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00:00:01
Linda Zebian | Head of Comms at Muck Rack.
124 Plays28 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Linda!
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Content People newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: [email protected]
Connect with Linda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-ezziddin/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Linda, thank you so much for doing this. I am super excited to talk to you. I feel like everyone knows Mukrach, but you're a really cool person to talk to. For folks who don't know you, could you just say a little bit about who you are and what you do? Thanks for having me. First of all, Maris, I'm a super excited to chat about so many fun topics
Building a Communications Function at Muckrack
00:00:18
Speaker
today. I am Linda Zebian. I am the senior director of comms at Mukrach.
00:00:24
Speaker
I've been here a little over two years. I was their first ever communications director. Since I've been here, I've ah built up the function both internally and externally for what communications looks like, which is the most meta job.
00:00:39
Speaker
doing comms for a communication and technology platform. When I worked at a content marketing agency earlier in my career, I feel like meta jobs are perfect for a real expert because you can't get more into it than something that's comms for a comms
Muckrack's PR Management and AI Integration
00:00:56
Speaker
agency. I think most folks know what muck rack does, but could you give a little elevator speech just in case anyone's not familiar? well To go to Pfizer agencies and brands, we help them build trust, tell stories, and show their unique value of our media. and We do this through a PR management software that combines media database, pitching, monitoring, measurement, and reporting. We help our customers generate coverage in the press,
00:01:24
Speaker
protect their brand reputation, boost PR performance. We have efficiency exploration tools. We run the gamut of everything you need. If you are a comms or a PR person, we built luck back from the ground up ourselves in house, which is a unique position to be in PR tech. We're applying all the best technology, AI, et cetera, to our platform every day to get the PR person in the position they need to.
00:01:50
Speaker
prove the value of our own media, which we believe very strongly in the marketing mix. I was in there a couple of days ago and I noticed some cool AI beta features. I have a couple of questions on that for you for later. Yeah.
Balancing Remote Work and Family Life
00:02:05
Speaker
Can you give us an overview of a day in your life? The first thing I do in the morning is I check email and Slack right when I wake up. Cause when you work in comms, you just never know, bubble up overnight. I get my kids off to school, then log in and usually check are monitoring social mentions in Slack. Then I exercise and start my real day with a lot of meetings. It's a lot of writing. um I'm responsible for brand messaging. So it's a lot of writing, a lot of editing of other people's stuff and approving of other folks stuff and providing feedback. I think as a leader, that's what you do a lot. Mockrack has incredible flexibility. We're a fully distributed team.
00:02:43
Speaker
I'm so grateful to have that kind of flexibility to be a working mom and to pursue a career that I am passionate about and also have balance with a family life. You're in Springfield, Massachusetts, right? I'm just outside of Springfield in a small town called Wilbraham, the home of Friendly's Ice Cream. I'm in Somerville. I'm a Boston area guest. How old are your kids? They're eight and six.
00:03:10
Speaker
And when you have a moment for yourself in the morning, is there something you do every morning? Do you like morning pages or it sit with a coffee? What's your morning moment? um I have a delayed coffee drinker. I don't like to have coffee before I exercise. Usually it involves taking my puppy outside and getting some sun first thing in the morning without shoes on my feet. It's like grounding, getting natural light that I do if it's warm enough, exposing your skin to morning light is really grounding to start your day breathe a little before the chaos starts. Are you a Huberman listener? No, what though those are both his he has a famous sleep episode. And those are some of the things that he's really good enough, I should be a podcaster.
00:03:57
Speaker
What kind of exercise do you do? So on the weekends, I do hot yoga. But at home, we have a very fancy machine called a tonal. I don't know if you've ever heard of a tonal, but it's a pulley system like digital weight. ah And my husband and I are pretty serious about muscle building and lifting. And it's an awesome machine. I highly recommend you check it out. Okay, I'll be googling. We got our second hand because they are pricey, but it's really cool. Cool.
LinkedIn's Role in Modern PR
00:04:26
Speaker
I want to talk about my state of PR 2024 report. I have a bunch of questions about that, but I know you also did one on AI, which is a huge topic right now. I mean, starting with the PR report, I thought it was so fascinating. And my agency Medbury is really focused on LinkedIn. are A couple of things jumped out at me about LinkedIn from the report. It's the top social network for PR folks looking for stories and or pitching them.
00:04:53
Speaker
that has got the most growth and future growth potential of social networks. One quote here, LinkedIn is far and away the most used social network for social media and communication strategies with 84% of pros citing the platform. How do you think LinkedIn fits into the PR ecosystem now versus one to three years ago? Those stats did surprise me. They were interesting.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think what's really interesting is the rise of individuals on LinkedIn over what brands might want to say. It's really transitioned and been been a place for thought leadership.
00:05:27
Speaker
Over the past few years, I felt, Oh, I moved jobs. Let me update my LinkedIn profile or Oh, I'm looking for a job. And now I think a lot of folks are looking for a safer space where they can be among professionals and share in professional communities which are starting to bleed into personal but in a way that is
00:05:53
Speaker
professional and respectful yeah versus some of the other platforms. I find as thought leaders started to be influential on LinkedIn, more journalists are putting out queries for sources on LinkedIn, sharing their pitching preferences or stories about what it's like to be a journalist on LinkedIn. And I think as communities build, that's really going to be the place for content creators and marketers and media folks to come together as a community, share ideas, make connections and network in a really cool way that just feels transparent, but respectful, and real and free of ads and less commercial feeling. It really does feel like a comfortable place where
00:06:48
Speaker
There's a lot of respect. There's always risk on social or no reputational risk, but it's it's a respectful place where you're not going to get trolled. yes No, I think that's definitely true. People are polite and on their best behavior because you never know who's watching. It's like you're at a networking event as opposed to a bar where people say anything and everything. That definitely makes sense to me. Outside of LinkedIn, two things really jumped out at me from
The Rise of Internal Communications Post-Pandemic
00:07:13
Speaker
the report. One was that a third of PR pros are spending more time on internal comms. What do you think is influencing that trend? I think that since the pandemic, more companies are seeing
00:07:29
Speaker
their employees as another audience channel that you have to foster trust. What I've learned in my career is that your employees are the representation of your brand. but Everyone has a platform. Everyone has extending arms to every corner of the world via social. You really have to empower your employees with the appropriate messages at the right time, engage them in what you're doing as a brand and as a company so they can represent you appropriately externally. There's a risk when you have people who have large followings or just any following on social that puts you at risk for like negative blowback for whatever reason you might find yourself in a hot button situation because everyone has a platform you have to
00:08:18
Speaker
ensure that your employees are getting the right messages at the right moment. For example, when we're having an exciting news moment or a launch, we provide employee copy for all our employees to use. You can either share ours or here's some prompts to think about how to write your own. Folks use it because they're in go-to-market teams with customers and we want to empower them. They need to be informed and don't lip read messaging all all day long, say you're an engineer or something, but you still want to create conversation around a topic. We empower them to do that.
00:08:47
Speaker
That makes so much sense to me. I think internal comms rules are so important. The way that you can leverage and lead your folks through good comms, so meaningful, so important. The final thing I want to pick your brain about was from the report. More than half of PR pros at agencies feel very valued by leadership compared to only 22% at brands.
Value of PR Professionals in Agencies vs Brands
00:09:08
Speaker
This was unexpected to me because I worked in the agency world for maybe 14 years. There's often this sentiment agency side that people in-house have it really good. And the idea that it was the folks at agencies that were feeling more valued by their leadership was just unexpected to me. What do you think might contribute to that? Yeah, this is purely anecdotal because we didn't ask the rationale, but I got to say it wasn't that surprise. And that's simply because I think that
00:09:41
Speaker
comms and PR is is a misunderstood profession. You've got comms reporting into marketing or a marketer running comms or the challenge with how do you prove or the media's impact on the bottom line of a business is the way you may not have the metrics that a marketer has, right? So that's always a challenge. And that's something that we're working to solve for at Mudcrack through technology is better measurement, better analytics to tell the big picture of how earned fits in. And that's probably the reason why I wanted to join Minecraft because I for too long use tools that were just insufficient. And so I think that's it. I think it's more of a misunderstanding. We did ask about the value or if leadership understands the work that folks do. and I just think in an agency that they're living, eating, sleeping, breathing,
00:10:32
Speaker
PR, yeah um they're working, doing the same thing. They're all, but like the function is all the same. Whereas in an in-house team, you've got teams and departments, technology to sales. They may not have a full picture of what it means to work in comms and that it's not just pitching journalists all day. There's so many things involved in a community community and being in PR that are not media facing. I think the tides are turning on that.
00:11:02
Speaker
A lot of folks like me are out there trying to prove the value of our role so we can get more budget accounts, another agency, whatever, to do the job. And I think the more brands get into hot water with crises, we all know that reputation impacts revenue. The more at risk brands become, the more folks will start to understand the value of what we do.
00:11:28
Speaker
So the in-house folks feel misunderstood. They're like, if they're the only person, no one really gets their job. They might not have the tools and the tech fighting for best practice, but not getting it feeling frustrated. ah Yeah, exactly. I always say the comms team gets left off the thank you emails. You get a big email. We launched this big project. Read about it in TechCrunch and thank you marketing. Thank you product. Thank you engineering and thank you sales. They forget to thank the comms team.
00:11:57
Speaker
who placed that story that you're so excited about sharing with everybody. They don't understand. how the earned media got there, how much we are running offense, running defense to protect and promote these brands we work for, and the people at the heads of these companies that we work for, the C-suite, and they don't understand. And I think a lot of folks think that it's just not that hard. And you see this in the startup world sometimes, like they don't need to hire anybody to do their PR, they can do it themselves. And then they quickly realize how difficult the job is.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah. Do you know the haircare brand Odell sold at Target? They have a beautiful, simple bottles. They've been getting a bit of press. I had their founder, Lindsay Holden, our co-founder on. She was great. Earned media is the only thing they've invested in so far. They are blowing up. Even in Ledbury's business plan, the next tier of client base and revenue, my next big investment is going to be PR because I believe in it so much.
00:13:02
Speaker
Yeah.
AI's Role in PR Success and Muckrack's Tools
00:13:03
Speaker
That's great to hear. AI features are prominently in the report. AI now ranks as a higher priority than media relations. 44% say their companies need to incorporate AI tools into their workflow to ensure success in the next five years. This figure grew 13% from last year. What do you think is driving that sentiment from PR experts?
00:13:27
Speaker
I think that 2023, this report, State of AI is the second iteration of a report we launched in March, 2023. We did it again at the beginning of 2023. To understand where folks' heads were at, what the adoption was like and what they were using it for. I've been hearing anecdotally from folks in the industry that more seasoned PR professionals are having trouble finding work right now. I've seen that in numerous places. And I think that that kind of speaks to this adoption of AI and how important it is.
00:13:56
Speaker
is The future is in AI. I don't think you have to be using chat GPT every day to be a better communicator, but I do think you should have an understanding of the tools, and the potential of yeah and machine learning. We're talking about AI that learns on your data, centralizing your data, getting your stuff out of these siloed spreadsheets, centralizing your team's data so the AIs of the future can learn
00:14:27
Speaker
on your team level data to say, you're talking about recommendation engines and things like that. So you can be a better media relations person so that your um reporting is in your measurement. Your metrics are constantly being updated with the right information. You're getting notified when your brand is mentioned. The A is of the future. Getting your data together.
00:14:50
Speaker
is the best way to prepare for AI. It doesn't surprise me. That's what folks are most concerned about for the next five years. i noticed there's a press pal dot ai feature in beta in muckrack who i haven't used it can you say a little bit about what it does i is our press release and pitch generator, you input a prompt into press pile and you can toggle between the release or pitch. On the press release side, it will draft the press release. On the pitch side, it'll draft a pitch. That's 200 words, which is the number that we've found year after year that journalists prefer their ideal pitch line. And press pile is free. So you don't have to be a customer to use it, which is great. And then you can just copy and paste the text and make it your own. Nothing that is spit out for any and generative AI is really
00:15:35
Speaker
what you want to be out there. but Then it'll also suggest a list of journalists who might be interested interested in your news based on keywords. If you're a MockRack customer, you can click through and it will have a whole list of relevant journalists with contact information. You can send a pitch right from there. It's pretty great, a tool for your workflow. And and that's what we we've done so far in generative, but we've also been incorporating AI and machine learning into MockRack for a while now.
00:16:00
Speaker
Most users don't realize they are actually already using AI for monitoring and things like that. but We have a really cool tool called Recommended Journalists. It will, based on your media list, make a suggestion for journalists. Hey, we recommend you add your usage and then we have another tool in monitoring where it will notify you if you have a spike in mentions. If things are going viral or on fire for bad reasons, you need to know about the spikes. That's called coverage report spike alerts. You can't use these features to your advantage if you're not using a tool where your data's all together and it can increase output and equality of your media relations. You got to give it all the data or it's only going to give you something partial. Exactly.
00:16:47
Speaker
I'm exactly play around more with the AI pitch tool and I'll put a link in the show notes for anyone listening who wants to play around with it. i'm great That's an interesting data point. Maybe everyone knows that. Are there any other cool data points that you guys have found that you've incorporated into the the AI
Effective Pitching and Journalist Preferences
00:17:01
Speaker
tools? We build our.
00:17:03
Speaker
pitch product based on what we know about how journalists like to be pitched. Muckrack started as a free journalist tool 15 years ago. We added a layer of PR tech on top of that. We've been part of the journalism community for a long time. We have safeguards in place for pitching. If a pitch is a little long, we will flag it and say, this is longer than what we know journalists prefer, limit bulk pitching to a certain extent. so You can't just blast out a pitch, she just like,
00:17:32
Speaker
I have 10,000 email addresses, therefore I'm going to pitch 10,000 people like spamming. So we have those kind of safeguards in place, not to mention all the resources and the education that we do with our customers and our audiences about how to pitch, when to pitch, why don't we really focus on one pitching.
00:17:51
Speaker
No, that makes sense. So come back to internal comps for a bit. So yeah you're doing that at Muck Rack and I'm definitely going to pick your brain about your time at the New York Times, which folks would probably be super interested to hear about.
Best Practices for Internal Communications
00:18:03
Speaker
What are some of your best practices or golden rules for internal communications?
00:18:08
Speaker
no matter where you were, the New York Times was a few thousand people all over the world, and Muckrack is 250 plus, also all over the world. But it really doesn't matter how large or so small your organization is. People are still working in silos, in hybrid and remote work environments. That's even more of the case. People don't know what they don't know. And they also don't read. I've come to find and it's not to any fault of of anyone. It's just information overload. There's too many channels. I could check email. I have to check Slack. I have to say check socials. I have to pick up the phone. I'm on huddle. Zoom. I think repetition is key and making it easy for people to access information on a regular cadence on the platforms that work for them. One example of that is at MacRack. We started this weekly internal newsletter that takes all of the things you need to know for the week.
00:18:59
Speaker
puts them in an email every Friday morning. We are a Slack heavy organization. So to put it in email is, Hey, you should read this. This is important. It's got to be an insanely high open rate among employees. And the feedback has been great. People love it. It's not the place where you put, we're going to a baseball game in New York on X day. It's for things you need to know, organize, no hierarchy of information where things you need to do right now is at the top. And then we go down.
00:19:25
Speaker
the funnel and use our editorial of judgment to surface. What's the most important thing you need to know now? I also think that internal comps is one of those things that executives don't necessarily, they're not trained in it. They're trained in so many other things, but not to prioritize internal communications. So I think there's an element of guidance that we as internal comp leaders can provide executives on the importance of visibility, transparency, being visible as a leader, at putting your name on things and constantly talking to your employees via whatever channel is right for them and giving them an option of channels, whether it be a small group meeting, a large company email, a recorded video works best for your work culture, knowing that when you decided to sit in a C-suite, you
00:20:16
Speaker
agreed to a certain amount of access and being the face of the company, even in those uncomfortable conversations. I think there's some learning there and um some guidance that could be provided.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense to me. It resonates. I feel like once you're in the C-suite, there's accountability around communications. I really like what you said about people don't read. When I was pre-Medbury, I was in a chief product officer and then a chief operating officer for a marketing agency for about five years. I spent a lot of time coaching the VPs and directors. I managed on email drafting.
00:20:53
Speaker
and email comms. For folks who aren't trained on it, there's a temptation to write paragraphs. They glazed over by word four. And I remember a few folks really hating, I don't want to have to bold and subhead and cut down what I'm trying to say so hard. Have you ever heard of the book, Writing for Readers? I'm sure it's all very intuitive stuff. Yeah, better yeah we exactly. Who doesn't have a good internal comms person should read that book. I love the idea. I love what you've worked out around.
00:21:18
Speaker
the email, the consistency of that, the familiarity of that makes so much sense, figuring out the right channel for it, making it really legible. and A related question I have is different generations have different expectations for the type of communication that they're going to be getting from their leadership. How do you think the generational expectations differ and how can leaders manage in this environment where you have Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, all with slightly different preferences around how they're talked to and communicated with. I think the younger generations have higher expectations for being constantly brought into the fold.
00:22:04
Speaker
They want updates on the company's strategy, how we're tracking against the strategy. They want insights into what's being spoken about in closed door meetings at the top, right? You go to a leadership offsite. They want to know what, oh, you guys were all away for a week. All the leaders were gone. What did you talk about? Give us a summary of that.
00:22:21
Speaker
Whereas I would say the Gen Xers and maybe older millennials aren't used to having that kind of insight into what's going on. And they're used to being just, you'll tell us when we need to know. And I think the younger folks are just a little bit more vocal about, hey, we need to understand this. And we want to understand how our work ties into the strategy that's being set at the top.
00:22:47
Speaker
They want to know their work is making a difference. They want to understand how it translates into motivation to do the work and commitment to the company. They want to feel how they're making an impact and how they're part of a larger team working together towards a goal.
00:23:03
Speaker
versus keeping my head down and doing my job. And that's what they want more involvement. But I think that they're different kind of learners and they're different. Some are readers, some are visuals, some are audio. So you've got to understand what your work environment is. We've lost a little bit of that face to face with the remote and hybrid work situations. Even still, I think the value of smaller group settings.
00:23:25
Speaker
is an access to executives is what those younger generations are looking for. That's what we thought of when we did these brown bag meetings, we took our CEO and we brought him around to every team in smaller groups, allowed people to and ask questions live and spoke about his personal life a little bit. Hey, I'm a person, that's what I like to do. I think it provides transparency and access that we're not really used to seeing with previous generations. So I think those help and Like for example, our weekly email that we send out on Fridays, I heard from our engineering leader, muck week is great, but I don't think anybody on my team reads it. Yeah. We never check email. People who work with customers or marketing, they're reading them because they check email dealing with outside vendors, customers, et cetera. Whereas an engineer maybe isn't.
00:24:17
Speaker
So we just push it to Slack and that's and something we came out with. We said, we're not going to put it on Slack because this is just email and where there's information overload and people don't want too many pings and dings. We adjusted our plan for folks who don't leave Slack. It's worked. Yeah. It's interesting. It's like you're marketing to your internal folks. And if you're marketing on a channel that nobody's responding to, you got to figure out where your people are and deliver it the way they want it. I don't know if it'll happen. Well, maybe some companies doing this, but.
00:24:47
Speaker
I feel like there's going to start to be some, they have to be funny and interesting and they can be low budge, but I feel like short little podcasts weekly for companies could pi start to be a thing. People listen and learn in different ways. Yeah. And we're also seeing video snippets are a great way to motivate or engage folks.
00:25:09
Speaker
and We use them a lot to get people excited about something that's coming, a large scale meeting, a big planning meeting, a big gathering, whatever it may be, and say, here's why you should be excited or why you should attend. It definitely helps to fill the extra mile. um I feel like if ah if an exec's willing to embarrass themselves on video, everyone in the company will watch that. Exactly. Clickbait. When I think about the generational differences,
00:25:32
Speaker
I think Gen X and Elder Millennials have this Bill Belichick do your job expectations. We expect people to just tell us to shut up, stay in Arlene and do what we're supposed to do. Then I think Gen Z is more like an NBA player. They need Brad Stevens motivating them, showing them the town every week or something like that. Apologies to anyone who's not a Boston fan.
00:25:52
Speaker
I caught about half of that. Okay. That's really interesting. Thank you for all your wisdom. I think there's a lot of great tidbits to talk about how did you get into PR? What was your background before? I majored in English. I wanted to to teach creative writing um at the college level. And I had a professor who told me, absolutely not, you do not want to do this job. I was like, really? And you're like this impressionable, 20 year old college student. So I got a job at a PR agency, very small, like six person boutique agency in college and internship. And they offered me a role after graduation and I took it. I did a stint as a journalist for a while in my early career and then got back into PR and did PR for a while for consumer reports.
00:26:39
Speaker
which is a nonprofit. They cast cars and dishwashers and yeah do advocacy work for consumer safety. So ah that was the early days. and You worked at New York Times for quite a good stretch. Tell folks what you did there. It was to generate awareness of did of digital subscriptions and subscribe into the New York Times to help support independent news. So it was more like the business side. I wasn't necessarily promoting the journalism or working with journalists in 10 years, you definitely do some of that work. It was really about generating more subscriptions, positioning the times in the media industry and in business as being innovative and forward thinking about how to disperse our news, like where to publish it in the early days with social platforms coming out, how much access to New York Times
00:27:32
Speaker
news can you get via Facebook, via Twitter? And then how do you convert people to pay for independent news? I was involved in the launch of the New York Times cooking app and the games app. It's basically how do you take this plethora of knowledge and amazing content and package it um in a way that can generate revenue to fund protecting journalists on the ground in the Middle East with bodyguards and all of those other things that are really costly to pay to create news. So it was all about that. That was early days of people paying for news at the time. It was like the buzz fees and the huff posts of the world where they were bringing in content from all over the internet and giving it away for free. and How do you get people to get used to seeing a paywall?
00:28:17
Speaker
It was really interesting work. Yeah. must And those the games app, the cooking app, those are things that so many people interface with every day. That must have felt cool to be working on and contributing to that stuff. Yeah. To be involved in those planning meetings of the research into viable businesses was really interesting. And then being able to launch it, we had some apps that failed. And to be part of that was really interesting. It was a joy and an honor to be a part of an organization like that.
00:28:46
Speaker
I always like to ask because I think work disaster stories are the most fun stories. Are there any New York Times work disaster stories you can think of where now you're like, Oh my. I remember there was a horrible plane crash in some ocean. It was one that disappeared. There was a plane, a aviation disaster. And we had an advertiser on the New York Times total page who will remain that they had an amp fish and underwater.
00:29:12
Speaker
vibes going on and it was horrible timing. I was young in my career and I checked in with the advertising team because I got an inbound from a reporter. I called the ad team and I was like, what are you guys doing on this? They were like, we're pulling it down. I had to get back to the journalist and I said, it was a a terrible coincidence and kids pulled it out. That didn't go over well with the advertisers. And now looking back on it, I have more experience. What I would have done is directed that reporter to the advertiser. It's their ad. They should be talking about their ad, not the rep for the New York Times. And I think knowing when to deflect or pass the buck and not speak out of turn, like only speak to media inquiries that make sense, that you don't have to
00:29:57
Speaker
to do the job for the journalists. They're just going to ask. They're not trying to be manipulat manipulative. They're not trying to get you in hot water, but they're going to ask. That's their job is to just ask and try to get information. They're not really thinking about what's appropriate and who's it more appropriate to ask. They're just looking for quotes and to pull strings. I supply. I made a poor judgment call there.
00:30:17
Speaker
That's interesting. i I love that advice on know when to deflect. No one, it's not your job. I feel like your response is reasonable and transparent. You would think, especially in a crisis moment like that, you have to take a minute. Thanks for sharing that. You've been on a ton of other pods that I listened to prep for this. And I asked you before we got on, if there's anything you hadn't talked about that you'd like to the idea of the complete leader, which I thought was really fascinating. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? So.
00:30:47
Speaker
My idea of the complete leader, and I'm still figuring out how to create this concept and publish it, is that the complete leader of the future needs to have IQ, EQ, and AI. The leader of the past really has just had to have IQ. I think that leader of the present is really pushed for IQ and EQ. And the leader of the future needs to have all three.
00:31:11
Speaker
IQ, the intelligence, the smart, knowing your stuff. That's a given. EQ is that emotional intelligence. And I think a lot of leaders still struggle with that, but the successful leaders have that ability to be a human, accessible, accountable, and show empathy for your customers, your team, whoever you may be dealing with, because those are the brands that really stand out. And those are the brands that really make it to the end. You're not going to get anywhere in business by being a jerk.
00:31:40
Speaker
We're being cold. And then in terms of AI, what we've talked about before, how important understanding AI technology is to every leader. If your leader is embracing knowing as much about AI as possible and preparing for AI's revolution, you're setting your entire organization up to be successful. A lot of that comes down to creating policies for use cases.
00:32:05
Speaker
offering training for your teams on AI and what AI tools are available to them and investing in empowering your team to be successful in the future. I really like that. As you say it, it seems so obvious. A company's AI policy is going to be as important as any other employee policy and and incredible competitive disadvantage or advantage in the future. It all seems still so nebulous and wild Westy. I'm really excited to see what the next few years look like. I'm excited to see whatever you end up writing about it. It feels intuitive, but I don't think a lot of folks are talking about that. So I think you've really got something there. When I have a minute to write something, I hope to get pen to paper on that one. I can see the Venn diagram of the three different with AI EQ. Exactly. yeah um Here's my favorite question, Linda. Have you ever seen a ghost?
00:33:04
Speaker
I haven't seen a ghost. You told me on the prep, but I don't know the story, so I cannot wait. My family owns a 400-year-old building in Western Massachusetts. It's used as a business, but also has some residential property. It used to be a tavern way back, American Revolution days. And there's actually a book of fiction that touches on this. Two young men got in a duel.
00:33:31
Speaker
either in or outside the tavern and one was killed. We think this young man is haunting this property. I've lived in the residential part of the property in various points of my life um as a child, and my family works in the commercial side of the property. and You just expect somebody to come around the corner, there's nobody there.
00:33:53
Speaker
We've called the police multiple, we've stopped now because we know it's the ghost. We really think someone's in the house hearing footsteps above you, footsteps coming up the stairs, doors closing. He just can't explain any of it. But we know that he's not hostile. So we lived harmoniously with him for decades. So you've never seen him, but you've heard. Yeah, that's a great one. yeah When I hear ghost stories, I think I hope I don't become a ghost. That sounds like a very sad, lonely way to spend the afterlife.
00:34:23
Speaker
It doesn't seem sad to me. It seems engaged. Okay. All right. um Okay. Is there anything I should have asked? No, if you feel like you covered it. Thank you. Hey content people. Do you mind if I call you that? If you liked the show, there are a few ways you can stay in touch and support us. The first is you could subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode.
00:34:50
Speaker
The second is you could leave a five star rating and a review. And the third is you could sign up for the content people newsletter. The link is in the show notes. We share news about the show and episodes. And I also write a lot about the intersection between work and creativity, which is at the heart of so many of these content people conversations. We also love feedback if you want to.
00:35:11
Speaker
request a guest or a topic, pitch yourself to be on the show, advertise with us, learn more about Medberry social media, or otherwise just be in touch, shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you. It's Meredith at medberryagency.com. That's M-E-D-B-U-R-Y agency dot.com. I will throw that in the show notes too. All right, until next time.