpful to the audience? What can I add in that's going to help them out rather than just being like a robot and kind of running off, you know, oh, I, I've covered this, I've covered that. It's like, well, you know, you need to be able to engage as well, and people need to be able to kind of um, like relate to that content or at least find it helpful. And I think on some aspects that is going to need human intervention.

Um, what do you see as being the change in the nature of the relationship between the agency and the client as a result of AI?

I think it— I think it's important for agencies to present the opportunity of AI because you would be naive not to know that it is something that's happening. There's no point kind of guarding the client from the fact that this is something that's out there. It's something that everybody's talking about because they know it. Everybody knows it. Like, even if you're not in digital, you know about AI. I think it's more of a case of being upfront with the client about what AI can help with and how it's being used and maybe presenting some stuff like the Bison Bot where, you know, we're actually giving the client something that before would have taken days and days and days to produce, and we are offering a solution that uses AI in order to do that a lot quicker. And I think it's just like, it's a, it's a balance. But like I said, like, there's no way that, in my opinion, you can just cut out the people because you're not going to know what to prompt AI with. Even if you were just like, oh, I'm just going to take over, it's like, well, no, because you're paying for the ideas, you're paying for the experience. And even if AI is utilized to kind of you know, excel that content or, you know, make it a bit better or for research, then you're still going to need that first point. And I don't think that a lot of clients have that kind of level of expertise within their in-house team.

Yeah. And in my experience as well, having worked with big companies, the in-house PR people are as much worried about the internal administration of PR, you know, getting the information from product managers or from sales managers and so on. and the internal navigation of content and news, they rarely had enough time to go outside and look at what was happening. The agency played a really important role in consulting those in-house people on trade show viability or new product launch opportunities. And I think that's just the same with AI, right? We become really trusted advisors. And people in agencies are really experimenting, and like you're doing with Brave Bison, building a bot, right? You're really innovating. That's a really amazing demonstration of how agencies can be at the forefront of making AI valuable to clients. Gemma, with your experience now of over a decade in digital PR, are there some practical tools, some expertise that you think anyone watching this today could take away?

Yeah, so I think, as I've said a few times now, it's important that we don't use AI to make ourselves lazy and take us out of the equation. It's to help us be better at our roles. And I think there are a lot of ways that we can do this as digital PRs. Um, so for example, expanding expanding data analysis. Everybody that knows me knows I'm really passionate about data. Obviously, that was what my online PR show talk was about. So, you know, some formulas have wacky names, so there's no way you could just guess what formula you're gonna need because they don't— it doesn't marry. So by asking AI, and I keep using ChatGPT because it is free, and I think that's important for like freelancers and those that already you know, have a lot of bills and can't be affording these extra AI tools, um, asking ChatGPT or whatever AI you have access to, um, what you need the formula to achieve, and then it can tell you what formula to try. And then through trial and error and practice, you can expand your data analysis skills. And I think that's super important. Same if you've been handed a, um, a spreadsheet from a data team, if you're lucky enough to have one, and they've used a formula and you're like, that— I don't know what that means, uh, and I don't know how to explain how you got there. Taking that formula and getting ChatGPT to break down what each section of that formula means is invaluable because it'd be like, oh, okay, so that's doing that, that's doing that. Okay, now I get it. I understand, you know, what's happening here. And I think that's really important, again, for knowledge. Um, I've kind of covered headline variation a bit as well. Um, going back to Distinctly's headline grabber, not only can it give you ideas for titles, but it can also give you variations. So you can like pick tabloid, broadsheet, shocking, or informative. So if you're like, well, I would— or even like ChatGPT as well, if you give it the prompt of I would like this headline rewritten to appeal to a Sun UK journalist, then it will give you some ideas of how you can do that to kind of better pitch your subject line stuff to the right audiences. And I don't think that that is lazy PR. I think if you're going out to loads of targets, I think it's, you know, smart PR. I'd like to be able to utilize— because you, you've done the original work, it's just helping you tailor that. And in the same respect as well, like getting to know your publications a bit as well, or what publications to target. You could like give me a list of publications in the UK that are online that would be interested in XYZ. And then it can give you a list to start off with. And I think if you're going into a new industry, that's invaluable because it gives you a starting off point. Because you used to be able to use Google parameters for like relevant sites, and I just don't think they work as well anymore. So this allows you to be able to like, oh, I've got a list of these publications, and then you can start off from there. Um, so yeah, I think they're very handy, practical uses of this AI that we can use to just help be better professionals.

That's wonderful. I think also an area that we haven't touched on today, but there are AI, you know, monitoring tools, of course, now as well, and sentiment analysis, which is enabling us to do the other part of the equation feeding back to the client, isn't it? The reporting and the evaluation of what we've done which used to be a manual process where we used to, you know, buy magazines and newspapers and do clippings and photocopy them. And I was based in Asia, in Hong Kong, it was illegal to photocopy them. And so that caused all sorts of challenges. But now AI is enabling us to do media monitoring and analysis and reporting to clients in near real time too, isn't it, Gemma?

Yeah, and I think that for a lot of agencies as well, they're kind of using the AI technology to set up like dashboards and stuff like that that gathers this information and puts it in kind of a real-time, constantly updated format. But I think as well, again, it's great that you have that, but you still need the professionals to provide the context. So it's good that they can access that. And for shareholders, like stakeholders and those kind of C-suites that don't really want to hear the nitty-gritty, they can just be like, well, yeah, those numbers look good, that line's going up, great. But for your direct contacts and the ones that, you know, are more invested in the everyday, then you would need to provide more context as to, you know, what has influenced that and what's the next step and so on.

Gemma Flinders, the digital lead at Brave Bison. In our last couple of minutes, if there's one key takeaway that you would like to leave anyone watching today's PR episodes brought to everyone by Prowly, what would it be? What would you like to share with people as the kind of the rallying cry, the takeaway from today?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, use AI to be better, not to be lazy, and to always be transparent. So do not use AI and think, you know, oh, I'm gonna get away with being secret and I'm just gonna be playing a game while, you know, I've said that it's gonna take me 2 days to write this content. I've actually just chucked it in there. don't do that because eventually you will get found out and it'll be horrible. And we don't want anyone to not trust our industry, and we, we want to be a positive industry. There's a lot of really, like, bright minds in this industry, and I just don't think that we need to, to be like that. We don't need to be lazy, but we can be using it and utilizing it as something that will make our jobs, like, Not easier, but it'll make our work better.

Gemma, that's wonderful. And, you know, I'm reminded of when the internet came in. Again, maybe dating myself a little bit, you know, I started my agency in '95 in Singapore and we just had— yeah, wow, right? We had, we had, we sent originally press releases by letters, uh, and then the internet came in and clients said Oh, just send print. I don't want to see anything by text or by fax. And then the internet came and then people had to start to build websites and they had to start to build email. And then journalists were a bit wary about it. And then it was video and then it was text messaging. AI is another transformative moment for all industries. But PR agencies really adapted and grew into that technology change with the internet and multimedia.

Well, they, they are now. And I think that obviously, as I said, I started off in link building and, you know, that, that was SEO and now it's kind of like PR and SEO met. And now we have digital PR, which kind of meets the needs of the SEO KPIs and those kinds of goals. but then also, you know, has developed PRs into being more digital, to be more tech-friendly.

Yeah, and I think, and I think if anything, it makes us even more valuable as PR practitioners and agencies, because for the client to keep up with this is so hard, and we're in it and we're delivering and innovating as you are over there at Brave Bison. Gemma, if people want to find out about you, how can they contact you and follow up with your great Great work and initiatives on this?

Oh, I can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter mainly in a professional capacity, sometimes professional on Twitter, um, and obviously, you know, with hair like this I'm easy to spot as well, so I have people who have like run up to me as well because they're like confident that they know my hair. So yeah, um, but obviously not to sound gross or cliché, but you can DM me, message me anytime if you want to chat, and I'm Obviously, I'm even happy to have like calls if you want to discuss things further. I'm happy to share.

Gemma Flinders, I'm sure that people will want to both see you because of your amazing hair, uh, and it's, it's beautiful. Um, I'm gonna resist any urge to say I'm, I'm jealous of what you've got there. Um, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the PR episodes brought to everyone by Proudly. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about AI today.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

It's been our pleasure. So we've been listening to Gemma Flinders, Digital Lead at Brave Bison over at St. Neots here, just outside Cambridge in the UK. And if you've enjoyed this, do please leave a comment below, share it with a friend or a colleague, and join us for the next episode of PR Episodes, brought to you by Prowly. My name is Jim James. Thanks for joining us.