Distinctive Discoverability: Search Rules the Reputation Roost - with Rob Jekielek - The Trending Communicator

Episode Transcript
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Daniel Nestle (00:00):
Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. I'm going to bring up my word of the year again. I know many of you have heard this too many times. Maybe it's my word of the past few years. Fractured, maybe fracturing. As in the fractured media landscape, the fractured audience landscape, our fractured ability to exert influence. Look, I keep pushing communicators and marketers to stop wasting time on those big media hits or dumping money into overproducing those single channel campaigns. Because everything we need to do should be audience first earned attention has to be our goal. So it stands to reason that we should be spending a lot more time than we do seeking to understand what our audiences, our stakeholders are up to and what that means to our brands and our reputations. So it's a good thing.

(01:00):
My guest today is at the leading edge of brand and audience research. A globally recognized expert on data driven business society, technology and healthcare trends. A frequent speaker and visiting lecturer across leading organizations and institutions including Columbia Business School, USC Marshall Business School, Rotterdam School of Management, and so on and more. He has over 20 years of experience leading the development of transformational brand and reputation programs with extensive expertise building and executing enterprise level initiatives driven by cutting edge research and analytics at the intersection of audience insights, social impact and business outcomes. Regularly quoted and interviewed across leading business and industry media. Perhaps you know him from Page Society, ipre, or as the managing director of Harris Insights and Analytics, the Harris Poll. Please join me in welcoming my friend, Rob Jakilik.

Rob Jekielek (01:53):
Hey Dan. Great to be here.

Hey Rob. You know, for my listeners who are so accustomed to my smooth and flawless and silky voice and my beautiful introductions, full disclosure, when you hear this, the introduction will be very nice, but I just bumbled it like four times talking to Rob. And it's because frankly, there's just so much here on the table that we need to talk about. And me and Rob go way back. So, you know, every time I think about the incredible things that you're doing, Rob, and just that where you are in this space of data on analytics and understanding what audiences are all about and understanding how that ladders up to reputation, positioning, brand, it's sort of mind boggling. You know, you have these interactions and relationships with people on the one hand and then the body of work that is coming from that very same person.

(03:02):
I'm not saying it doesn't match up, man. I'm just saying that it makes, it humbles me to be in the presence of, like, this intellectual power that I now have across from me, well, virtually, anyway, on the screen. So I welcome you to the show, Rob, and I thank you for just giving your time and coming here to talk about such an important topic.

Thanks, Ted. I'm always grateful for the opportunity, appreciate some of the compliments, but I think it's easy. Not just myself. I think across the communication spectrum, people would very easily put most of those right back to you.

Well, thank you, sir. I mean, I'm fortunate in having been around long enough, I suppose, to know enough people. But I love having these conversations and I think it's important to bring to our listeners the work that you're doing because, you know, in this day and age of AI and of fracturing, as I said before, you know, we all don't know where to go next and what we should be doing. But there's some fundamentals, especially when it comes to, you know, when it comes to the way that we need to be looking at our stakeholders, when the way we need to be approaching the bigger pictures, the bigger picture items, that should inform strategy and that should inform the direction that we take our communications or our marketing. And, you know, that is what. How are the audiences behaving? What are they thinking?

(04:26):
And, you know, what can they tell us about, A, what we're doing right and wrong with our positioning and with our rep, you know, reputation, and B, you know, like, do we resonate our. Is what we're selling what they want to buy? I mean, ultimately, right. And, you know, it's, it's not as easy it used to be. So why don't we start kind of around there and just, you know, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are so we can set the stage for our listeners and what you're focused on right now with the Harris poll. And we'll build on that as, I think, the rest of our conversation, because it truly is fascinating.

Great.
Thanks for the setup, Dan. So, first and foremost, I've been working in the space of corporate, brand and reputation for over 20 years. So I kind of go back to and from a variety of different aspects. So I guess back in the day, we're going back over 20 years. There's a lot of emphasis on things like media analysis. And this is back in the day where you were literally, people had, like, VCRs and tapes and people were coding into access databases and stuff like this. Right. I remember so very hands on and my team did a lot of that work.

(05:50):
So from there I went kind of pivoted into more kind of traditional market research with at the time the agency was called or the was called Reputation Institute, it was started by two professors, Charles Vombren, who was at NYU Stern, and Case van Riel, who is at Erasmus in the Netherlands. Hence a little bit of the Erasmus connection. So I was brought in there. I met them through a variety of different intersections, which are a longer story in themselves. But when I joined, Charles had just come back to the U.S. Most of the work had been happening in Europe. I had been based in South Africa, then I was in Germany and I just transferred over to New York. Dan, as you know, I'm also originally from Canada, so kind of been around the block a couple times.

(06:36):
But so I came over with Reputation Institute when it was kind of regrounding itself in the US I think I was probably employee 6 or 7 or something like that. And that was like a real immersion into kind of deep stakeholder insights. Right where were building this niche consultancy that could cover every market, every key stakeholder, with an emphasis on kind of understanding complexity, using data to bring forward tangible, credible insights, and then helping companies really get to activation between that. That company is now called Reptrack, for those who maybe aren't in the know or whatever else they had. They had a couple different changes that happened in the organization, namely being bought at private equity, which. And I think everybody who's been there seen that can kind of walk through the implications.

(07:26):
But so from there, actually I moved to an agency where they brought me in. Actually the guy who brought me in, his name is Bob Pearson, definitely one of those, not a small thinker for anybody who knows Bob. And he basically was. He said, well, I want you to do the same thing that you were doing using traditional market research, but do it only using social and digital. Anybody who knows Bob or the person who runs the agency is currently the chairman, Jim Weiss. It's. It is a rocket ship. There are a lot of curve balls, but it is a ton of fun. And they take research, insights and analytics very seriously. I mean, I had the privilege of working with. When we started, it was probably about 100 analysts, including software engineers and data scientists.

(08:11):
And I was there for a good stretch, I think about three years. And then from there I just moved to the Harris Poll, which is more kind of back to the core corporate brand and reputation research, but bringing along some of the digital work. And really I would integrating it with More like reputation and brand strategy.
Right.
So I think the, our lens on this stuff right now, it's less about digital for the sake of SEO, digital for the sake of just content optimization or for social insights. It's how do you kind of elevate it into brand strategy and reputational positioning.

Yeah.

And which kind of leads us to some of the research that we've been actually in the US we've been doing consistently over the last 18 months and we recently just fielded globally which talks about how people find information about companies and brands.

And you'd think that how people find, you know, information about companies and brands, you'd think that, you know, it would have been a no brainer four or five years ago.

Right.

It would have been like, well, of course they're using, there's, they're searching, of course they're, you know, they're using, they're searching or they're talking to their friends right. Throughout, you know, either they're there was I, you know, I remember these bubbles of time on like oh, it comes in cyclical fashion I think where somebody will say really to understand what people are talking about, you need to be doing social listening, you need to be looking listening, you need to grab your next brand, watch, talk, walk or whatever it is. And that's how you need to understand what your audiences are looking for. But what they neglected to really kind of understand is that's still 10%, 8% of your audience. That's not really representative of your brand unless Your brand is 100% focused on that space. It's just another input.

(10:05):
It's useful and it's incredibly important, I think. And you can certainly drag, pull out incredible insights from what you get from social listening. But there was that kind of fad. Oh well, let's throw in some social listening data to kind of show people that they're doing it wrong or they're doing it right, whatever it is usually doing it wrong. Because you know that there's usually a kind of motivation behind it to say you're doing it wrong. I'm going to help you do it right.

Sure.

And then that cycle kind of, you know, sort of changed and you know, no, search is search. Right. Everybody's using search and look at search volume, look at search data. It's, I mean it's outpaces and I guess out volumes. I don't know what the right word is, but it is degrees or, I don't know, infinitely larger than the amount of traffic and data you see on social. So that's what we should be looking at. And I think people keep coming back ultimately to the anchor, which is search.

(11:07):
And it's fascinating now and I want to get into this with you because definitely want to hear about the research, but there's no time that I can remember, even with the advent of social, that search has been under so much scrutiny or critical appraisal because of AI's integration into search and the rising power of your ChatGPT search and your perplexities and so on. So let's cover all of it, man. I'm excited to hear everything you've got to say about that. Yeah, yeah.

Again, Dan, I think you set this up so well. One of the reasons we got into this conversation is because I think it's a pretty fluid one for both of us to be talking about. So search is. So to kind of ground us a little bit in the discussion, we recently completed a 14 country study kind of across North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, and looking at how people find information companies and brands. So the number one is search engines and it's by far margin.

(12:16):
Right.
So it's like, you know, globally speaking, in aggregate, all 14 countries, 79% of people use search engines often or always versus never or only sometimes to find information by companies and brands. What's equally important is that 77% of people who use those tools to find information also trust the information they get back.

(12:39):
Right.
So both Those numbers, the 79 and the 77 are off the charts versus everything else globally speaking. You have YouTube, there's a kind of a next tier which is a mix of YouTube, word of mouth ratings and reviews, social media in general, company and brand, website and then news media.
Right.
So all of those others are in kind of low to mid-50s. Right. That's actually all low-50s. And then the trust on those drops down to not bad. But like social media in general is at about 50 globally. If you look at the US it's a lot lower. And this is just like.

This is talking specifically about information about brands. Exactly.

Like this is not, when I wake up in the morning, what app do I open?
Right?
It is like if. Exactly.

And it's not. You're not talking about the trust that social media denizens or the public have on political information presented on social media, for example. It's what you're talking about is specifically brand related or when people are looking for companies.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, how Much theoretically, people can interpret a couple different ways. But the information that you find, how much do you trust it?

Yeah, because one of the surprising things for me there is that we've heard and we've seen that just trust in media in general has plummeted and continues to plummet. And it's, you know, it's. I think the recent gallant Gallup polls and sorry about the competitor there, but the recent Gallup polls we're talking about totally fine. 20%, 21% of the public is an all time low. Trusts media. And I, you know, that's not what. It's not that kind of. We're not talking about trust in news information. We're talking here about individually kind of motivated and generated search, active search for information for. About companies or can you help me understand that a little better?

No, I'll clarify. I mean literally the question, the two questions we ask are, you know, when you're looking for information about a company or brand, how often do you use the following?
Right.
And then it's kind of like that. I give you the percentage always often or always.
Right.
So high propensity. And the other is how much do you trust the information you get from each of them? So I think you could easily interpret it as trust in the channel as well. Not just so for example, in the U.S. It's the trust in media is about 49%.

(14:59):
Yeah, right.
Which is not again, it's definitely not great. It's like 50 flip the coin. If you. We do a lot of. As the Harris poll, we release a monthly poll on voters. It's called the Harvard Harris Poll. We do in partnership with Harvard Caps. And a lot of the data that you see is just split 5050. And what that often means, it's pretty bipartisan. Pretty. Not bipartisan, quite partisan.

Partisan.

It's quite partisan, exactly.

Correct.

Right. So I think that, you know, news media in some circles is probably more trusted, in other circles, much less trusted. And the data would support that versus if you look at again in the US because the numbers here, I think are a good sanity check. If you're looking at trust in social media drops down to 45. We ask social media in general because a lot of people when you're doing interviews or surveys, they just say I saw it on social versus saying very specifically, I saw it on this day on TikTok vs Instagram vs Facebook. If you specifically look at some of the channels like Instagram or TikTok, the trust drops down into kind of like 30s and 40s, right? Yeah. But two of the big highlights is that search is number one.

(16:03):
And one of the big things I think is important to note about search is again, this is idea of discoverability. You've heard me talk about this before. Like discoverability, I would just say is when you're looking at a communications or corporate marketing function, I would say is has to be the future.
Right.
You don't have unlimited budgets.
Right.
Also, in many cases you're playing both offense and defense and a lot of your proactive defense needs to be highly discoverable. So you're in the consideration set, right? Yes. Search is very powerful because as an example, if you have a problem, rest assured that someone and that someone could be an investor, a policymaker is typing in your company's name and whatever the issue is. And Right. If your domain has a lot of authority, if they're searching for information about you, it behooves you to figure out a good path to make it highly discoverable and have good evergreen content. We talk with clients a lot. On the risk side, it's not responsive, but evergreen content values driven. Feels like it's been there forever. Feels like it's how you've always done things. But anyway, so on the search, this idea of discoverability is so essential.

(17:08):
And then the other aspect I would just reinforce is the distinctiveness.
Right.
So how do we make sure that when you think of this organic as your core strategy, and we would argue that very strongly this idea of distinctive discoverability I think is the essential idea. So how do you make sure that whatever we're putting out there is distinctive competitive positioning and how do we ensure that it's built in a way that's organically discoverable? And we're not against paid.

(17:35):
Right.
But we would argue strongly build some good organic content first and then use paid on top of it. Paid has lots of great additional app like if you go into any social channel, as an example, if you're using paid, there, you know the targeting criteria that is enabled when you switch from kind of organic content creation to advertising is dramatically better.

(17:56):
Right.
So obviously a lot of these social channels want you to be doing one versus the other. But what that also gives you is extra tools when you're, when you have something that works well organically, being able to iterate on it, using paid, kind of reformat it like replay it is a huge opportunity for sure. Don't do that on stuff that has no organic traction.

Yeah. And when you talk about organic, you're, you're essentially talking about owned content. And you know, Jeannie Dietrich, who's been on my show, would 100% agree with everything you're saying. You know, you should be considering, of course, all of the capabilities available to you to get your. Get the right message to the people who need to see it or who you believe need to see it. And it doesn't hurt to put a little bit of paid behind an important initiative or a particular. Whether it's a product or a service or a thought leadership piece, doesn't matter. Just if you need to amplify, by all means do that.

(18:53):
But to your point, it's that organic side, it's the owned content, so to speak, that gives you the authority and more trust and more credibility if that content is indeed good to begin with, if it makes sense, and if it's made to be evergreen, like you said, it's even better if it's solid, lasting, expresses a good point of view, clear.

Examples, long form, good quotes, experts, et cetera. There's a very good formula for actually building strong content. And it has nothing to do with kind of like keyword stuffing.
Right.
I think there's part of why. I think people have also moved away a little bit about, away from things like search and website is that for you had this, I don't know, it's almost like a decade of like sludge where you had like these super shady shops doing kind of like, you know, just, it's like. And even the word SEO, when you say it right, you're like, theoretically should be very credible optimization, but very often it is just sludge, right? Or it has been. I think, I think we're kind of at. We're kind of coming out of a valley on it. And I think one of the, that's one of the reasons a lot of this stuff is underutilized. Like people dramatically over index on silos, which are, which I would say is social.

(20:09):
Right.
The only way to win in social is like the strategy is feed the beast and spend a lot on paid.
Right.
So it's basically like the social channels have figured out fantastic monetization models versus them. Thinking about how your brand can succeed or how your company could succeed at their core. Yeah, right. Yeah, so. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like a lot of these social channels are extraordinarily useful and compelling. Like, especially if you're in the corpor, LinkedIn is essential for corporate positioning, for referral back. But Again, there's really good use cases for things like Instagram. I stay away from TikTok a little bit. I hesitate on TikTok. No, I hesitate on TikTok. And then the one that's the most squirrely for folks, I think is X.

(20:55):
Right.
Like the use cases for X, especially on the insight side, are still massive. When you log in the morning to like the top of X, you're kind of like, what is going on? Holy food fight. Yeah, yeah.

Side, side note, on X, I mean I just like anything else. Like I've been on all these socials for. I can't believe it's been like almost 20 years on X. I've been on LinkedIn for, my goodness, 22 or 23 years. Yeah, I don't know, you know, search my archives have been like, I always say, like I was member number 65,000 something. And it's true, you know, so I've had a life Almost on LinkedIn and I've seen the way these different channels grow and change and come and go and you know, just as a side note, TikTok is one of those things where, you know, I'm recently now adventuring into my own certain like, kinds of content development, content creation, partly for the discoverability issue that we're talking about. So I'm now taking a course to learn how to do short form video better and.

Oh, awesome.

And the course requires me to be posting to Tick Tock and I'm like, I deleted the app 18 months ago. You know, it was sucking the life out of me. All right, fine. So I, so I'm back in the TikTok environs, but only as a casual, only as an experimentation playground, so to speak. But, but the point, the point is taken that, you know, the different channels have these, you know, have this cap, have this. I think different approaches to the way that organic content either gets a life of its own or interacts with, engages with audiences or is relevant or resonant. And brands need to understand this.

Oh, I mean it's basically all, each of the, all the platforms are built so that there's almost like a cap on organic.
Right.
Like that's the idea is not that you have unlimited. If you, if you go back to, you know, when Facebook first started, like having corporate sites, there was killer content from companies.

Yeah.

And you'd get massive engagement, all that stuff. You, you cannot do any of that on any One of the channels, unless you're using paid right now, just. But there's no chance.

Well, even LinkedIn. LinkedIn I think is a sort of, you know, different animal. I mean, yes, you can certainly get your message out there if you're brand with paid and you could really put more out into the ecosystem if you put a little bit of amplification behind it. But LinkedIn really does favor the organic from. For individuals versus brands. It's the only, it's the only platform that actually, you know, suppresses brand activity as part of their algorithm. And that's, it's not a, it's not like they're being, you know, shadow banned or anything like this. It's more just, it's built in, you know that when you're, when you're a brand and you're promoting something on LinkedIn organically, it's not going to that many people. So there is that incentive to put the paid behind it then and you know, and boost, you know.

(24:08):
Yeah, but it's not really an advertising platform.

Yeah, no it's not. I mean, I shouldn't say that because it means we've. I'm going to take a half step back, which I think will be an important point. All the stuff we're doing in digital I would put into three kind of lenses. The first is corporate reputation, which is really understanding complex companies through a structured lens. Ours is. And the second point I make will be the key one here, which is just we use our RQ framework as our foundation. We have a thing called digital rq. So you have products and services, you have vision and growth, you have citizenship and ethics, you have workplace and culture, which is a really great lens for understanding kind of a corporate entity.

(24:48):
Right.
And we have like cross industry KPIs, like the same kind of scores you'd expect to see, which is great. I mean it really provides a magnificent and very compelling foundation for competitive positioning. But the point around LinkedIn that I think is really interesting is they actually do a Good job on B2B marketing. Yes. And the. So in our work, whenever I talk about brand, I don't even know if brand's the right word because we do a lot of work on brand equity funnels, things like that. In the traditional space, in the digital space, it's all about kind of journeys, information and influence.

(25:18):
Right.
And so this is like stuff channels like LinkedIn are actually very useful in that both in terms of driving awareness and kind of getting more people into that consideration set so like having very specific. And that's because within the platform there actually is good B2B targeting. It's probably its best use case. Right. It's not, it's not that great for trying to attract talent or doing paid campaigns on talent, it's okay. But the B2B marketing is very good. The exception on the, on the tart, like I've seen actually some really compelling things that are more towards students, which I thought that was really interesting.

It's interesting that audience is starting to grow in LinkedIn. It's good to see.

Oh, it's a hundred percent. Yeah, I think it's very intriguing. But that's, that's the one thing on, on the LinkedIn. I would say it's just very good for, for B2B marketing.

Yeah, of course.

Right, yeah.

You're mentioning three.

Three.

But you said reputation. There are three things. Reputation.

Oh yeah. So reputation, it's very much around a kind of holistic perspective. Holistic Cross Stigler perspective on a company and really getting to compelling competitive positioning.
Right.
Again, it's like your portfolio, your leadership and financial. The third one is around data driven thought leadership. Those are the three big things we do. We do a ton of other stuff, but the data driven thought leadership, when you bring search into it's what are the territories that not only have creative intrigue that we've brought forward through cool questions, but also how do they fit into paradigms and kind of trends that people actually search for? Yeah, right. So how do you inherently make it discoverable versus hope and pray that a new idea that you just created will stick?

Yeah, let's go back to this, let's bring everybody back here to this distinctive discoverability because. Sure, first of all, I always like it when new phrases are coined in a way and it makes a lot of sense. People have been trying to parse out, make sense of the search world forever and there's no shortage of experts out there and I don't mean that in the tongue in cheek expert way. There are legitimate experts who, very legitimate experts.

Very, very good research on this, like 100%.

There's, they're very good at understanding, you know, how search works and how that's changing. And you know, you have your algorithm hucksters who are trying to just game the system and say this is what Google's gonna do. But yeah, any of us who are in communications and who are about conversation and who are about, you know, relatability and I guess, efficiency of message. You know, SEO is almost a secondary. Well, it's never a primary thing. It's always, the conversation is always primary. And SEO flows naturally because that's the way that people, that's what people look for, is they look for the kinds of things that you talk about in a conversation. Now this is where all eyes are on AI, right? They're on your perplexities and it's on perplexity and it's on Gemini and so on. And now you have perplexity also for sure.

And then ChatGPT's got their next version, right?

The language models are looking for, they're probabilistic, right? So they're looking for, you know, essentially they're completing a Mad Libs, you know, instead of 100%, instead of doing a Boolean, which is what Google used to be anyway. You know, they're just trying to figure out the best way to complete the phrase or what the next most probable answer is to your query. And especially if you ask a question as a question in a search rather than just a single term, AI is getting to be very good at answering that. But it's also looking for different kinds of information and different kinds of content will attract the interest, so to speak. If there's such a thing of your language model versus your search engines. And that's playing a little bit of havoc with the way that companies, brands are trying to become discoverable.

(29:26):
So how does all of this play into distinctive discoverability? Just to back up a little bit, I understand that 79% of the respondents are going to search first. I fully expect that number to decline over time, but not tremendously. I mean, you know, because the search, because Google's not stupid, it's going to continue to embed better results or better kind of experiences for its users.

But.

There'S perplexity is making its gains, it's clear. And how is all of this going to affect discoverability?

So I'm going to take a half step back to move forward. So the half step back is search engines I think are super interesting because they give you everything back. So in terms of building distinctive discoverability, you certainly, again, the globally speaking company employees brand website is basically tied with a whole bunch of other stuff. For number two in the U.S. It's, it's number three, right? So again, you have a big correlation between search engines and websites, but you get a full ecosystem, right? The super interesting thing about search.

(30:38):
Right.
Rather than thinking about as SEO is, you know to. Another acronym is peso.
Right.
So paid earned, shared owned.

Ginny.

Right, because Ginny, exactly.

My favorite.

Yeah, exactly.

Correct.

Right.
So the, what you're pulling back is a bunch of owned content. But it's not just web, it's not just, you know, search for search sake. You're getting a ton of earned media articles, blog reviews, people's just commentary on Reddit, on. There is, there is a bunch of social that is actually in the mix there. Not as much as I'd like to see, but there's a good amount in there. You have a ton of press releases, you have a ton of journals. You just. And you have like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't really categorize. It's just kind of like a, it's like a paper or an essay, but it's not one of the big blog or whatever.

(31:22):
Right.
So there's the content in there just gives you a much better lens on for example, competitive positioning and then also how do I build strong content, whatever the area is. Because to the point that you're setting up with all the GP. The search GPTs. GPTs are also for the, for this conversation I would say both are very relevant because Whether you're using ChatGPT or Perplexity, there's a lot of the same things come to play. And right now I don't know if it's going to be the same thing in six months or a year. The formula that we see as for sure the winning formula for search is very similar for any one of these GPTs or generative AIs, right. In that it's compelling long form content, clear examples.

(32:07):
Ideally you have some new perspectives, really good quotes from experts who are credible, things like that. We have a much more specific formula than that, but I think that gives you a good sense of the fundamentals. If you do that really well, you're going to show up both in search engines as well as in the GPTs. Because what GPTs look for and especially the search GPTs, they're looking for kind of credible content, right? So the search GPTs also start with Google. So if you're doing well with Google, it's going to help you. So it's for sure going to help you. I mean, I think it's a really interesting kind of golden age for maybe a little bit of old school comms content.

(32:42):
Right.
Just like strong Writing has, you know, is big.
Right.
It's a, it's a big opportunity. I think things like video are super important as well.
Right.
Again, if you are on social, like I think the class you're doing on short form videos seems, you know, spot on for the time. But in terms of. Yes, I mean it's kind of the closed loop on it. I think it's thinking about the full ecosystem of peso.

(33:06):
Right.
And then how do you fit owned content or into it?
Right.
And I would think of. Increasingly I'll talk about a lot of the generative AI tools as destinations. Like they're an audience.
Right.
They're their own audience you should be thinking about. And you know, I've heard some people talk about how they're like, you know, they should be your collaborator or maybe one of your employees or something and you're like, that's fine. But for comms, I would say one of the key things is making sure that you think of it as one of your core audiences. And if you skip that audience, shame on you because it's. Again, if you're using any one of these tools right now, there is a ton of branded content because a lot of companies talk about things that are so specific around something that they're doing and there are people that search for it. So again, if you're thinking of like a buyer journey or a decision maker journey.

(33:48):
Right.
It's very important to have the generative AI tools as one of your audiences.

I have never, until this moment, Rob, and this is why I love it when I talk to you, envisioned adding AI to my stakeholder map for any project now, you know, at the of. It's always been under, like in. Over the past especially six months, a year. It's always been like, well, we really start. Need to start writing this in a sense for so that AI can pick it up. But it's, you know, it's funny because we're talking about, oh, AI is my co. Intelligence or it's my collaborator and everything like that. And if we're, the more we personify it and the more we kind of work closely with it or embedded in our workflow. Well, I guess it makes sense that we should start kind of treating it like an, a, A consumer of our content. And gosh, that's a great.

(34:40):
I'm gonna, I'm, I have written it down. But, but the idea though, you know, it's very fascinating because I suppose, you know how far you pull the Lever on that it shouldn't matter because good content should be picked up by, you know, by the right kinds of people anyway and search engines, AI etc will theoretically match the best with the query. That's what they're doing their job.

Right.

And you know, I like what you said about, and I was sort of smiling when you were talking about, you know, the kind of, the importance of you know, good writing and like going back to what makes something a good communication. I'm paraphrasing of course it's not exactly what you said but I was smiling though because I've been saying as well, like I think in the next, you know, however many number of years you've got so much content being pumped out and these, you know that you have, you can create a 1500 word, 2000, 10,000 word piece with just a simple type by typing a question and hitting the enter key and you're, and then you have content. You know that's, that's now an option and that's clearly polluting the content airwaves and being a Google is going.

Out of its way to get rid of that stuff.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

So if Google, like if you're using AI as a research tool or a polish or kind of refinement or synthesis, great. But if you're going into ChatGPT or any other tool and being like write me a whatever it is 750 word piece of content about this topic and you just do some basic editing on it's, it's going to go nowhere. Yeah, like Google spends a lot of their time making sure that it is going nowhere. They do not want like the, you know, the content factory spam.

Yeah, it's increasingly going to be, I think it's going to be increasingly difficult of course and it already is pretty much, I think mostly impossible to discern AI content from real content for when that content itself is technical or when it's about when it's really when there's a lot of care taken to create the content etc and you know, that's, I think that's different but you do need to spend a lot of time on the final end editing your content to make sure that, that it really does reflect the truth and your view and all of that.

Yeah, it's not repeating the same ideas over and over. There's, there's all sorts of like little tells. Even if you look at like good quote unquote good content from, from these GPTs. Right. So great research tools, great synthesis tools, great refinement tools, but if you're. It's not, it's not logical idea flow and how do I construct a provocative argument? Right, yeah, it's, you know, again, it can help with those things, but it's not going to get you there. Otherwise it just looks weird.

Yeah. So what I was thinking though is about all this dull, terrible content that's going out there and how that might. How that's affecting discoverability by clogging up the system and you know, the system just ignores it. Right?

The system just, it's like literally does not care. So it's just kind of like into the rubbish bin immediately. So it's like off your desk, into the garbage.

And that itself. I think I've just heard the audiogram for this episode. But that itself is so important, I think, for people to understand, especially folks who are like creators and writers and consider themselves as having built a very important skill set over years or decades of work in our field. You know, they get discouraged or suspicious or reject or just outright. They reject AI for example, because, oh, you know, I'm not gonna look, not gonna bother with that nonsense because I'm a real writer. But the fact of the matter is that by virtue of being a real writer and by virtue of if your skills are good and if you are a good writer or a good editor or a good whatever, fill in the blank, increase a good prompter.

(39:02):
But even being a good prompter only goes so far because, you know, you still need to fix what's on the other end. There, there is, you know, you're going to rise, continue to rise in the future as your work is what's discoverable and the rest of the dull nonsense is ignored is kind of what I'm getting from this. You know, like let's let the. Let the people who have no business creating content flood. Flood the zone because that makes yours stand out more.

It's 100, right? I mean, it's actually that's a good. Like who cares if it's there? But I mean in general it's just discarded into, into a rubbish heap. But it's. I don't know. I mean, this is. I'm going to give you my old school example, right? So I remember when I was doing my business degree, there were a bunch of people that I knew across the country in Canada who did like, their stats classes were really like literally Written paper and pen.

(39:59):
Right.
Like, you would basically be just students, like pencil and eraser. So you'd be just going through and writing formulas. It happened that the program I was in, it was all applied statistics. And you're building Excel models and you're working on, like, optimization.
Right.
It's kind of like when I left school, like, that. That skill set was extraordinarily useful. Like, you could just hack through a lot of data very quickly. And I didn't need to explain theory behind what I was doing. I just had to get it done right. And doing it in a very kind of elegant, compelling way. So, I mean, that's kind of like. That's my old school parallel to this. Like, if you're. If you're just writing on your typewriter, I think there's, you know, hopefully your novel is going to be a world beater.

(40:42):
Right.
But if you're doing corporate content. Right, and you're using a typewriter versus using, like, any of these additional tools. Yeah, it's a big miss.

Yeah. I mean, speed is everything, or it's not everything, but speed is an equally important part of the equation when it comes to corporate content. It's funny you're talking about the move from paper to Excel, you know, because I certainly am of an age where, you know, handwritten essays were. Were a thing. And, you know, being on the cusp of, you know, being Gen X or, you know, I've seen it all. The Mark Schaefer always talks about, like, AI being like the calculator, you know, to even go. Go back to a simpler. A simpler thing. Because, you know, back in. When calculators were introduced, you know, people who did math for a living were up in arms 100%. Oh, how can you arrive at that? You know, why are you. It's shortcuts, and you're going to lose the knowledge.

(41:42):
But you know what I mean? It's a tool, and if you don't use it, you're. You're just simply not going to function as quickly as. Or as. As. As effectively and efficiently as your. As your competitors and your peers, so. Exactly. You know, But I don't know. Bringing it back a little bit, I think, to. To the. To. I just want to say it again. Distinctive discoverability. It has a ring to it being distinctive Marc Schaeffer. And no episode of my show will go by if I don't mention Marc Schaeffer. People ask me what's wrong with me, But Marc Schaefer just wrote this book called Audacious and the idea of course is very obvious by the title that really to make it in this world that we live in now, and he's speaking mostly to marketers, but it's 100% applicable to comms.

(42:42):
We have to be audacious, we have to disrupt, we have to get a little crazy. And I love his quotes, as you know, humans still own crazy. So when we're talking about that, right. Of course crazy doesn't necessarily mean and you're throwing bombs all the time, but that standout content or that just really out of the blue point of view.

Will get, that's where it's creativity, right, Creativity.

And it's exactly if it's and curiosity all combined now. But when we think about creating content like that and making, you know, if you can actually succeed at being, letting yourself loose a little bit and really just being brave and courageous and putting stuff out there, how does, how would that kind of content be this, be discoverable? It would be distinctive for sure. But I, sure I just, I wonder like in the short term anyway, where you have AI that's looking for probabilistic results, you know, if you put something out there that's improbable, what's the likelihood of that surfacing in an AI search? I don't know.

This is why you need to have a good formula for this stuff because if you're, whatever topic you're talking about, you want to have like, you want to have some good examples from experts, you also want to refer to some, you known ideas or known statistics. But equally importantly, you want something novel, you want to establish credibility that you know what you're talking about. But at the same time novelty is extremely relevant, especially if you have good examples or good data points around it.

(44:35):
Right?

Yeah.

So this is one of the reasons we're very big fans of the data driven thought leadership is that you can actually add novelty into a very well known or maybe even state topic.
Right.
By providing a new point of view where again ideally you're bringing in a new angle or a new gap or providing new updates on it.

Well, if that's not true, I'm closing my business because that's basically the core of what I am out there trying to do or help people understand is that you can inject new ideas into your old existing work.

You have to and you have to. I don't know how many companies you work with that aren't in some way shape or form of transformation.
Right.
The reason they're going through transformation is because what they were doing before wasn't working.

I was just talking about this. Yeah, I was just talking about this the other day. Like, we keep like you're in Page Society and IPR and these other things. You know, every time you go to this, to one of these professional organizations and I'm. I'm not denigrating Paige at all. I mean, look, great organization, but every time you go to one and.

I'm a very big fan of Paige, so I don't know where this is going. I'm like, I'm gonna need to get Rochelle onto the podcast. It's gonna get out of me. I've gotta go.

I'm a fan too. I just, you know, but the idea that like every time you go to a conference, you're hearing very similar topics bubble up, you know, digital transformation, the transformation of the profession. The transformation of this has been a topic at every. And it's not. And I'm sure it's not just in PR as well. I mean, like, if you go to any marketing conference, same thing, digital transformation, that has been a topic at least as far back as 2010, if not before that, at nearly, you know, every major conference and talk, you know, track and professional organization like ad infinitum, it's like been pinned to the wall. How long are we going to be transforming? And I, I'm not saying that as enough already with the transforming. What I'm saying is that. But that's just the nature of things now.

Exactly.

You know, and so, you know, let's talk about digital transformation.

All right.

Really, like, let's just understand that everything we do is digital is transformation.

I think we're early in the digital transformation for communications functions.

Yeah, well, that's true.

So like I've. Oh, for sure. I mean, we have the privilege of working with some. One of the companies with, I think, bar none, be called a top three marketer in the world.
Right.
Global company. Right. And when I look at. And they've been pushing the envelope on everything AI when I look at their comms team, I would say they're ahead of many other comms teams, but they're probably 18 months or two years behind their marketing team.

(47:25):
Right.
And if these guys are, if that's your cadence like that comms team is probably whatever it is, two years or 18 months ahead of a lot of other marketing teams.
Right.
So anyway, I think we're. I think there's still. There's big opportunities for digital transformation. The reason I say this with confidence is we're doing a lot of these digital projects and the kind of competitive gaps we're showing are like 3x5x10x, right? Which what that tells me is that there's just nobody who's looking at it this way, right? Because they, you, you. Basically what you'd expect is when people have, when it becomes like a known idea and everybody's doing it, you're gonna see differences of 5, 10, 15, 20%.

(48:03):
Right?
And then it pops every once in a while there. Right now you're seeing like multiples of opportunity for competitive advantage, right? Or where it already exists. And you're extending leads, right. Actually, that the two things I love in a lot of these projects is one, like extending leads where it's just so apparent that what you're doing is so much better.
Right?
And how do you triple down on that? Because it's, again, you're just blowing everybody else out of the water and it's key to your business and then also gap filling, right? So when you have that competitive dynamic for a lot of the digital work, people just, it's like Google Analytics and it's very insular, right? And it's like SEO versus again, peso full ecosystem, all the content across earn press releases, journals, et cetera. And in a competitive setting, right, it's hard to do. It's a lot more work. But like again, you're seeing 5, 10x differences, which for me just tells us. That, tells me that right now there's, it's, there's an inflection point emerging, right. I don't even think we're at the inflection point yet.

Agreed.

I think the inflection point is that now search is just becoming much more kind of top of radar and people are coming back to it a little bit more. But just as I said before, the over index on social is crazy to me.
Right?
Because it's like social is so relevant. It is. You have to be doing something on social. But if you're spending 90% of your time on social channels and social posts, all you're doing is basically feeding the beast.

(49:20):
Right?
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

No, it comes down again to this fractured audience environment, you know, and yeah, 100%. Like if you are a, you know, if you're Mr. Beast or something, then by all means spend all your time on, on YouTube or wherever it is.

But he is, that's what he does. That's what he does. And YouTube is a phenomenal platform, which, again, of all the platforms, has a little bit better kind of integration. But it's like, it's much more highly searchable. You can find it a lot more easily, obviously, because it's owned by Google, but it's still very hard to get off platform.
Right.
If you're a brand who's building a lot of content there, like, connecting it out to other places is. There's way more friction than there should be.

I have a, you know, I'm a walking example of that. With one of the things, you know, one of the projects I'm doing on YouTube, I, I, I created something on YouTube, just almost on a lark. And my God, you know, I'm a podcaster. I kind of get the way this, all this stuff works.

Yeah.

What if I just take this YouTube thing and then put it out as a podcast? It's not that easy. Like, it's not, I mean, it is easy. Like, it's not hard. You know, it's not hard to understand. It's just like, you know, you go from this technology or this media form, which you can do a recording and then you have a host and you put it into the host and you know, you, it's all in the setup. As long as it's set up properly, as soon as you push that button, it goes everywhere except YouTube. I mean, it goes to YouTube, but the video, it doesn't go as video. And then from. But you can't go the other way. So, you know, you can go from Spotify to mostly everything else, but you can't go to YouTube anyway. I'm sorry, I'm bitching.

No, it's okay. I mean, that's so. Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, go on. It's, it's just fascinating. You're talking about social and over indexing. Yeah, Yeah.

I mean, this is one of the examples I use pretty frequently is like last year, Verizon, this is a lot of our public research, had a really nice reputational spike. And you can correlate it very closely to, in the axis, here's poll 100, which we should release. You can correlate that very closely to the super bowl and their super bowl ad with Beyonce.

(51:28):
Right.

Yeah.

So kind of like, it's like, again, is that a game changer? That is the question.
Right.
But it's, you know, again, it's part of the fun. It's amazing. You can do it. And the fact you got Beyonce, it's because she's releasing an album, right? So it's like an impossible get, but you still get her. And so when, if you look at like Beyonce's Instagram post, it has like over a million engagements, like 1.2 or something like that. Like, try finding it. That's right. Right. So let's like, you could argue that they basically got like three weeks of value out of that.

(52:01):
Right?
And that's, and that's a post from a partner collaborator who's calling you out in a very positive fashion that you've spent a lot of money for.
Right?
So, and it's not that's bad or that's that, like, it's. How do you, how is that an asset? How is that an ecosystem or a full kind of campaign asset that gets integrated into, you know, again, owned hubs that can actually build ongoing value for you.

(52:24):
Right?
So again, most people aren't getting the Beyonce 1.2 million post, right? So of course, like, what do you get? What are you getting at? Like your, your social posts. And again, I think something like LinkedIn may have more of a half life because you actually have like, your whole spread is through, like, through partners, all that kind of stuff, and like, it has some extra life. But in most these other things, right, you're getting a day or two, like.

(52:45):
I don't know, like a week or something.

You know, in some ways, the virality of those platforms accounts for the burnout of content very quickly. And, you know, I'm sure it's, but it's baked into the algorithms. But, you know, you can have something on LinkedIn and, you know, you might have a maximum, even the most. I think the most followed people on LinkedIn were talking somewhere in the area of 150,000 followers or 200. Like, it's very rare to have. I'm sure there are a few people that are just kind of way up in the stratosphere because the, because for some reason LinkedIn has let them be that way, but not that many. You know, influence on LinkedIn is at a different scale, but the nature of the content and the nature of the way things work on LinkedIn is not about searchability or findability. It's about conversation and activity.

(53:40):
You know, so people find things when they're alerted to it. Generally speaking, right? When it comes to their, if it's on their feed, it's one thing.

Yeah.

But in their notifications or in their inbox is like, you know, where a lot of stuff happens. On LinkedIn. So, you know, somebody comments on something that goes to your notifications or it goes through that person's followers notifications, etcetera. So it's, it's, it's very possible that a piece of old content just surfaces because somebody.

Oh, yeah.

Finds somebody comments on it. That doesn't happen 100 on other platforms. You know, that's, it's not like that.

Yeah, I mean, it's also that you'd plan for. So I was actually, I was thinking in my mind, I think you're right on the, like somebody like Mark Benioff is about 135,000.
Right.
And that's, and he's like a person who's very active. He's a cowboy. Yeah, but Satya Nadella is 11 million on LinkedIn.

Yeah, well, he owns LinkedIn.

I know. That's, it's, this is literally why I picked him. I just, I did a quick search as were chatting.

I have a, a woman I respect and know I don't know her too well, but she is one of the thought leaders in AI and Web three and everything. Sandy Carter. She just wrote this book actually. It's on my, it's on my desk. And Sandy, if you're listening, ready to let, ready to read it. AI. AI, first human always. And you know, she, you know, she, when I met her, oh, gosh, almost a year ago, she had something like, I want to say 70,000 followers, something like this, but LinkedIn capped her. She couldn't like anybody who was reaching out to her was just like putting a cue. You were, you know, she couldn't accept any more people into her connections.

(55:27):
And finally I think she had a conversation with someone or someone had a conversation somewhere and then the cap came off and she was able to add. But I think there's a normal limit to people on LinkedIn. But look, we're going afield a little bit and it is part of discoverability because you want that organic content to be absorbed and engaged with. Otherwise, it's, that's. The other piece of it is engagement begets discoverability in some ways on a lot of these platforms. But I don't know what it does for search, you know, but it certainly does it for findability on social.

Sure. But I mean, I, again, findability on social is such a secondary thing. Like, it's not. That's kind of like, it's more. This is why I would say like you know, whatever it is, I don't know what the right rule is, but like 1 out of every 10 of your posts, let's say for being a little conservative, should be going back to some strong piece of organic content on your website or some sort of an experience or some sort of invitation for action or some sort of an opportunity to download something or whatever. But it's getting you onto an owned asset that you're now kind of reinvesting into versus most of the social stuff is you're basically reinvesting in that company, right. In LinkedIn, you're reinvesting in Facebook, you're reinvesting Instagram.

Yeah. And you know, and I'm glad you brought that up, that was saying 1 in 10 of just again, I know it's not, may not be the number, but a certain amount of your content should be, or your posts should be sending people back to your organic home. You know, build on owned land and all that good stuff. But there's nothing wrong with a good rental property. I will tell you that. It's, it's also important to rent wisely. You, you said that there was a good offering. You know, 1 in 10, like do 1 in 10. Do you have any other based on your research?

(57:17):
And I'm conscious we should be winding down momentarily, but as we kind of say goodbye to folks or sort of wind this down, are there any other big practical takeaways that you can reveal now before the research is really published? I mean, by the time this airs, we're still, we're, we're recording at the end of February. This will most likely go up in April. So any other like practical takeaways that you can offer now that our listeners can walk away with and be like, geez, I really want to know more about Rob. Or I, I gotta look into this information.

Yeah, I mean, I'll give you a few.
Right.
So one of them is higher order, but it's gonna be very intuitive to any of your audience. Right. One of the other studies we recently did, it was released at Davos earlier this year with the Page Society is called Confidence in Business. The main takeaway from that research, it's again, take a look, it's on the Page site, download it, et cetera. We're actually, if you're a Page member, we're doing country based debriefs. We're in the process of it. Like us is Next week, China is the week after, et cetera. But there's a key formula. So the research looked at 14 countries, 16 issues and the thing that startles you is unless you get to context + action or action + context, your content is going nowhere.

(58:54):
Right.
So it's basically the formula is action plus context equals confidence. So we ask people like, how important are these issues, how confident are you? And then how are you seeing companies engaging? If people are across all those issues, across all those markets, it's very similar. So if people aren't seeing anything from you, obviously the confidence is non existent. If people are only seeing action, confidence is actually pretty low. It's niche. It's only 25% of people would say they're confident.

(59:19):
Right.
If you. Same thing. If you see just communication.
Right.
Just about 25 versus when you add context, not volume, not communication to action, you pop the confidence up to over 50%.
Right.
So context plus action equals confidence. And the reason I bring that up here is when you're building content, you need to have clear examples and you need to have a very good description as to why you're doing this, what's intriguing about it. And I mean we're adding in, we talked about this, you want to have some novel ideas as well. Sure. The idea of confidence I think is also a really nice parallel versus something like reputation. So we spend a lot of time and attention on reputation. I think of, you know, corporate reputation, brand health, those are really top of the house KPIs, those are, they're really essential. Understand all your key stakeholders, they can, you can see the drivers, you can see key issues, you can see messaging, evaluation, et cetera, but they don't provide you a strategy.

(01:00:15):
Right.
A lot of this stuff, if you look at a full digital ecosystem, the big gap it fills for any comms function or corporate marketing function in particular is what I call middle metrics. Hopefully you have top of the house metrics. You may have on the ground metrics. I think of on the ground metrics as social monitoring, media monitoring, SEO monitoring, all that stuff is very good, tells you what happened. You can see trends that are emerging, you can see journalists that wrote about something, et cetera. The piece in the middle that is missing thing where things like digital fill in the gap. I would call it the strategy scaffolding. Right. It's how do you translate drivers key issues into true competitive positioning and then turn it into real strategy.

(01:00:54):
Right.
Own strategy, like website strategy, content strategy, earn strategy. You can almost fit press release strategy in there because press releases are actually surprisingly useful. And then also social strategy. Yeah, right.

Daniel Nestle (01:01:08):
Peso the hell out of it is kind of what you want to do.

Rob Jekielek (01:01:11):
Well, but you need to be clear, right? It's like we're making these decisions. Honestly, I will say of all the work we're doing right now, one of the things I'm proudest of is a lot of our initial engagements have literally become the business case for how comms leaders pitch what they need to do next. Right. I need to do like I need to rebuild our website. This is how our, this is where we're doing. Okay, but here's where we suck on competitive positioning. Check out these gaps, right? These gaps are really important to how we're talking about our executive leadership, how we're talking about our financial story. And by the way, I'm showing you, I'm going to show you a whole bunch of other content that's actually crushing it. We could do that too.

(01:01:45):
Right?
So like actual go for budget. The other piece is like in many cases comms folks, they want to have the like reputation brand health research. But it's again it could be an expensive thing. You need to have a clear rationale. The reason we are going to like actually up level to that research is we need to understand these five or six things. This is how we're working with the government affairs team, this is how we're working with the commercial team, this is how we're working with the IR team, et cetera.

(01:02:09):
Right.
So anyway, so that's, I would just say like that's one of the things I'm proudest about is that it's not just kind of insightful and interesting, it's actually practical for pitching. So I mean I'll hold it at those two ideas but in terms of like implications there's a ton. I mean it's. Yeah, we've covered a lot of them. Gen AI is one of your key audiences. The same formula works very well for search and for AI and just kind of reinforcing the idea. Like you need to have a comprehensive perspective to build strong competitive positioning.

(01:02:39):
Right.
The idea of distinctive discoverability, I think it rolls off the tongue well but it's actually a real tangible thing. Like you're either you appear when people are looking for something or you don't.

It's that simple. It's funny, it's like I was thinking of one of those funnel pages that you spend, you know, you click on something on Instagram or wherever you are, and you just spend all this time, scroll, you know what's going to happen. I mean, if you've been alive for more than 15 minutes, you know that you're going to go into one of these pages and you're going to be scrolling for 45 minutes until you finally get to that click here. And it's only going to be $47, whatever it is. Right? That is. That's what I feel like this episode is like at the very end, it's like it's that simple. I don't know, but it is.

And you get the steak knives.

And you get a steak knives. An extra coaching session. Look, Rob, this is. Every time I talk to him, it sort of blows my mind. But the takeaways that you've just, you've just offered us, I think certainly go a long way toward not only wetting folks whistle and just kind of making us all want to learn more about how we can be more, are distinctively discoverable. But also it's just given me so much to think about as I move forward with my own creative strategy and how I want to interact with folks. But there's a lot more I want to talk about with you, and we'll have to save that for another time. Meantime, everyone out there, if you want to reach Rob, you can look for him on LinkedIn. His name will be spelled properly in the episode title.

(01:04:24):
And, and LinkedIn is pretty much where I think most of us live these days. You can look for the Harris Poll online. Is it harrispole.com?

It is, Rob. Yeah.

So harrispole.com, are you on any of the socials that you care to, you know, kind of reveal, or is it not your thing?

I am. I just don't use them very much. LinkedIn is by far the. I think that's for a lot of the stuff that we do, for sure.

Excellent. So LinkedIn, harrispole.com and I'm sure when you're out and about, especially if you're in communications pr, you will see opportunities to see Rob in person, hear him speak, listen to him on podcasts like this one, et cetera. So, Rob Jikilik, thank you very much for being here. It has been a pleasure. And after I decompress from this, I'm gonna have 150 additional questions. I'm gonna have to call you later.

Thanks, dad. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, man. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know at Dan at trendingcommunicator. Com. Thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.

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Distinctive Discoverability: Search Rules the Reputation Roost - with Rob Jekielek

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Distinctive Discoverability: Search Rules the Reputation Roost - with Rob Jekielek