Can You Really Get Media Coverage Without a PR Firm? with Shanté Micah & Josh Moody

Shanté Micah (00:01.766)
Hi, we’re Good News. My name is Shanté and I am the co-founder of Good News along with my partner Josh Moody. And I have about two decades worth of experience in PR and all things brand marketing. And I’m excited to be part of the podcast today with Karn.

Josh Moody (00:18.855)
Hey, and I’m Josh, the other half of Good News. I come from the marketing space, gone product slash engineering. So happy to be here.

Karin Conroy (00:30.52)
Thank you for being here, both of you. First of all, I love the name of your company. feel like, you know, how smart to call yourself good news when you’re doing PR. It feels very well done. But I feel like PR is somewhat of a mystery for a lot of law firms. It feels a little like…

crystal ball like, I’m not quite sure what this magic is that happens, but I need the right person and then something, something happens and then bam, I’m on CNN. So I’m hoping that we will kind of maybe uncover some of those mysteries and talk a little bit more about plans and strategy and thoughts and how things have changed. The title for today’s show is, Can You Really Get Media Coverage Without a PR Firm? Which I love, I feel like this is gonna be interesting from the start.

So let’s dig into it. Let’s start with what is some of this magic and mystery behind PR?

Shanté Micah (01:33.21)
We talk about this all the time. We think that PR has a PR problem because there’s this mystique to it and there’s this glamour to it. But truth be told, it’s probably the oldest type of visibility strategy.

Karin Conroy (01:36.864)
Yes, I love that.

Shanté Micah (01:50.716)
before marketing, before SEO, before anything. people have just, they don’t know how to connect those dots. So the whole impetus of Good News was my frustration at working at this for 20 years and bringing a framework to my business partner, Josh, and saying, can we make this more accessible? Not only the idea of PR, but actually what visibility is today. The difference between visibility that creates credibility.

Karin Conroy (01:57.794)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (02:15.671)
Yeah.

Shanté Micah (02:20.654)
and trust, clout, we call it engineered omnipresence because people need that.

Karin Conroy (02:27.436)
I love that phrase. There’s so many things I want to get into. want to talk about, you put an emphasis on visibility today. I want to talk about how things have changed, but let’s first talk about what I know you guys have mentioned before in terms of whether you really do need a PR agency to get things going. So Josh, what, where do you think people should even start? Because I can tell you where my clients typically start and what they think basically PR.

agents and agencies do is write press releases. So let’s start with how that’s not the whole thing. That’s not your whole plan. And what is, where should you start?

Josh Moody (03:00.775)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (03:05.819)
Yeah, absolutely. We, I mean, we talk about this ad nauseum that we’ll talk to people that come to us. say, look, I just need to submit a press release. How do I do it? And we say, well, back up. Why do you want to submit a press release first and foremost? Let’s talk through this. and usually the answer is, well, that’s, that’s PR, right? That’s how you do it. And,

Karin Conroy (03:14.316)
Yeah, right. Yeah.

Josh Moody (03:26.727)
I would say that’s one piece, but I would say it’s a waning piece. Really, honestly, the way that Shantana I think about PR is we think about human first connections. Like everything in PR is just, hey, let’s connect with the people that are writing the stories, the journalists, the publications, and how can we connect with them on a human level? Not just a, hey, I want to send you a pitch. I’ve got something that I need. Can you give it to me? But more as a, hey, how can we?

create a system that we ongoingly connect with these different individuals and then connect on a human-to-human basis and then we’re friends, right? It’s not purely transactional, but we’re actually friends moving forward.

Karin Conroy (04:07.212)
Okay, so how do you do that? Because part of what I wrote down to talk about was a pitch process, because this is in my mind, what you do. You create like an idea or a concept that you’re trying to promote, and then you just like hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer. And I will say for this podcast, I get so many PR agencies that are representing people that are trying to appear on podcasts, and it’s so poorly done.

I want to get to, there’s so many things we’re going to talk about, but I want to get to some of the things I see that are mistakes. But if you’re not doing, or, or I guess the question is, do you do a pitch process? And if so, what does that look like?

Shanté Micah (04:48.476)
Yeah, I’ll take that one. So I absolutely want to hear about the pitches you get that just land that like they fall flat. But our whole process is based on a lot of research, like an absolute deep dive into research so that when you’re pitching, you’re demonstrating that you understand the person you’re pitching, their audience, their beat, their body of work, that they’re a human, that they have deadlines, that they have

Karin Conroy (04:54.816)
Yeah, this is so bad. Yeah.

Shanté Micah (05:15.088)
You know, there’s relevant cultural conversations. There’s things that need to matter. And so the pitching process, is a numbers game, but we probably get three to four times better response rates than the industry average because of all of the research we put into place before that. All of that data mining from the, what we call the connecting index. Other people would refer to it as a media list, but for us, we specifically call it a connecting index because we have so many more.

Karin Conroy (05:30.925)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (05:38.776)
Okay.

Shanté Micah (05:44.88)
data points. So reminding ourselves about all those connections. And then the storytelling index is applicable to, you think it’s about you and in a way it is, but really it’s all of those overlays. How can I tell stories that I know their audience will want to consume? And based on that, we just put all of those together and then the pitch is the last part.

Karin Conroy (05:45.911)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (05:50.082)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (06:05.11)
Yes, exactly.

Karin Conroy (06:12.396)
Yeah. Okay. So you still are doing pitches, but you’ve just got them much more refined and effective. Yeah. Okay. So should we, I think we should talk about like where things go wrong and mistakes people make, because I’ve got just from this podcast alone, I have lots of examples where first of all, there’s just like sloppy things where I need to know if you’re sending me an email about a potential guest,

Shanté Micah (06:18.938)
Yes.

Shanté Micah (06:26.3)
Please.

Karin Conroy (06:40.63)
I wanna know who this is and I want at least a link to something, a website or you could send a one page, I suppose, but I really would rather click on something and make my own kind of judgment. More often than not, I would say a lot, way more than 50 % of the time, there’s nothing. It’s just like their pitch of who this person is without any ability on my end to kind of click and…

like do my own research on that person. And then the other failure that I would say comes up most often to me is they have not done any of the research you’re talking about. And it’s actually like a direct competitor. I’m like, hello, no. That happened this morning. And it was a follow-up email and I’m like, no again.

Shanté Micah (07:22.287)
Hahaha

Shanté Micah (07:33.072)
Yeah, can I tell you about your craft?

Karin Conroy (07:35.316)
Yeah, right, exactly. Can I talk to your audience that you’ve spent all this time and money and you know, you’re trying to, you know, speak to and I might want to snag them from you? No.

Shanté Micah (07:47.879)
Yeah, think sending, I think a lot of people think that, I need to tell them my story. And so let me just, they end up sending like a bio and they don’t consider of all the work that you’d have to do to even connect those dots. again, Josh and I, I mean, I just handed Josh a framework that I’d been using for 20 years and I’m like, can we codify this?

Karin Conroy (07:54.348)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (08:04.267)
Yes, yeah.

Karin Conroy (08:12.396)
Nice.

Shanté Micah (08:13.038)
And so Josh was able to turn it into like, can do the research at such a depth and specificity where I can tell you your episode that you did 10 months ago. And I can pull out insights and match those into things that I would like to talk about that would be relevant to both of us, but make that case. then.

Karin Conroy (08:28.299)
Nice.

Karin Conroy (08:33.302)
Yes, nice.

Shanté Micah (08:35.552)
you get the pitch and hopefully you think, okay, they paid attention, they’ve connected some dots for me. And then of course have a signature with a link, please.

Karin Conroy (08:44.376)
something. Okay, so tell me more about this system. It sounds like you’ve got some automation behind all of this. That’s amazing, because you’re talking about making these human connections, but also having like a behind the scenes that is more automated. so how do you how do you kind of walk the balance of those two?

Josh Moody (09:06.963)
I’ve got copious thoughts on this one. No, so really to understand the way that we perceive PR, I’m gonna walk it back just a bit so that the context makes a lot of sense. And I feel like I can say this more than Shanti, because I’m not in the PR space, so I can say, PR’s broken, and we do things very differently. So instead of saying, hey, law firm X, Y, or Z, go to a PR firm.

Karin Conroy (09:09.582)
You

Karin Conroy (09:15.48)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (09:24.535)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (09:32.299)
and have them run the show and pitch your stories and all that. I feel like that is where things more than not go wrong with big retainers that they’re paying and then, well, we want to see all these results and then results take time. And then the agency may not pitch the right story that really resonates with the VIP or the execs or the founders. And so I feel like that’s where things start to go in disarray.

Really kind of our perspective of it is no, no, we want you to be doing the pitching. You know your story better than anybody. We want you to be that person again, back to that person to person connection. But we also know that these lawyers or, mean, really in, every industry founders, you don’t have a ton of time to just be managing a PR pipeline all day, every day. And you probably don’t even have the skills to do that because your skill sets in a different discipline. So for.

Karin Conroy (10:08.461)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (10:29.358)
Right. And hopefully you’re busy with all your cases that like you don’t have the time. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Moody (10:33.235)
Exactly. Yeah, right. Running your own business for sure. So the way that we look at it is when Shantay and I sat down originally, we were thinking, hey, well, what if we could have, you know, 1000 PR professionals that could do all this research and go really deep in the weeds and pull back all this research, summarize it so that an individual could review, understand what are those cultural conversations understand kind of

Shanté Micah (10:34.05)
Running your business. Yeah.

Josh Moody (11:01.777)
what’s going on in the world, right? In my industry specifically, but then go a step further and say, okay, now how can we tell my story that meshes perfectly with those conversations that are natively happening, right? So that’s where we start to lean into kind of these more cutting edge technologies of, hey, I mean, doing this at scale would be incredibly cost prohibitive for even the best PR agencies all the way to the best law firms.

so leveraging AI instead of saying, Hey, we’re going to create, you know, one-shot blog posts, one-shot pitches, which you see, and you get all the time, which kind of more Solis the SEO industry. Yeah, absolutely. the PR industry, just, it’s, it’s the wrong way of using AI, but if, if we could say, Hey, AI, like we want to build an AI system that can do basically how we think about internally is, an intern that

Karin Conroy (11:40.012)
Yep. And you can tell right away. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (11:49.484)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (11:57.853)
graduated from the best Ivy League school, right? Incredible potential, but doesn’t know a thing about your business. if we can shape them to say, okay, awesome, this is the task, and then we chain those AIs together, we can do this research at scale, right? And we can pull that together and then we can start pitching. Now know that’s at scale, that’s wide picture. I wanna boil it down for your listeners and get really actionable. You can start this on a much smaller scale, right? You can jump into…

Karin Conroy (12:00.204)
Yes. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (12:11.619)
right.

Josh Moody (12:26.339)
chat GBT, you can jump into notebook LM and all these other AI tools. And you can start analyzing, you know, what people are doing a quick and dirty workflow would be, Hey, I’m going to do some quick searches in my industry. I’m going to grab a handful of the top search results. And I’m going to start just copying and pasting, you know, the whole thing on that page, paste that into chat GBT, then have it summarize, Hey, what’s going on? Do that a few times. You’re going to start to get a good flow. Even if you, you have no

Karin Conroy (12:39.223)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Moody (12:54.675)
credentials as a marketer or PR professional, but you’re a lawyer and you can start to see, okay, these are the trends that are coming up time and time again. And then you can start blending it with, with your story. And that’s when the magic starts happening for pitches.

Karin Conroy (13:08.31)
Okay, so that makes total perfect sense to me. I’ve actually used the intern analogy. was laughing that you said the exact same word that I keep using where like you just let it do that low level stuff and then, know, kind of, you know, layer your own human story and all of that on top of it. But I think where my brain gets stuck is

Josh Moody (13:26.707)
you

Karin Conroy (13:32.83)
in the whole process. So we’ve got this pitch or maybe a handful of pitches based on some different topics or things going on in the firm. How do I create a process and system around that when I don’t like that’s where I feel like I would need an agency, PR agency to make it systematic, make it happen, do the consistency of the outreach. Are you saying that where does that come in?

Or are you saying that I can do that on my own in some way that also doesn’t take over my life?

Shanté Micah (14:09.274)
Well, you would hire us and we would build all of that for you. So what we’ve done is we’ve created what we call the good news blueprint. So if I’m taking on you or someone that you wanted to create an entire publicity pipeline for, our belief is, you know, if you’re going to do it, do it well and do it at scale. Otherwise, it takes a lot of time just to get going anyway. So.

Karin Conroy (14:12.374)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (14:17.229)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (14:35.372)
Yeah, it feels like the connections with finding the media, knowing how to contact them, how to reach out, all of that stuff, that seems like the tricky, you know, whatever. And that seems like the pieces where you guys have had years and years of experience and you know these people and you have those human connections.

Shanté Micah (14:54.468)
Yeah. So you understand that there’s so many steps before you can even send a pitch. And I think that’s where people either the, the unknowingly, you know, they send the bio thinking that’s enough just as a connection point. Right. And most journalists even podcasts host, they’re receiving a hundred to 300 pitches in a given week, sometimes in a given day. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (14:58.926)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (15:06.156)
Yeah, done.

Karin Conroy (15:13.836)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get tons. And many of them, it’s not even sort of like in the same topic area. So like, they’re just somehow spamming, like they’ve got some lists somewhere and they don’t care. They’re just sending out, you know, a mass. So you were talking about how the PR industry has this PR program, but I’ve also seen the recent posts that you had from Rand Fishkin about

PR is the future of marketing. where, it’s broken, but it’s the future. Where does it all come together? Where the good stuff is? I mean, cause obviously there’s things that are just not going well. There’s a lot of garbage and spam and people doing things in a really messy, wrong way. But where’s the good stuff that is the stuff he’s talking about? That’s the future of marketing.

Shanté Micah (16:09.382)
Yeah, I’ll talk on that, but I think Josh has an immense background on this. So Rand Fishkin, he is the former founder of Moz. He moved on, he started a company called SparkToro, which all it is is about like insights when it comes to like relevant cultural conversations. If you want to know where your audience is, then go check out SparkToro. But when he says PR is the future of marketing, what he’s talking about are things like attribution have changed.

you know, Josh would go into the whole devaluation of even indexing of SEO value. But how people are sharing is what we call dark social. So it’s not attributable. It’s things like text message, Slack. I mean, think of how you share a piece of information. It’s not, you know, sharing it exactly. So it’s places where, and it could be privatized, it could be groups, any number of places, but…

Karin Conroy (16:58.239)
on social. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (17:05.098)
Mm-hmm. You could be standing next to a person and hold up your phone and show them a thing. Like it could be, yeah. Yeah, right, know. Did you see this? Yeah.

Shanté Micah (17:09.66)
I mean, if it has to do with puppies or cats, then obviously, yeah. So cultural conversations are happening in places where, you know, you might think your content marketing is really valuable, but it’s not showing up anymore. It not in the same way ads, ad fatigue, we’re all experiencing ad fatigue. So ads aren’t performing the same way. When he says PR is the future of marketing, what he’s saying is these stories, these great storytelling stories that have third

party validation baked into it because I’m here on this podcast with you and so your audience thinks, well, Josh and Shantae might be okay because you vetted us. They assume you did your due diligence if you’re willing to share them as an audience with us. So right away, we’re getting to co-create content with you in a way that has that immense third-party validation. We get to share some of our stories, but hopefully we’re just sharing insights.

Karin Conroy (17:47.82)
Yeah. Yes.

Karin Conroy (17:52.472)
Right.

Karin Conroy (18:06.956)
Yeah. And you’re building your own reputation. You’re expanding to a different audience. So Josh, where do you see, what do you think he’s kind of referencing or where do you see that PR being the future of marketing from your side?

Josh Moody (18:21.619)
Yeah, to understand my side, you got to understand my context comes from the marketing world. I come from the SEO viral marketing content marketing world. And

Karin Conroy (18:32.514)
And that’s where a lot of lawyers start, which that’s a whole other conversation, but they think that is their entire marketing plan, strategy, budget, everything is SEO, which no, like in the same way that a press release is not the whole thing. But yeah, so that’s, Okay, so sorry to interrupt.

Josh Moody (18:37.369)
Sure.

Josh Moody (18:42.322)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Moody (18:53.811)
No, you’re great. I know that’s where a lot of people start, right? Is, hey, I just want to create some blog posts, create some content, get it out there. And I’m not shaming that. That’s totally fine. But in the past, how it would work is you would create really good content. You would do your market research, which in SEO would be called keyword research. And you would see what people are searching so that you could publish your blog post with the right titles and the right content so you’re answering the question. But then where that authority and credibility would come from was from Google.

Karin Conroy (18:57.548)
Yeah. Yep.

Josh Moody (19:22.781)
You know, people would search you and they would see you and be like, Hey, Google must think these, these guys are credible. I’m going to click them. and to Shantae’s point, that could be ad-based as well. But now we’ve got a lot of fancy new things within Google search, right? We’ve got the AI overviews section. We’ve got featured snippets. We’ve got a million different things and it’s only going to continue to change. And then we have people leaving Google to go to search GPT and kind of all these other AI based perplexity.

other places in order to get their top of funnel information, right? Their initial touch point. So when Rand and others say, you know, PR is the future, I think it comes down to, hey, how do we get exposure and how do we align ourselves with that credibility at the same time, right? Which formerly was done via Google, via search, by other forms of, you could classify them as word of mouth.

and right now I think that, you know, we’re moving into this world in which everybody can create content at scale with AI. So the barrier to entry dramatically has dropped. and that’s okay because we can then leverage AI to instead do the busy work. AI can do the busy work and we can focus on the fun things, which is human to human connection and chatting about these things. So that’s where I think things are going. And as we do so, we create content like this. gets published.

And then we start to elevate our credibility. I mean, all of us, and we kind of go in that trajectory of, hey, now we’re getting the credibility. We’re getting the top of funnel exposure. You we can repurpose on all the different social channels and, you know, we’re good to go.

Karin Conroy (20:51.565)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (20:58.861)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (21:04.471)
So when you mentioned credibility, I’m thinking about there was a pretty big shift, I don’t know how many years ago, but in the legal industry, it was maybe five or six years ago. I think the rest of the world, it was way before that where strategy became a major element of where you started. Way back when I first started doing websites, it was like, here’s a brochure, literally, I’m gonna hand you or mail you a physical brochure, make this into a website. There was no thought or strategy.

But this idea of credibility, I think is the next kind of elevated level. And my first thought of what people are hearing is that sounds hard. I just want the easy answer. And so then they’re just going to lean back on SEO. And my second thought was when you’re talking about SEO, the difference to me in SEO results that we’re seeing is something along the lines of

traditional SEO kind of organic results versus something like a knowledge panel where I think a lot of my listeners don’t know what that is. And that is you’ve probably seen if you search for somebody who is considered a thought leader, I have one so you can search for my name, but, and you’ll see it looks different in your search results. It kind of stands out separately. It pulls from a bunch of different sources and it…

Google makes the decision on whether you get a knowledge panel or not. And it’s this whole process. we have an episode on that. But that is where I think things are going. This idea of having this credibility through something like a knowledge panel, as opposed to pay-per-click ads that you’re just sort of throwing $5 at and thinking you’re going to get sort of cheap, quick, easy results. Yeah.

Shanté Micah (22:55.067)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (22:55.387)
Yeah, 100%. If I could speak to this real quick, Shantay. Fully agree. I believe it’s going in that direction of entities. And this comes down to the technical layer of the structured data behind entities, and we won’t get into the weeds there. But we could. We could. Well, I fully agree. And I think that we saw this. This is going be a deep cut from professional to professional. But I remember.

Karin Conroy (22:58.198)
Yeah, please. Yeah, no, I love this.

Shanté Micah (22:59.708)
I’m like, go, go.

Karin Conroy (23:05.943)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (23:10.794)
No, we could.

Karin Conroy (23:17.974)
I love it. Let’s do it.

Josh Moody (23:20.631)
It was like nine or 10 years ago, Google started playing around with authorship and you could actually tag your bylines differently for authorship sake. And I think that was their first attempt at getting to where we’re getting now, which is, Hey, let’s see if we can classify all of the works by this entity, whether it’s a person, whether it’s a brand and let’s attribute it so that we don’t have to rely on links as much. Right? We can rely on this, this score that’s kind of more proprietary to Google, which gives them a moat above and beyond everybody else.

Karin Conroy (23:31.918)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (23:41.953)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (23:49.166)
And it also separates the game players too. which game players in my book are these SEO people who are just trying to weasel their way through and do sort of a false layer of credibility. And they’re starting out, know, I’m a brand new, I’ve just graduated from law school last week and I’m trying to compete with these guys who have been around for 30 years. And so the only way I can do that is SEO and buying.

Josh Moody (23:49.752)
And so I fully agree. Yep.

Shanté Micah (24:11.47)
Karin Conroy (24:15.15)
keywords and all that stuff, but on some layer, Google’s trying to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, let’s pull back and let’s give those guys who have been around for 30 years a different kind of platform or layer or whatever you want to say. Okay, so how, I don’t know if this is a good transition or whatever, but how do you figure out where the real value is in terms of where to show up? So you were talking about this, how the measurement of social is,

gone because it’s all dark. But showing up on podcasts like this versus like a New York Times byline or whatever, how do you figure out where the value is and how to measure all that stuff and what you should be going for?

Shanté Micah (25:02.716)
I mean, we talk about this because we’re always testing podcasts. love podcasts. Josh and I are huge fans of podcasts because yeah, I imagine because imagine, you do one conversation and you have upwards of 30, sometimes over an hour of content that can be turned into snippets. All of it ranks really well if you’re talking about SEO value. And then if you talk about, you know, atomization and amplifying, like you have content.

Karin Conroy (25:09.11)
Me too.

Shanté Micah (25:32.698)
that was created that’s better, Lightyear’s better, above anything else that you can create yourself immediately. So we prioritize podcasts very highly. And in fact,

Karin Conroy (25:38.146)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (25:43.48)
That’s amazing to hear. So over like typical media exposure.

Shanté Micah (25:48.72)
I mean, we like to say that’s where you should start. And I would say for some people, it could be 80 % of what you do. And you would do the thing really well, because that’s how people like to consume these types of content. It could be served up in so many different ways. And it can look like you look like you’re everywhere, even if you’ve only been on a handful of podcasts, right?

Karin Conroy (25:56.738)
Wow. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (26:09.954)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Shanté Micah (26:13.548)
So we prioritize podcasts very highly, but what we recommend is that omnipresence is you start to then serve up things like contributing author ships. thing with top national media is you need something to leverage before you start pitching. So all of it is with the game plan of eventually, you’ll start pitching top national, or they’re going to start reaching out to you because you’re showing up everywhere. They’re like,

Karin Conroy (26:28.141)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (26:38.656)
Yeah. Nice.

Shanté Micah (26:42.03)
We have a go-to media expert. We need to talk to them. So we have all their categories. We weight them differently. We also weight things like podcasts differently. So we know inevitably we’ll be asked, well, how do I get on Joe Rogan? And the answer is usually, well, they come to you.

Karin Conroy (26:57.878)
Yeah. Why? Yeah. Well, and also like, why do you want to do that? Like, does that relate to anything or is it just sort of like an ego thing? Yeah.

Shanté Micah (27:04.995)
Right, right, that is a question.

Little a little bit, but that like that tells you people think our visibility is just it needs to have the biggest audience. No, you need a niche specific audience. And then what you do with that, how you amplify that with the podcast host with their audience, how you turn that into the flywheels and start to be part of that community. And again, those conversations like those relevant cultural conversations, that’s that’s what we value. So to your point,

Karin Conroy (27:18.954)
No. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (27:38.062)
So you talked about this engineered omnipresence. Sorry, did you have something? Okay, yeah.

Shanté Micah (27:40.764)
Yeah, no, to that point, actually, engineered omnipresent, you talk about SEO and you can do link building. That’s very transactional. Essentially what we’re doing is link building.

Karin Conroy (27:49.334)
Yeah, right.

Shanté Micah (27:54.086)
but it’s that human first, like you and I are, there’ll be links. Like there’ll be links to what we create. Yeah, and they’ll rank and they’ll do really well. So the engineered omnipresence is being able to be across all media categories in a systemized way. So you understand what milestones you want to hit for your own goals. And then how to do that methodically so that you’re using everything. Like you’re able to leverage the next thing for the next thing.

Karin Conroy (27:54.204)
Sure.

Karin Conroy (27:58.358)
Yeah, that’ll be part of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (28:11.779)
Okay.

Shanté Micah (28:24.724)
and then you’re able to amplify that and atomize that. So to your point in marketing, like, you know, how to atomize content, turn one piece of content into exactly, don’t know how, how big you went, but like, yeah, the sky’s the limit. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (28:34.936)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that’s the point of this podcast. And it took me a long time to organize and get it systematic. and I spent probably a year before I even started this podcast going on other podcasts to do a lot of research and figure out, I’ll be honest, for the most part, like what I don’t want to do. Like it is not, we’re not going to talk about your journey in life. We’re not going to talk about.

Shanté Micah (29:02.076)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (29:03.894)
this and we’re not going to waste time with, you know, XYZ, but also I was recently asked to be on a podcast and just their process alone, just talking about like the automation of things was so poor. was like, no, I’m, I’m out because, just that alone, it’s the same as within your law firm where if you give a bad first impression in your process, your intake, your, all of that,

It’s very off-putting and all of a sudden, for no reason, you have kind of pushed people into the less likely to be loyal category. And all it would have taken is a great system and follow-up and process and some thought into all of that stuff. So this idea of looking at your whole PR system and creating like a process and a strategy and a thought around all of that.

makes so much more sense. Because I do think, and what I see in a lot of these poorly done pitches is it just seems like a crap shoot. Like they’re just kind of like they’ve got a gun full of bullets and they’re just shooting all over the place. And it’s like, let’s see what hits.

Shanté Micah (30:13.796)
Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but if you’re going to do a lot of work, might as well be the right work.

Karin Conroy (30:18.978)
Yeah, like let’s spend some time to figure out, figure this out first and then do it.

Shanté Micah (30:22.876)
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So Josh has done an fabulous job of just like codified that in a way that everything before the pitch, we know what we need to do. And then after the pitch.

Josh Moody (30:24.475)
And honestly,

Karin Conroy (30:31.638)
Yeah. yes. Yeah. The process, the follow up, the making sure that, you know, the links get out and the sharing happens and yeah. What were you going to say, Josh?

Josh Moody (30:33.587)
Totally.

Shanté Micah (30:43.077)
Yes. Yeah.

Josh Moody (30:43.259)
Yep, totally. I think that a lot of, so like speaking to metrics, a lot of people get lost. They get lost in the sauce of the metrics and they say, hey, especially if you’re not coming from a marketing or PR background, you’re to say, okay, do I look at it? Do I look at impressions? Do I look at clicks? Do I look at, and then even there, do I look at sessions or look at visitor? Like it just gets really convoluted, right? What I would say is go on iTunes.

Karin Conroy (30:51.469)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (31:03.66)
It’s overwhelming. Yeah.

Josh Moody (31:12.359)
Find a list of podcasts, right? There’s gonna be a lot that are out of your league. Know that, even if you’re a pretty big law firm, you’ve not done this yet, that’s fine. Compile a list of some kind of huge podcasts, some what you would classify as medium, and then some that you would classify as more kind of emerging podcasts. And those metrics, they can be tailored to you, they can be arbitrary, right? There’s not like a perfect score. But gather a handful of those.

Shanté Micah (31:19.9)
you

Josh Moody (31:38.301)
And then start doing some research into them, start listening to a few, a few podcasts, start seeing who they are as people and then start pitching. So from a metric standpoint, transfer it over to just, can I land some, some shows? So you’ll send some pitches and then do those turn into media appearances. So just make it, make it really kind of silly, simple. And what we see is when people start doing that and they get that first podcast, they’re on fire.

Karin Conroy (32:00.587)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (32:07.655)
They’re excited because it feels different. It feels so different from, I’m going to just publish a blog post. And it’s kind of like low stakes. I put all this energy into it. And for some people, it might feel like I stakes. Sure. I mean, we’ve all been there. But when you then go and you tell your story and the podcast host is resonating with and you’re resonating with it, there’s this energy that just picks you to another level. And then you want to do more and you want to do more. And then you want to see like who’s watching, how many people are watching. And it just kind of builds and builds and builds.

Karin Conroy (32:07.724)
Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (32:27.928)
Yep. Yeah. Right.

Josh Moody (32:37.435)
So when we when we’re coaching people, we talk about the initial metrics. What does it take to get on your first show? Because once you get there, you’re going to be hooked.

Karin Conroy (32:47.286)
Yes, I think that’s so true. And there’s like such a growth process with it too. Like, let’s just be honest, your first show is not gonna be the best. Like you are gonna learn a lot over time. yeah, well, true.

Josh Moody (32:56.092)
No.

Shanté Micah (32:56.892)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (32:59.451)
About your story too. I told that weird like I need to shift and maybe tell a little bit better. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, 100 %

Karin Conroy (33:04.47)
Yeah, and this part I can leave out because that was weird. Yeah, yeah. But over time, you figure out like which parts people connect to and resonate and what’s good. And also, there is sort of this dynamic when you’re having that conversation. And when you the first few times, like you’re saying, you’re so excited that you’re just all over the place and you’re sort of like, you know, a toddler who, you know, doesn’t know how to stop talking. It’s weird.

Shanté Micah (33:04.591)
Yeah.

Thank

Josh Moody (33:32.53)
Yeah, totally.

Shanté Micah (33:33.02)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (33:33.31)
so like give yourself that grace that like, some point it’ll be better. You’ll figure this out and just try to make it through. It’ll be good. And then you’ll, you’ll find the right ones and it’ll get better. And, you know, it, it’s just the whole process of. Also, if you have been doing this, you know, being a lawyer for more than let’s say a year, you have things to talk about. You have things that you can like solidly answer and resonate and kind of.

Shanté Micah (33:41.573)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (34:03.308)
speak to at a somewhat expert level or maybe an expert level. Like let that be your comfort zone too. And let that be where like, okay, I know what I’m talking about here. This part is not weird or uncomfortable. And I can speak solidly and interestingly about this. Okay, so it is time for the book review section. We have a whole section on the website where we have a library of the books that all of our guests have recommended.

called The Thought Leaders Library, which works perfectly for you guys. And I actually wanted to come back to the thought leaders part after we do the book review. so what is the book that you guys wanted to recommend for the audience today?

Shanté Micah (34:44.22)
I’ll go first. So the book that I read at least once a year, and I always come back to as just a good reminder, you know, in my world, I work with just people, like I’m people-ing all the time. So the book that I read is by Robert Greene. It’s The Laws of Human Nature. And he has other books like the, I think it’s like The Laws of Power.

Karin Conroy (34:56.654)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (35:06.542)
48 Immunable Laws of Power or something. We read that in business school.

Shanté Micah (35:09.868)
Right. And huh. And there you go. Yeah. so that’s a good one. Also seduction, which great, great. Learn those for sure. But if you understand human nature, I think that’s where it’s just a good reminder to everything we’re doing. If we’re trying to market, if we’re trying to pitch, you’re pitching to another human. Remember.

Karin Conroy (35:30.636)
Yeah, well, it comes back to play with every part of every marketing piece that we ever do. When we’re talking about strategy, we’re talking about the psychology of how people make decisions, but it’s still like humans. How does this human person think and make decisions and communicate and all of that stuff? And we’ve had this conversation about AI over and over.

This is what’s gonna differentiate us going forward. Is this human? We’re human!

Shanté Micah (35:58.072)
It will. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times people ask what’s one goal of a pitch and it’s to make a stranger care. If you know how to do that, which understanding human nature, understanding their immediate objections and you’re not trying to get past those, you’re trying to relieve those. So.

Karin Conroy (36:06.328)
I love that. That’s awesome.

Karin Conroy (36:18.562)
That’s so important. And I talk a lot about the frequently asked questions part of a website, which is so important once again, also for SEO and all that, but you are trying to show and illustrate that you can relieve those problems and you, you have the answers and they may or may not read them, but here’s your questions and I got you. And like, I’ve got those answers, whether you dig through all of this, you know, stuff I wrote here or not, but I do have these answers and I, and I know how to.

to help.

Shanté Micah (36:49.84)
Yeah, make it pithy, make it powerful. I think my pitch to you is 200 words. Because who has time? I imagine you don’t have time for, and I don’t need to tell you everything about what I’m thinking, but.

Karin Conroy (36:55.266)
Yeah, I’m sure it was very… Yeah. No.

Karin Conroy (37:04.013)
Please don’t. When we’re not recording. Josh, did you have a book that you wanted to recommend?

Shanté Micah (37:07.428)
Later, later, we’ll…

Right?

Josh Moody (37:13.703)
I do. So my book comes more from, again, the marketing world. I love Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. It is a dense read, but I would make the argument that if anybody wanted to learn, if they read one book about marketing and wanted to learn everything that would make an impact, it would be Breakthrough Advertising. It’s a deep cut. So Eugene Schwartz wrote it…

Karin Conroy (37:21.878)
Ooh!

Karin Conroy (37:34.668)
And what is he talking about? Because I haven’t heard of this one.

Josh Moody (37:41.659)
I mean, it’s very old, many, years ago. It’s kind of hard to get.

Shanté Micah (37:43.396)
Is it? You can’t even get it on Amazon, right? Like I had to go… I had to go on eBay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (37:43.416)
Good. that’s like go into a dusty back room of basement somewhere.

Josh Moody (37:51.025)
Well, it’s so good. So Schwartz talks about copywriting a lot. so within that copywriting, he talks about humans. This is going to be the trending theme, you know, obviously from Shantana is he talks about humans and what are the forces that humans act on in order to make a purchase in order to be interested about a product. He talks about the marketing funnel, which I mean, a lot of lot of marketers that start in digital, they start with

Karin Conroy (37:56.055)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (38:01.047)
Yeah.

Josh Moody (38:18.543)
SEO tactics, they start with content tactics. They don’t necessarily break it all the way back to, what does the funnel look like? And it’s like, Hey, at the very top point, you know, you’ve got problem aware, not solution aware. And then they go down to solution and kind of down the list. So he kind of pioneered a lot of that framework. So if you read one book, it’s, it’s a pithy one, but it’s good.

Karin Conroy (38:24.054)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (38:27.938)
Yeah, right.

Karin Conroy (38:34.286)
That sounds awesome!

that sounds awesome. We’ll link to both of those. And if you are thinking about the marketing funnel, all last year, all of my episodes were going through the funnel one episode at a time. And then we went back through the funnel in the second half of the year, just in case, just as a little refresher. But I live and breathe the marketing funnel. I think that is one of the nicest visuals in terms of just thinking about marketing, but also

It’s not as simple as it looks. Once you start digging into it and thinking about like what goes where, it’s not just one answer for, you know, like email marketing goes there. No, it’s, much more complicated than that. So it looks kind of straightforward, but you know, like everything it’s, it’s more difficult than it seems. So, that sounds great. I have not heard of that, a breakthrough advertising, but we’ll link to that on the show notes and on the show page and the library, all that good stuff.

So what’s a big takeaway that you would like? Because we’ve covered a lot. What’s a big takeaway that you would like people to get from this episode? We started with, can you really get coverage without a PR firm? And kind of how to do that research and all of that. But then talked a lot about being human and, you know, there’s a lot here. But what would you, what’s the one thing you’d like people to?

think about after they stop listening to this episode.

Shanté Micah (40:04.636)
I would like people to jump in where they’re at. We have created a turnkey solution because again, a big download of PR and even managing a PR partner takes a lot of time, a lot of bandwidth. It usually takes them two or three months to onboard with you. We’ve codified it down to a three week.

Karin Conroy (40:25.135)
amazing.

Shanté Micah (40:25.532)
process and then we made it turnkey. You benefit from everything that we’re testing and learning and, but you own it. Like there’s no gatekeeper. I think that’s the takeaway is that if you’re going to do it, own it, you know, so that you own those relationships. Otherwise, once you break with a PR agency, you’re at square one again. And.

Karin Conroy (40:48.214)
Yeah. Yeah. And you’re kind of like backed into a corner with that. If, yeah.

Shanté Micah (40:54.2)
Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of people have been burned when it comes to PRs. They don’t know enough going in to understand the scope. And then it’s this weird, like what are the milestones? So that’s what we’ve attempted to do with everything we’ve done. It’s the frustrations I had as a PR professional trying to navigate it. So start now. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (41:13.698)
Yeah, yeah. And that’s where we started with this whole mystery. it’s like, part of that is like these secrets of how it all works and what the relationships are and how to even do any of that. And I love that you guys are kind of cracking that open and saying, like, it doesn’t need to be like that. And going into the future, it shouldn’t. And it just seems like the people who are holding onto that are stuck in the past.

Shanté Micah (41:38.748)
Yeah, and so it is a wide, pretty wide open playing field right now. Like if you want to get in, get in, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (41:42.786)
Yeah, that’s awesome.

It’s time. Josh, what’s the one thing you’d like people to take away from the episode?

Josh Moody (41:51.933)
I would say.

look, you can do it as long as you get out of your own way, right? It’s gonna be uncomfortable. Know that. But after you get that first, you know, first handful of pitches out, you’re gonna get feedback. You’re gonna see what people are saying, if it’s resonating with them, if it’s not. If it’s not, great, pivot your message a little bit and keep pivoting until you start to get some hits. And then you move to the next, you you start booking podcasts and you’re telling your story, just like you were saying, Karin. I love that. And I would say that’s my main takeaway is look, you can absolutely

Karin Conroy (41:57.037)
Yes.

Josh Moody (42:22.837)
There are tools out there. can have ChatGBT assist in crafting that. And then just learn, iterate, and continue to move on if you’re doing it on your own to promote your own law firm and your own story.

Karin Conroy (42:34.318)
Totally. Amazing. Shantay Micah and Josh Moody are the co-founders of Good News, one of the best PR names for a company I’ve heard of. Thank you so much. This was like chock full of awesome little tidbits and helpful tips. And I think it’s like this fresh breath of where PR has the potential to go. And it does feel kind of, when I think about it, it feels sort of stuck in the mud.

Shanté Micah (42:44.976)
Thank you.

Karin Conroy (43:02.848)
with people doing things a lot of the wrong ways and just thinking that press releases are it, that’s you do. So it’s so interesting to hear all this kind of different perspectives. So thank you so much for being here.

Shanté Micah (43:17.478)
Thank you.

Josh Moody (43:18.237)
Thanks for having us, Karen.