How this newly launched AI for PR software will empower or impoverish your PR agency.

Do you want to stop sharing your screen, Alex, just before we start?

You're right.

Yeah, that's better. Hello and welcome to this episode of PR Episodes brought to you by Prowly with me, your host, Jim James. I'm in the UK, but I'm delighted to have with me today Alexandra Kubica, who's based in Portugal. Alex, welcome.

Hello. Hello. Nice to see you. Hello, everyone.

So thanks for joining us because I've personally been associated with Prowly now for about 3 years. When I first of all met Joanna Drabant, the founder and CEO, she came on my podcast and I was really excited and impressed with what Prowly were doing then. And I've been, you know, working and watching and I've had the opportunity to see what Prowly have put together when it comes to using AI. for the PR platform. And Alex is an evangelist based at Prowly. But before that, she had her own PR consultancy. She worked in big tech in-house. So she knows what it's like to be on the inside of a big company and also delivering as a consultant to companies. And as you may know, I ran a PR firm for nearly 30 years with offices in Singapore, China, and India. So I have a little bit of experience with PR as well. But I want you to stay tuned today because AI is making huge changes for all of us in our companies, but the technology that we're going to show you today can either empower or impoverish your business. Empower because this AI tool that— an implementation that Prowly's developed is dedicated to public relations. The problem with ChatGPT and many of these other AI tools is they're just generating content, much of it frankly will be rejected by the journalists. And a study has shown actually you'll be making enemies if you send journalists information that is just kind of generic. So what Alex is gonna show us today is gonna empower you and your team to do great PR work. And I'm really excited because having spent many, many years training people and working on copy and pitches, What Prowly have done now is they've radically, radically reduced the time it's going to take, but what they've also done is improve the quality that you're going to get from your team, whether it's an agency or in-house. And your clients, if you're on an agency side, your clients are going to love this because it's so quick, and your teams are going to love this because of some of the features about how it helps you to find the right journalists. So stay tuned, we've got some videos that Alex has kindly made for us. So the format is Alex has got 5 videos just to show you a glimpse into what the tool can do now, and we're going to show those. They're 1, 1.5-minute videos, and they're going to show you some key features of the new Prowly AI PR platform. And then she and I are going to have some chats. You can leave messages, you can have questions, we've got Michaela helping us out as always. So if you've got any questions, put them in the chat. We'll have 5 to 10 minutes at the end to answer any questions that you've got. As always, the Prowly PR episodes will be available online afterwards, and the team at Prowly are always super responsive for any questions that you've got. So with that said, Alex, thanks for coming and showing us what I really believe is going to be transformative for the PR agency. Tell us what you're going to show us today.

Thank you for this amazing introduction. So everyone is testing AI, playing around with AI. Everyone is searching for the best prompts to put in ChatGPT. Maybe some of you already started to prompt something like, act as a PR specialist and write a press release about this and that. And you probably— many people were already like disappointed with the outcomes. It was like super generic, full of jargon, buzzwords, and everything. Um, I, I, I was working in Prowly and helping the product team to, to train our AI to be to be just, uh, your peer buddy, your assistant that is working in the background, and it helps you exactly where you have the biggest blocks, um, blank page syndrome, and so on and so on. So it's, it's working in the background step by step, uh, with you. I would actually like to switch to me because I want to show you from, uh, peer professional perspective, and I have to write a press release about this amazing, groundbreaking, exciting new line of breakfast products. And here I am, um, with a blank page, and I'd like to show you how you can first fight the procrastination and create not only like something, but something really full of facts figures and interesting for the journalists in the end, right?

Let's do that, Alex. And I think while you just tie up or tee up the video, if you're going to share screen now, aren't you? So if you can do that. And, you know, in the past we used to have people researching for a press release and we still do. And now the AI is helping and saving so much time at that stage of the research. So, Alex, let's see your first video, which is really around starting to brief the engine, right? And you talk about the prompts in ChatGPT. By using the Prowly platform, we're not trying to guess at what prompts will deliver us a great response. So let's see your first video.

Yeah, here I am starting with selecting the type of the press release. So we are launching this new line of breakfast. Products, organic, healthy, and non-GMO, and amazing. And I have a bunch of marketing materials. I have some brief from, from product and marketing. And usually that's the first step. I have to filter out and find the most newsworthy parts, skip the jargon, skip any, um, buzzwords, and just, uh, put the most important, uh, things there. So First, I'm choosing the type of the press release, then my audience. So it'll be general public and customers. Then I have 7 languages to choose from. We are launching in US. And here I am, I'm starting finally to structure all the content I have and Finding the most important points, the key points I want to include in my in my press release. The first is just about entering a new market, then about our news policy as a sustainable supply policy, and something about the tastes and more product oriented. And this is a nice moment when When I already can mark which of the key points I want to have in the quote of our CEO. So I think that he should speak about our new policy for cooperating only with local and certified farmers. And here I am. That's the first step. And now I. Did like a first briefing for the AI.

That's fantastic. We asked Alex here to do a bit of a preview for us because it makes it much quicker than doing a live demo, but you can see how quick that was. It really took less than a minute to create this, the beginnings rather, of the briefing. For the AI. Now there's a next stage, isn't there, Alex?

Yeah, that's the step. Yeah, I'm really excited about it and because it's something unique. And okay, I would start with comparing it to the experience when you send your press release and then you get questions from the journalist who is checking facts, figures, what actually has changed, like digging deeper. And this— those questions are live generated. They, they are, uh, tied to the 3 key messages and to my audience type and to my press release type, but mostly to, to the content I put in those key messages. So based on that I have questions about details like the ingredients, details about numbers, how many farmers actually, um, are working with us, the price range. Oh, here you see I'm skipping it because sometimes the questions are like too detailed. I don't want to go in that direction, so I'm skipping it. But sometimes actually the questions are opening a new direction. And I, oh, actually I could give some market overview and prediction about the growth of organic food category in US. So it will definitely increase chances for, I don't know, ending up with expert comment from my company's representative. So it's really helpful to, to First, provide more facts.

Yeah, I think, Alex, you know, traditionally in an agency, especially if you're working with young, younger staff, one ends up saying, you know, think about who, what, why, where, when, and how. And you're spending time with the staff and training them to think about the questions that would prompt the response to populate the press release. So that Prowly is doing this now based off your 3 key messages is, I think, tremendous because it means that if you're working with the team, you can really let them get on with the work. And that's gonna liberate so many senior account directors or if in a smaller agency, even the agency owner from asking what often are quite frankly repeated questions until those junior staff become more experienced. So this is really, really liberating from a time perspective and save people a lot of money.

Yeah, I totally agree. It's, it's, it's so helpful. And, and definitely I think that it will raise the quality of, of our final draft that we will soon have. After those 10 questions, we have the last step is just choosing the tone of voice. And we want to be serious and professional because it's a very important announcement of entering a new product category. And that's it. Now we are waiting for the draft to continue.

And the draft takes 2 or 3 minutes to make, doesn't it? It's extremely quick.

I think it sometimes depends. It's like up to 2 minutes, more or less. Let's say 2 minutes.

When you're When we used to take hours to write a press release and rewrite it and so on, that you're in the minutes, not the hours or the days, I think is just transformative for an agency or for a client. But certainly if you're an agency, that means you can also generate several drafts of the same press release if you want for a client to see different versions.

Exactly.

So we've got our draft, Alex, which is fantastic. Do you, what are you gonna show us next?

So, I got my draft and now I do what all we need to do is download it, just read it, edit, add my own style, add some just human touch, maybe improve the storytelling, maybe polish the quote. And then I'm sending it to my manager, to the CEO. to get the approval, right? And I finally have my final version and I upload it, upload it to Prowly again. And you can already see the names of journalists on the screen on the right side here. So based on the keywords from my press release, AI is showing me people who might be interested in my story. And sometimes the keywords might be too narrow and I want to change them. I want to like make a broader, um, search, or I want— or this is, this is like the, the first step of creating, uh, my media list. But then I can also, uh, try to test a bit different angle. Maybe I want to send something for also for the media who write about nutrition, organic food, less business and economy oriented. I also can, can, can search for journalists who were writing about local farmers in California. So that will be like perfect match to give this, this, this tweak to, to, to, to share a story about Cooperation with local farmers. So I just, I feel like this playing with keywords, it's like the most fun way to search in like 1 million contacts database. And I think it saves a lot of time. Yeah.

As you say, you've got a million contacts in Prowly, which is tremendous, but also with the matching automatically of the keywords from the press release. With the keywords that the journalists are tagged by. And then again, saving you a huge step, isn't it?

Yeah. And, and that's the keyword is like the first, uh, filter. And then you can add country, state, um, type of media and so on. Just play around. But the keywords are really time-saving.

That, yeah, that's incredible. And especially with Prowler, you can do a keyword search for the journalist. Uh, or for the article or their social media post or the outlet name, right?

So, and you can also just adding one thing, you can also search in tweets of the journalist. And if you narrow the search, the timeframe, uh, up to, I don't know, last 7 days or last 30 days, you can even play around with some newsjacking. Like someone just recently tweeted about this case and we have something interesting for you.

So it's, it's, yeah, that's gonna make you so responsive.

Exactly.

Great, Alex. So this is coming towards the end of this, uh, little module, isn't it?

Yeah. Right here we have press release. We have, uh, let's say 3 media, uh, lists for local media, for business media, and some food-oriented. And then we need to send out our press release, right? And there's another blank page waiting for us. It is the email we, we need to write to.

And I think, I think just to dive in there, what's beautiful about the Prowly implementation is that you're not left alone with a blank page. You know, you, if you run an agency, excuse me, uh, and you're training people or you're working from home and you've got a blank page, it could be really hard to know what to do with that. But I love the way that Prowly at each point is prompting you. It's not replacing you. Uh, it's not giving you also everything that you have to use. It's saying, hey, Let's get you started. And that's gonna just give people just the energy and the momentum that they need to get going. So what are you gonna show us on this video, Alex?

Yeah, just as you said, the PR people are super creative and they don't need replacement. They're amazing storytellers. It's like their DNA. They just need impulse and some help And that's it. So that was our idea behind it. You don't have like already— okay, so you have first, you have to choose the press release and AI is reading the press release and creating a draft of the email. And as you see, you have bullet points. That's just one of the suggestions I want to also implement in the product, like education in the background. Use bullet points in the emails. Journalists love it. Everyone loves it, but journalists, they love it the most, I guess.

And this is a game changer because people before were just sort of cutting and pasting sentences. So it's kind of duplicating the press release. But this auto-summary, where for the journalists that's maybe looking at this on their mobile phone, for example, or on a tablet, they're going to get really nicely formatted and concise bullet points that they could even use as the header part of a story, or they often have to pitch the story to their own editors as well, right? So this gives them what they need to do their job more efficiently.

Exactly. And it's also, um, you can play around. You have features like make longer, make short, make shorter, try again. I strongly recommend it. I love to play around with it. It's always like kind of a lottery, and then I get some, some, some better and better version each time. And this is also, look, we have, as usual, we have one press release, then we have 3 target groups. 3 types of media we want to target. And here I can just remove, remove some bullet points. Okay, I will skip the part about flavors and prices and packaging, and I will leave parts about growing markets and transparency, for example. So it's, it's helpful. I won't lose any important message. I, I'm still It's very like natural way of working, of polishing and polishing your perfect media pitch.

So I love that. And so for me, the takeaway from that slide there, what you're doing at the end is that you're still in control, right? That it's not some kind of an AI escalator that just you get on and you get taken along and you get off. And that'll enable the consultant to differentiate themselves as well from, you know, other agencies or other consultants. We've got to keep that human touch.

Definitely.

This is really helping us to do that, but saving us some of the traditional writing. And for those people that may be not native English language speakers, or maybe because also this works in multiple languages, doesn't it? Um, you know, it'll help people who maybe have got different language skill sets. to draft materials as well. Perfect, Alex. This is exciting. I can really see how this is going to change. And Patrick Wojcicki saying it looks great. Thank you, Patrick. I think it's great too. Right.

Thank you, Alex.

We haven't got too long and there's so many exciting things to see. I think we've got one more.

The final touch. So we are— what we want to have, we dream about those 40-50% of open rates, right? Only. And so what we do to increase the open rates, first we use the AI suggestions to narrow the media contacts, then we polish our target, we narrow our targeting even better. And then that's the last step and also a lot of struggle. When In the end, you have to be super creative and come up with a catchy subject line. This is, um, okay, okay, we've been doing it for years and it's, it's, that's just our, one of our tasks. But it's nice to have a friend, a creative friend that's just giving you like 5, 6 ideas. And how about we put put this and that, like some big catchy numbers in the subject line. And okay, I love the idea. I, I'll just make it a little bit shorter. And then we have the second thing, which the second hook. And I, I don't know how many people, I would say the majority of people who are sending emails to journalists, they, they overlook this part. This is the preview text, and this is something that journalists also see in their inboxes, right? Why, why we are just leaving it to be just random, random words there? We, we are also helping you to put some extra, um, info, maybe mention of the brand, maybe some interesting keywords like local, eco-friendly anything what you, you think that could grab the attention of, of the journalists. So we are not saying that those, uh, we, we will write you the, the most catchy subject line that will give you 50% open rate. No, no, no, we are not there yet. And I think we'll never be, because in the end you decide, you have the feeling, you You are the storyteller and, and you, you're choosing the, the final, the final version. And of course you can test a few of them. You can personalize it even more. It's up to you, but you have this nice help in the back, the creative guy with coming up with many ideas.

Alex, this is more than just a bit of help. I mean, this is A massive, massive support. What I love about the implementation by Prowly on this is that it's at each of the critical stages in the production chain. I call it the production chain, you know, the process. And I think that's a credit to the team and obviously your involvement, because with your background, I can really see how it's been built in the same way that people create and polish and distribute a press release. So that's fantastic, Alex. I have to ask you, unless we've got any questions from anyone that's watching, do we have any questions? We've got 5 minutes left, and if you do, put them in the chat, please. Whilst we wait, Alex, just tell us a little bit about security, just because at the very beginning you're putting content about the company into Prowly. Just help us out. Is it that that content goes out as well into the, into the ether and into other people's ChatGPT, or is it within a walled garden? Just take us through the security side, can you?

So everything, uh, yeah, people are putting here, key messages, some product features. We are not using it for training our algorithms, making our platform better. No, we don't, we don't do that. It's, uh, it's a matter of privacy and the terms and conditions that also relate to using any OpenAI, um, algorithms. It's just exactly the same, uh, this is the same, uh, safety there.

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's very, very reassuring, isn't it, that actually what you're putting in there is staying within the Prowling, within the organization. On a practical level, often a press release is written by one person and there'll be another, maybe a senior consultant or account director involved. In my agency, we'd have 2 to 3 people looking at each release before it went to a client. Can you just tell us a little bit about the approvals process and how other people can engage on the same piece of content?

Well, it's up to you and your workflow setup. If you edit and you work on it in Google Docs, on Word, Office, depending on what your company policy is, and then the final version you upload into Prowly and then work on finding the contacts, drafting the email and the subject line. So that's the usual way of working.

Okay, that's great. I think Prowly as well has got, you know, team settings, hasn't it, as well? So you can have one account, multiple users could then be, for example, taking a press release that's been written for a client, you know, maybe a month ago, using that as a basis for the next press release with some key messages, for example, or maybe some pull quotes that were particularly well received the first time around. Alex, I know there are some more features coming down the line and we didn't want to overwhelm everybody today. So is there something you could just tease, give us a little bit of an idea of Anything else that you've got that when people go to the Prowly website, they can start to get an inkling of how else this can help them?

Oh, I definitely want— can, can tell you already that we will have social media monitoring coming soon to, to, to Prowly, which many of our users already requested because they just want to have everything in one platform. So the same way we implemented AI, so you don't need anymore to use few tools for like checking the, making, editing the content or finding contacts. It's everything in one platform. And the same, that was the idea also with adding social media monitoring to Prowly, which is which is coming soon.

Alexandra Kubicka, if people want to find you, they may probably want to go to Portugal. I know I would love to come to Portugal, but until they can get to Portugal, how can they find out about Prowly? Do you have a place that people can go?

I think that we have this website that is guiding through our AI features. Do we have the link somewhere? Or I can share it right now in the chat.

Yep. If you could put that on the screen, then people can see where they can go.

Okay.

Of course, it's proudly.com.

Yeah. There you are. I need to change the tab that I'm sharing.

There we are.

Here's our website. And if you want to see how it's working, just click on the video and you'll see the magic happening. And we have also some educational materials about working with, with, with AI. So yeah, we are happy, happy to help. Just, just contact us here.

Great. I think if they're looking for you specifically, they can find you on LinkedIn as well as, as, as a product specialist. And then the whole team is out there. Aleksandra Kubicka, thanks for joining us on PR Episodes today. I've seen what the Prowly team have done. I'm really, really excited. I think it's transformative. So thanks for giving us your tour and all the hard work. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you also. And I'm happy that the discussion is not about scaring people with AI and AI taking our jobs. It's usually, it's That's how it used to be, but now we are— I think that we are switching into boosting the creativity with AI and time savings, which we were supposed to calculate, but I think it's hard to measure it because it depends on so many factors. But definitely, I would say— would you agree that we can say they can save hours?

I think it can save minutes, hours, days, and it can build businesses, I think, for people. So we've used up our half an hour, Alexandra. So thank you so much, and thank you to everyone that's joined us on this webinar today. There will be this recorded, and so you can watch it again. Do share it with friends, share it with your teammates, because I'm sure you haven't been able to get everybody on that would like to see this. And PR Episodes. Uh, we will be back again next week with another episode and really working on how we can help you in the industry, our friends in the community, to really make the most of using technology to get you and your clients noticed. So thank you for joining me, Jim James, today on the PR Episodes.

Thank you.