The Creative Agency Success Show: Episode 148

Imagine turning media attention into real business growth. For service-based small business owners, publicity is about turning visibility into profit.

In this episode, Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, shares exactly how you can use PR to grow your credibility and revenue. He explains how press releases, when done right, can open doors to media coverage, attract your ideal clients, and create long-term financial success.

Jamie Nau: [00:00:02] Hello everybody, welcome to today’s show. Excited to talk with Mickey Kennedy from eReleases. He’s here really to talk to us about how to use PR to boost our credibility. So first off, welcome the show Mickey and why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background and kind of how you got to where you are. [00:00:22][19.9]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:00:22] Sure, so my name is Mickey Kennedy. I run eReleases. We’ve been
around for 27 years this year. So we’ve been round a while. Congratulations. I started with PR
about 30 years ago. I had finished a MFA creative writing degree. And my emphasis was poetry.
And I’m like, I was just gonna wait tables and write poetry. And so I had always done that part-
time waiting tables. And then I did it full-time the summer after I graduated and realized full- time
waiting tables is like 50 to 60 hours, mostly on concrete, standing, back hurts, just feel
exhausted. And I never wanted to roll another silverware again. So I… [00:01:05][42.2]
Jody Grunden: [00:01:06] I think we probably all did on this. [00:01:07][1.2]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:01:09] I transitioned to an office job and I got hired at a telecom research
startup as employee number three and because I had writing in my background, among the
30,000 things they wanted me to do was to write press releases and fax them out. And so we
had a roll of decks of 150 fax numbers to send to and our fax machine state-of-the-art that it
was held only a hundred numbers. So I would waste two days each time we sent out press
releases programming a hundred numbers, hitting send. Then having to delete those to put 50
more in and, uh, and you’d literally wait a whole day for it to try to finish sending. And, uh the
next morning you collect all the errors and add those to the next batch that you’re sending and
trying to finish it that day. And what I found was at the end of that, nothing happened. And I
mentioned to the owner, I was like, Hey, we, we set that release out and nothing happened and
he goes, yeah, it never does. He goes, it just… We’re expected to write press releases and send
them out. But yeah, they never do anything with it. We’re wasting two days here. I’m wasting
two days here, right? I’d like, I kind of want to spend a little time figuring it out, you know, what
we’re doing wrong, if we’re doing anything wrong. And what I found out was we were, we were
publishing data and, you know, a lot of people say data is great for, for the media, but we
weren’t really putting it in context. Like we just sent out, Hey, here’s our latest Caribbean
country, uh, us telecom traffic. Traffic to here’s the number of minutes, you know, for this past
year, and nothing happened. And I was like, Well, let’s, you know, let, let s look for the story
here. And i had noticed that most journalists, even if it’s a small article, like to write in a story
arc. And it was like how do you write numbers in the story arc, where there’s only numbers. But I
did notice that like one of these countries, I can’t even remember what it was, but it wasn’t when
you’ve heard it was like not a… You know, a normal Caribbean country you’ve heard of, but it
had more telecom traffic than all the others by far. And I asked them, what’s the story here? And
they go, oh, you know 1-900 numbers, which nobody listening probably does, but they were
popular 30 years ago. They all routed through this country. I think like the 900, 1-900 is like to
them. And it just rerouted through in this country and they’re taking advantage of this. And if. For
those who don’t know, there was all these 1-900 numbers and each one had a different price.
So you could call one and get like your horoscope pre-recorded and you press seven if you’re a
Leo and six if you are a Virgo or something. And you’d hear, you know, people talk real slowly
trying to get that third or fourth minute and at 50, 75 cents a minute to get your horoscopes. But
you could also talk to people live, they had like pet experts, there were psychics, there was
everything from like. You know, reading children’s stories to more mature stuff during the time.
And so I was like, oh, this is cool. So I wrote a press release about 1-900 numbers and how
they’re tied to this country. And, you know also put our data in there and backs that out and
another two days gone. But this time we got picked up by the Financial Times, The Economist,
Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Red Herring Um, and three or four telecom trade
publications. And, uh, it was different. And I was just like, Whoa, I was like, I wonder if we could
keep doing this. And we never got that many, um, again, but we routinely got two or three
pickups on average, every time we were doing more story-based stuff. And I just felt like this is
cool, but I wouldn’t want to do this for a living because faxing sucks. And then around the same
time. I would do more batches of faxing and I’d get phone calls saying, Hey, could you start
emailing your press releases to us instead of faxes? And I remember celebrating the day that I
was able to take the 51st plate person off so that I didn’t have to reprogram the fax machine. I
could keep the numbers in the faxes machine and just store it and then pull it out and hit send.
And it saved so much time, but it gave me the idea for emailing press releases as a business.
And that’s how E-Releases started and. Um, over the years, that business model does not work
well anymore. Uh, but fortunately I had, uh, transitioned years before because, uh PR newswire
kept reaching out to us and saying, Hey, we like what you’re doing. Have you thought about
offering us as an add on? And I’m like, Oh, how much do you charge? And just to give you a
comparison today for like a 600 WordPress release to go out nationally, PR news wire charges
over $1,700. And my clients at the time were paying a couple hundred. Today it’s still a few
hundred dollars. And I was just like, hey, I don’t think they can afford it. And I said, but could you
give me really great pricing if all of my clients went through you? And they were like, well, what
kind of volume are you talking about? And so I think at the time it was like three or 4,000
releases a year. Today we do over 10,000 a year, and so we have a really good rate and we
have some caveats, but. You can use us for probably about a quarter to a third of what you
would pay if you went directly to the wire for a national distribution of a press release still goes
to all the trade publications and all of that, but it also goes nationally to all the media. And so it’s
a really good value from that standpoint. And I’d mentioned to my original business model of
emailing, uh, over the past 20 years, uh media databases have become pretty commonplace
paying anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 a year for a license. And you get to. You know, send to
the journalist. And what happens is you have, you know a golf club company buys it. They hit
send of their press release to 2,200 golf journalists and nothing happens. And rather than go
back and try to figure out what they did wrong, like I did originally, they just said, we just need to
send it to more people. And so they go, you who loves to play golf? Bankers and Wall Street
types. So let’s send this to a financial analyst and people who report on publicly traded
companies and stocks. Knowing they’ll never write on golf clubs, or maybe they do think that
they will write on goth clubs, but they never have and they never will. But that happens now in
every industry and national journalists biggest complaint is their inbox is chaos. And they usually
just create filters for people that they recognize and are safe and send them to a different folder.
And in the inbox, they just sort of skim it and move on because it’s just so bad. Um, but the
news wire. Is exactly the opposite. In the US, there’s basically a duopoly. There’s a business
wire and PR news wire for press releases. And there’s other wires you’ve heard of, AP, Reuters,
places like that. They do not transmit press releases, they originally write the articles that run on
their network because they get licensed by newspapers and other media outlets that say, hey,
we’re the Baltimore Sun and the editor wants to go home rather than stay up and write an article
about a Supreme Court decision that just happened. They’ll just pull it off the AP and pay a
licensing fee or they already have an arrangement. And that’s how that works. But for
businesses that are transmitting press releases, it’s basically pure newswire and business wire.
And they’re very clean. And the industry feeds are very, you know, there are editors who look
and make sure that you’re choosing appropriate, you’re not a golf club company saying, let’s go
to banking, let’s go to business marketing and other things like that. So journalists love it
because they can log in. Look at their feed and they can even customize their feed. So like
maybe they cover fashion, but they cover like retail, not the high fashion. So they can set up
keywords to exclude. Look, if it’s mentioning Gucci or Hermes or Hermese or whatever it is, I
don’t wanna see it. So it’s a very clean and relevant to them. And that’s the real value of it
because what’s also happened over the past 20 years is classified ads have gone away.
Journalists are expected to do double today what they were doing in the past. Very little time for
investigative journalism. Instead of writing two to three articles a week, it’s four to eight articles a
weak. And so they’re expected to do more with less. And so, they’re relying more on, you know,
just knowing where to fish. And the two biggest ponds, of course, in the U.S. Are PR News,
Wire, and Business Warner. [00:09:48][518.3]
Jamie Nau: [00:09:50] Cool. So I guess when I think of news releases or press releases, what I
think is either sports, right? So like I’m a, I’m an athlete that just got signed or I’m, an athlete had
a transaction or I think back to my like sec days when like, you know, anytime someone was
hired or we’d have a quarter release, we’d had to do the press releases. And so thinking about
your business model. So if I’m five million owned a $5 million company and I’m sitting here
listening to this podcast, okay, awesome. I understand what you just talked about, but how can I
use this to benefit my business and what type of press releases can I have that might help?
Help draw me customers or people to really understand who I am. [00:10:28][37.1]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:10:29] So what is appropriate to send out is any major milestone. So
you’ve hired a new executive, like someone who’s really recognizing the industry, or you have a
new CEO or something like that. That’s an event that certainly a press release would be
appropriate, and to let your industry know that. Helen, the new associate in HR, maybe you
don’t do a press for Helen. She’s not important enough. But So you want to make sure that, you
know, it’s an announcement that’s newsworthy enough. But that being said, a lot of things that
people issue could be made a little more newsworthy. For example, product launch and service
launches are, you know, the most common type of press release that we get. And it’s usually,
you know, missing the elements to create a story. It’s usually here’s a new product or service,
here’s a list of features, and here’s a page to learn more or buy it. And from a journalist’s
standpoint, you know… You remember, they’re writing not for you, but for their audience, you
know? They have to either educate or entertain or ideally both their audience. And is that
announcement gonna do it? No, but one of the easiest things you can do is incorporate a use
case study. Like, hey, here’s a failing business, three years old, been losing 12% this most
recent year. You could take a publicly available data point and say, in our industry, 63% of new
companies fell in the first five years because they don’t achieve profitability. And by using our
solution 90 days in, they’re projected to have a 5% net profit at the end of this year for the first
time. Then you follow that up with a quote by the client saying, of all the things that I thought we
needed to do, I thought it was just win more contracts. But what I found is you could win
unlimited contracts. If you’re losing money on every one, you’ll never be profitable. And
something that just speaks to what they’re going through. That has a little bit of suspense and
play and. You know, you can build the story arc, you know, and that gives it a much more
likelihood that journalists can take that and get a compelling article that they can share with the
audience. You can kill, you, you could, what did they call it? Uh, kill two birds with one stone.
You want to satisfy the journalists need to have something that’s going to really delight their
audience, but at the same time, you want to promote what you’re doing and you can accomplish
both. But so many people are only thinking about themselves that they’re only trying to kill one
bird and it doesn’t really satisfy the journalist and therefore you just get ignored.
[00:13:01][152.6]
Jody Grunden: [00:13:02] Is that the difference between what an ad campaign and then a PR?
So that you’re attacking one area versus attacking. [00:13:09][6.5]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:13:10] Yeah. When someone is doing an ad, it’s just like, it is very guilty.
It’s like, we just want to sell this. So we want to present it in a way that we feel is going to be
compelling from an advertising standpoint. That being said, people have blinders on when it
comes to ads. We are suspicious. We’re not inquisitive. We don’t get curious often when we see
ads. We just sort of move on. When we read an article, it almost like a third party endorsement
when a journalist writes about you. It’s like, oh, you know, they feel more invested. And there’s
usually this, when you read something you get this human interest element and you know it’s
often because of that story. And you know I’ve seen a lot of Kickstarter campaigns where they
talk about this person who just wanted this one product to have a change so that it could be
used in this really interesting and valuable way that could apply to a lot of people and the
company’s not interested in changing it. This person’s like. All of a sudden I’m talking to
companies in China trying to get these molds made because I’m gonna make it. And you’re like,
all of sudden you’re like, I don’t need this gadget, but I’ll give this guy 30 bucks to help them
towards their dream and stuff like that. And that’s what happens because you start rooting for
the person. And we like to buy from people and not businesses. And I think journalists do a
better job of bringing the humanity out in these articles and things like that, a better than we do
when we’re writing ads and things that. Um, and I think that’s where the real magic happens.
I’ve had people come to me and say, you know, we had this article and it looks, there was a link
in it to us and it looked like 30% of the people who visit from that link bought and you know our
best landing page is converting it like 3%. Is that possible? And I’m like, sure. Cause not
everybody read it click through to it, but the people that did, you know that got that, you. Know,
uh, sort of that trust factor and a trust signal and they just want to Go! Work with you and
especially they were a consumer product lower end very affordable Not that type of decision you
have to go and consult or plan for is just a click and support or click and buy And so yeah, those
are the kinds of things that happen there people generally when they read an article and buy
from you They’re not price shopping. They want to support the person they read about and so
they’re not as price sensitive at that moment And they tend to be more loyal. They’re like, oh
yeah, I remember that company. They were on Shark Tank. And when they opened, they didn’t
share their numbers. No one does. They share their number after they told you the story.
Sometimes it’s like a vulnerability. They lost their job. And they said, this has happened again
and again. I want to be in control. I want start my own destiny. Or, you know, in another case,
you know, I had this. Hobby that I used to do with my dad. He died and I thought, you know,
now’s the time to turn that into a business because I don’t have children and I can commit to it
and I want to see that succeed. And what that does is it just that human interest element just it
smacks and gets us involved and we root for them. Even if they don’t get funding, there is this
huge upsurge of people who place orders and support these people because they shared their
story and they got vulnerable. And we want to support the people behind these businesses.
Jamie Nau: [00:16:36] So I’m curious. So how do you define success to your clients? So here
are a couple of things you mentioned there. So one, is it like pickups? So how many news
articles or news stories the press release gets picked up in or is it conversion rate? And then the
second part to that question is how successful are you? Like how often does that happen? Like
what kind of client expect? [00:16:56][19.8]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:16:57] That’s right. I’ll start out with the bad news first. 97% of press
releases that get issued over the wire and they pay a lot of money. I said it was $1,700 to go
over the wire. 97 percent of them generate no earned media. It’s not easy. That being said, I
define success as earned media and for some people it’s life transforming. I had one client.
Called and said, I don’t know what a press release is, but my boss says we have to do one. And
at the end of it, they sent out a press released and it was a waste management company that
builds waste management facilities, everything including recycling for your for mostly
municipalities, cities, they’ll come in, and they just do everything. And they sent out a press
release, and it got picked up in waste news, which was a I think it’s a monthly magazine trade
magazine. And a company in Australia, not a company, a city in Australia reached out and said,
Hey, can you build these in Australia? And they go, yeah, we, we do them in South America.
We do them. In India, we’re all over. We put them on barges or boats and ship them out and we
go there and we put them all up and, and Australia, they said, yeah. We we’ve been talking like
30 different vendors to how each to do a separate piece and you come in and you do everything
from the ground up. And hire people to assemble it and put it all together. That’s what we want
and need. At the end of it, it resulted in three municipalities getting facilities in Australia. And he
said it was over $30 or $40 million at the time. And just from, you know, a $300 press release.
And that person’s job was an office assistant, you know, he didn’t know how to do a press
release, we walked him through it. And I think it was under four at the time, $400 to send it out.
And he said that the odor is always coming by, just patting them on the shoulders. So good job.
Great ROI. But, you know, it varies for people. I mean, I’ve had people, we have a case study
on our website for an effort that was very short lived during the pandemic called the Dining Bond
Initiative. It was sort of like a volunteer grassroots kind of thing built up the war bond initiative.
And basically. They were wanting to help restaurants that were closed during the pandemic. It
was very early in it. We were still just sent home for two weeks to flatten the curve at that time.
We sent out a release. I quit counting after a hundred media pickups because the amount of
daily papers that picked it up just seemed limitless. It got picked up by all the big publications as
well as these dailies, generated over $10 million in revenue for restaurants. The way it worked is
you would nominate your favorite local restaurant, and if the volunteers were able to get a hold
of them, you would give money that went directly to them immediately, and it’d be backed by a
dining bond or gift certificate type scenario. And it’s like, you know, if you had a favorite
restaurant you went to on your anniversary, you just wanted to give them $50 or $100 to let you
know I’m thinking of you and, you know. I hope that it helps a little bit. It was just something that,
you, know, people really responded to. And I think it was because there was such negative
news and uncertainty. That here was something positive, so it did very well. And also, I think it
was actionable. We were sent home. We were powerless. But here was, something we could do
to help in our local community. And it just did very, well. And so that shows that this can go
really wide if you have something that just really speaks to people. But that being said, the
biggest thing that I did during the pandemic is I honed in on the 3% of press releases that do get
picked up. And I created a free master class. That is originally 11 hours long, but I’ve got it
under an hour because I was told by my staff that, you know, we live in a TikTok world, no one’s
gonna watch 11 hours. So it goes through the types of releases that represent the 3% that
almost anyone can do. And the first is story arc, you now, telling something in a story format,
what’s your story, the same thing with the shark tank, You know, what is. You can sometimes
talk about your reason for being in business. Sometimes you can talk about the impetus for a
product or solution, but that’s not always applicable. But even when you have just like a product
launch, what is the case study that you could put in there, the story elements that you can give
them? There’s things like a long time ago, someone coined news jacking, and I think by the time
they finished spelling it, it was already out of favor. Uh, it was, uh, basically if something was
trending, you do a press release on it and, uh I had someone say, Hey, this target credit card
breach. This was years ago. I think about doing a press lease on it. And I said, well, let’s go look
on business wire and PR news awareness. Uh, yeah, there’s like 1400 other people who’ve had
the same idea. And, uh uh, I doubt that there’s going to be that many stories. And so what I
suggested is, you know, if you’re going to. Join a conversation like that, never join it with the
same message as everybody else. Be a contrarian. Is there something in this announcement
that you could be a contraryan about? Because if you think about it, in the case of the Target
Predator breach, let’s say there was 50 articles that got written about it in major publications. If
you’re the only person raising your hand and giving a contrerian viewpoint to what everybody
else is saying, you have the likelihood you could be plugged into all 50 of those articles because
no one else is doing the contrarian viewpoint and journalists technically like to be fair and
balanced. And so you do stand the likelihood of being plugged in there. I noticed that when I
worked with the telecom research company, there was a guy there in the telecomm world who
had a website. And every time there was even the hint or smell of a telecom merger, he would
just update his website and say, here’s two or three quotes on this impending merger, if there
even is one that announced. And they were always negative. So, and it’s funny because, you
know, if MCI, you they did, I think, merge with WorldCom, you know when they announced it,
they both issued press releases saying, this is good for consumers. It’s gonna give you more
leverage and synergy and lower prices. And you know this guy’s like. Oh, this is going to be
terrible. This is bad for consumers. And so he always was ready with these quotes. Every time
there was an article in the telecom publications, Wall Street Journal, any of these places about
these mergers, he was quoted in at least half of them because he was the, he was the
contrarian on every merger in the Telecom world. And that’s a really great place to be. If you’re
comfortable, you have to make sure that if you are being contrarian. Uh, that you’re not going to
alienate yourself with your customers. I had one client come to me and say, Mickey, I’m getting
all this great press, but my customers now say they hate me. Maybe that’s a sign that you
shouldn’t be taking these contrarian viewpoints on every issue. This person was really good at
being like the devil’s advocate of contrarians. But so you just have to be mindful of that, but
there’s other types of things that I go through that you can do. I have one type of press release
that has never failed. The least it’s ever generated in earned media is four articles, and average
is like seven to 12 articles, and that’s to do an industry survey. And I know that people’s eyes
are gonna glaze over and that seems like such hard work, but I tell you, you do a survey
monkey, four questions per page, three pages of 12 questions or four pages, 16 questions.
Really brainstorm and ask thoughtful questions, like what’s going on in your industry? You
know, AI is hot, is there questions around AI? You know if I’m in the graphic design business, I’d
be like, do you, you know, do you believe that your job’s gonna be replaced by AI in five years?
And you know you could ask things around that, but you know brainstorm, if you were going to a
trade show or conference, what are some of the questions you’d ask? And often you’re thinking
of questions to ask at these trade shows and conferences because you’re being ignored by the
media. They don’t mean to ignore it, but there’s usually things that you see. And I say, I wonder
if it’s just our business experiencing this or others in our field that are experiencing this. Those
are great questions to ask, but sometimes just, you know, regular questions, do you plan on
spending more or less in the next quarter on marketing, you, know, are you finding it, uh, you
know, people’s budgets are going up or are they going down? Are they staying the same? You
can really build out those into sort of like a, uh. You know your own prediction of where the
Industries economy is going in the next six months to a year based on that and then you’re
gonna have a quote in there Is why you felt the numbers skewed in a particular way? And of
course, you’re only focusing on a couple of the questions in the press release But do build out a
page on your website where you put all the questions and answers So journalists can go there
and hunt for other stories that you know might be there But you’re you ideally hopefully decided
to pick on the two biggest aha moments from the survey and sometimes share with others to
say what you think would be most shocking if this came out. And generally when we do those
press releases and send those out, it’s a minimum of four articles and it’s often as many as a
range between seven and 14 that we see. And the next pushback I get from clients is I don’t
know enough people to send a survey to. And the thing is every industry has dozens, if not
hundreds of independent and small trade associations. You want to steer clear of the big ones
because they don’t need you and they’re not going to cooperate. But the smaller and
independent ones are out there. I like the ones that have at least 700, 800 members or more.
And, you know, I had one person tell me, well, Mickey and public relations, there’s only PRSA.
And I was like, well, there’s 700 others in North America. And they were shocked. And so I told
them that there was one that I like to use that has, it represents PR firms of 50 employees or
less. And I was like, it’s probably 80% of the PR firm market. And I don’t know that I even like
one person surveying for the large companies because I’m gonna get someone to agree what
the whole corporation really feels. [00:27:42][645.6]
Jody Grunden: [00:27:43] Right, in one direction, yeah. [00:27:45][1.4]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:27:45] Brain. But you know, and that’s a great association, because
nobody knows these associations exist, they thrive on getting a little publicity themselves. So I
always approach it. It’s like, Hey, I have this link, could you send it to your members, I’m looking
for a minimum of 100 responses to be statistically relevant. And if we get that, I will mention you
in the press release, I’ll be issuing nationally over PR Newswire in the coming weeks, two thirds
of the time, they’ll say yes, right off the bat, because it’s an opportunity for them to get some
media attention. And all they have to do is generally email and maybe do a social media push.
And because I mentioned I’m looking for 100 responses but I don’t get it, they often will help me
do a second push so that we get our numbers up and we get closer to that. [00:28:26][41.6]
Jamie Nau: [00:28:29] Yeah, that’s a lot to dig in on this topic. So I definitely think there’s been,
you’ve really dug into it and really understand the industry. So I think hopefully, when we’re
listening to this, goes out and checks your website out and wants to. Again, it’s a lot more than I
thought went into press releases based on my limited experience with it. So I appreciate that.
But we’re close to time here. So I want to ask the final fun question and you did mention your
poetry background and I’m not going to embarrass me, maybe Jody has a better understanding
of poetry than I do. I’d be like, my favorite poet is Dr. Seuss because that’s about how my poetry
goes. But I am curious and obviously you’re interested in writing and writers. For both of you
and this is a question I’ve asked before but it’s one of my favorites is what’s the last good book
you guys have read? It could be any fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter to me, I’m just kind of
curious if there’s any books I need to be investing in. So Jodie, I’ll start with you, because I know
you’re reading like 10 books a week or something like that at this point, so. [00:29:23][54.6]
Jody Grunden: [00:29:23] Yeah, I could actually look it up. Yeah, come back to me here
because I got to [00:29:28][5.7]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:29:28] All right, Mickey, do you have a good one, Mickey? I do. I recently
pulled out a book, The Way It Is by William Stafford. He’s an older poet and someone had
written a poem about a deer dead on the side of the road. And I’m like, why do people even
bother after William Staffords book, which has the most perfect poem about that’s in it. And uh…
Pulled it out and was sharing it with a friend, and I just got lost in the book again. It’s like such
an amazing writer. And, you know, there’s a reason we go back to the classics and stuff like
that. I know that a lot, especially in literature today, a lot of the older white men are getting beat
up in there, but you know he’s a really great writer and just amazing, you now, diction and word
choice and images and things like that, and just reminded me that, you knew, The classics are
usually the classics for a reason. [00:30:28][59.4]
Jamie Nau: [00:30:29] Yeah, what about you, Jody? [00:30:31][1.1]
Jody Grunden: [00:30:32] Yeah, I was trying to think, because a lot of the books I read are the
business books. And so I was in a strategic coach meeting and the lady’s like, you know, hey,
you should read one to two, basically fiction books. And I thought, well, I used to do that like a
lot when I was younger and all the way through college and everything. I thought yeah, I’ll do
that. And I picked up a book called The First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston. Okay. It was a really
cool psychological thriller. It uh… I didn’t know where it was going at first, and then just kind of
twisted it around to where it, it was exciting to, it was actually fun to actually continue it on, hey, I
can’t wait to, I’ll put it down, I can wait to finish the next few chapters and so forth. So I highly
recommend something like that for the person that reads a lot of non-fiction books is to kind of
get away a little bit and read a fiction book every once in a while and let your mind. Go and have
some fun with it versus focusing and concentrating and trying to do what everyone does with the
non-fiction type books. [00:31:36][64.9]
Jamie Nau: [00:31:37] What I like about that is you can do both at the same time, right? Like I
can be reading a nonfiction and a fiction book at the same time and it’s not like my wires get
crossed, right. Like, cause there’s really not a lot of stories in it. So I’m at any one time I’m
reading like two books because I’m always reading a fiction and a non-fiction. So from that
standpoint, 13 by Steve Kavanaugh is one of my, you might want to check out Jody. It’s, it’s
similar. It’s a it’s a 13. Yeah, I’ll send you the link. Yeah, it was really good. It was about a guy
that got on a jury and it’s a really interesting story. I don’t want to give too much away of it, but it
was a fast read for me because I enjoyed it so much. But in terms of the other book I’m reading
that I had on first in my list, what I really like is when authors tell a story. But then in that story,
they’re also giving like Toys away kind of like what’s the one you have Jody? Uh, mr. Smoose.
Isn’t that what he? [00:32:23][45.9]
Jody Grunden: [00:32:23] Oh, Mr. Scrooge, yeah. [00:32:24][1.0]
Jamie Nau: [00:32:24] It’s through a story and each chapter he’s like a little lesson. So the one
I’m reading like that right now is called Pound the Stone by Joshua Metcalf. He also wrote
Chopwood and Carry Water and it’s a similar style where like he writes a chapter about
something and then at the end of each chapter there’s like different parables that come from it.
So that’s the one i’m reading right now called Pond the Stone, by Joshua Medcalf and really
enjoying that. So those are kind of the couple books that I’m that’s fascinated me over the past
month or so. Cool, well, definitely appreciate you coming on, Mickey, and as always want to
kind of end with how our listeners can find you, and yeah, and also final thoughts. So let’s, I’ll
start with you, Mickie then we’ll end with you Jody with your final thoughts [00:33:02][37.8]
Mickie Kennedy: [00:33:02] Sure, so my website’s ereleases.com. That free master class I
alluded to, it’s an hour long, a great place for anybody to start and they can sort of envision a
PR campaign of six to eight releases and make sure that they’re strategic from the beginning.
That’s at erelease.com slash plan, P-L-A-N, and again, no cost for that. [00:33:24][21.7]
Jamie Nau: [00:33:25] And then what was your final takeaway for our listeners? [00:33:28][2.2]
Jody Grunden: [00:33:29] Yeah, I got a really good understanding of the difference between a
PR and just a regular ad, which is, uh, I think, you know, for a lot of people it’s just more
education and I thought, I thought what, uh I thought telling the story and all that kind of stuff
wasn’t admin reality, it’s, it, it it’s public relations and you can kind of pick it up for really any
subject, any, you know with, with every company, I’m sure there’s many, many different uh,
things if you really dig in deep that you could, could talk about, uh, that would help generate
revenue for your company. [00:33:56][27.0]
Jamie Nau: [00:33:58] Awesome. Well, I think both of you for my final thought. Yeah. No, I,
again, it’s, it was very educational for me. And again, my thought of always a press releases
was very, uh, almost could be written by AI. That was always the way I looked at it when I did it
for the public companies I worked for. So you kind of put a different spin on it for me, that the,
you know, that those types of press releases get picked up in very few places where if you can
have a pretty good story for a press release that a lot of people are interested in, then it can
really help your business. And I get, I never even thought of that as a strategy. So I definitely
learned a lot here. Great, well appreciate both you guys and hope our listeners get a lot out of
this.