Episode 144: How to Solve a PR Crisis with Oliver Aust
What do you do when you are in a PR crisis that puts your company or business reputation at risk? This episode with communications expert Oliver Aust reveals the best ways to deal with challenges that poses a threat to your reputation that can arise from media backlash, product defects, legal matters, bad reviews and more. We also highlight the most CREATIVE PR campaigns on a budget to inspire you to build buzz around your brand even on a shoestring budget!
Here’s What We Cover and More:
Crises are inevitable and can significantly impact a small business’s revenue and profitability.
Common crises include negative online reviews, cyberattacks and health related issues.
The necessity of preparation, including vulnerability assessments and crisis communication plans.
The triple As— Acknowledge, Apologize, Act— and advises against the three Ds— Deny, Diminish, Deflect.
Incentive PR tactics such as leveraging unique events and building strong relationships with journalists.
Memorable campaigns like sending pizza-sized cookies to journalists and using visual stunts at airports.
Power of authenticity and taking contrarian viewpoints to capture media attention.
Maintaining a reputation for honesty and delivering compelling stories.
Evolving media landscape, including the rise of AI in communications.
How AI can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for genuine human connections.
Value of unique, original voices.
Being prepared and creative in crisis PR can not only help small businesses survive tough times but also can turn challenges into unique opportunities for growth and visibility. Additionally, these strategies can help differentiate themselves and cultivate robust relationships with journalists, even when operating with limited resources.
Product Businesses! Download my free HOW TO GET INTO A GIFT GUIDE/PRODUCT ROUND UP roadmap for free HERE to get more sales and traffic to your site this season.
If you want to land your first feature for free without any connections, I want to invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Register now at www.gloriachoupr.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
Follow Oliver Aust on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/oliver-aust
Listen to his podcast: https://oliveraust.com/podcast/
Additional Resources:
Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Platform
Follow & Review on Apple Podcasts
00:00:00 Gloria: What's up, small business heroes? Welcome back to another episode of Small Business PR, where we make PR and marketing super accessible for the everyday small business underdog. Today, we're going to do something a little bit different. Now maybe you're used to hearing a lot of journalists on this, or one of my PR members, but today I have a special treat for you, my friend, Oliver Aust. He is also a podcast host of his own podcast, Speak Like a CEO.
00:00:21 Gloria: He has been a spokesperson, a communications expert, helping Fortune 500 leaders master their communications, but I wanted to have him on to talk about how to get creative with your PR campaigns and crisis communications. So if you've ever wondered what the most creative PR campaigns have been, how they're created, or if you're in crisis, let's say, your competitor is ripping off your idea, Oliver is a person to go to. So welcome to the show, Oliver.
00:00:46 Oliver: Hi Gloria, thanks for having me.
00:00:47 Gloria: So can you tell me a little bit about the work that you've done in communications really quickly? I know you've been in this field for 20 years and you've authored so many books, but just tell our readers, our listeners, a little bit more about you.
00:00:58 Oliver: Thank you. So, yeah, I've been in communications for over 20 years and working internationally across Europe. And for a long time I was the chief spokesman, chief communicator, of a big international airline that some people will have heard about called easyJet. And I joined easyJet in 2005, and it was still sort of slightly fledging and a business that was growing fast and was trying and starting to take on the big boys of the airline industry in Europe Air France, Lufthansa, British Airways.
00:01:25 Oliver: And that was a very creative and exciting time from a PR perspective because the company was really built on PR. We didn't have the budgets to do huge marketing campaigns that traditional airlines would normally do to entice travelers to go somewhere, so we had to get creative.
00:01:41 Gloria: I love that so much. So would you say your expertise is in creative and crisis PR?
00:01:46 Oliver: So these days, I focus on leadership communication, so I help a lot of CEOs and founders to become better communicators. And that encompasses crisis, PR, public speaking, podcasting, writing books, so the whole toolbox, so to speak, of CEO and leadership communication. But certainly as a PR expert, I've given hundreds of interviews myself and in my books, I've also covered PR, of course. So it's really something that's very close and dear to my heart.
00:02:13 Oliver: And crisis communication is something where we actively advise a lot of quite important organizations and help them stay up to speed. It's not just bringing people up to speed, it's staying up to speed, especially now with new threats like Deepfakes, AI and so on.
00:02:25 Gloria: Yeah, I love that so much because a lot of times when you think about crisis PR, you think celebrities or politicians, but now, like you said, with AI and Deepfakes and even just people ripping off everyone else because everything is on social media. Crisis PR now, I think even for the small business owner, let's say, an Etsy shop owner would need to know that. So let's dive into that. How do you define crisis PR and why should even let's say, if I make jewelry, right, why should I care about crisis PR?
00:02:52 Oliver: Because something will inevitably go wrong, right, that's just how life is. And if you're not prepared, you will have to prepare to fail. And we define a crisis as something that has a potential, significant negative impact on your business. In other words, if you face a crisis, it can be small or big. It will have impact on your revenue and your profitability, of course, so it becomes immediately a financial issue, and for a small company, a crisis can often mean essentially the threat of going out of business because we, as small business owners, probably don't have the resources that a big company has that can take some of these on the chin.
00:03:27 Oliver: So I would always care about it, and, of course, how I prepare depends on whether I'm a solopreneur or small business owner or large corporation, so the preparation should obviously be matched to where you are on your journey.
00:03:39 Gloria: So can you give me maybe three examples of types of crisis PR for a very small business?
00:03:45 Oliver: Yeah, so, for instance, many who engage in e-commerce depend on online reviews, right? Whether it's Trustpilot or Google Reviews, et cetera. So sometimes things go wrong that are outside of your control potentially, and that leads to negative reviews. And I can give examples where the reviews dropped from 4.8 to 0.9 due to no thought of the business owner. This was a case in 2016 or 2017. That was due to differences in the Trump administration's customs policy. So all of a sudden, products coming into the US had to be marked made in China, and that wasn't the case before.
00:04:27 Oliver: So, in this case, as a company I had on my podcast, they were describing how thousands of their customizable iPhone and laptop cases were stuck in custom. So what happened is their customers were waiting for their customized iPhone cases, for instance, didn't get it and they left bad reviews. So that led to this significant drop, as I said, from almost perfect reviews to beyond terrible, which, of course, became life-threatening for a business, because we usually check these reviews before we order something online, right? We want to see if that trader is credible. So they had to dig themselves out of that hole. We can talk about, you know, how do you do that, but that would be a typical example a small business owner faces.
00:05:09 Oliver: Another example would be cybertechs, right? So we all have data online, sometimes potentially credit card data we have from our customers. So if I sell something online and if that gets lost, that will obviously harm my reputation as a business quite significantly, because of course, that is very emotional for people and they will respond accordingly.
00:05:29 Oliver: And maybe another thing is, as a small business owner, if you, for instance, there's a health thing, right, something happens in your life, maybe a bereavement, whatever something negative happens and you can't keep up your business, so that can become a crisis as well. So how do you deal with that? How do you communicate that so that maybe a few months down the line, when you've recovered, you still have a business to come back to?
00:05:50 Gloria: I love what you said about the iPhone cases, and especially when we talk about product owners. We have a lot of product owners. There's so many things in the supply chain that's out of our control. So let's go back to that example. In your point of view, what would be the right way to solve something where customers are angry but it's based on three things out of your control because they're stuck at customs? What would you do in that case?
00:06:09 Oliver: Yeah, exactly. So I developed this formula. It's got the three A's and the three D's, so it's a good rule of thumb what to do in a crisis situation. And the three A's stand for acknowledge, apologize, act. And this is exactly what caseable did at the time. So you acknowledge you have a problem, then you apologize for it and then you act in the sense that you try to mitigate the problem, of course, like getting it out of customs, but you also ensure that it doesn't happen again. So it's a one-time thing. That's what you're trying to act upon.
00:06:41 Oliver: And the three Ds mean deny, diminish, deflect, and that's what you shouldn't do. You shouldn't deny you have a problem or crisis. You shouldn't diminish the size of the problem and you shouldn't deflect it onto someone else and say, well, it's Trump's problem, right, or Trump did it. It wasn't us who changed the customs rule, because that doesn't really fly very fast with customers usually. So acknowledge, apologize, act, don't deny, deflect, diminish.
00:07:03 Gloria: So I think those are good, but I immediately think about, for us, there's a values thing, right? We know that customers want to buy based on your values. Let's say, if you make a phone case, I can't control who's buying it, right. I'm not going to suss out every person. What if there's a member of a racial hate group that buys my phone case and it's in one of the videos? Like what can someone do, right? Do they acknowledge and apologize at that point?
00:07:30 Oliver: It's a great question because there's so much going on online. You have to be very clear and conscious about what, can you actually realistically respond to. Otherwise you become, maybe like a company that's just purely reactive and it's distracting you from your business. But let's stay with your example. In that case, you would want to distance yourself from people who misuse or abuse your product in ways that you absolutely do not agree with, because that's what your customers would expect. And you would do that publicly, for instance through social media, and you would make your stance very clear.
00:08:03 Oliver: And we've seen the rise in populism in different countries in the West, and you know, this is something companies now do, and I think it's the right thing to do that something is beyond the pale, that you call it beyond the pale and distance yourself and your product from it. Otherwise, the sort of decent customers, the good people you want to serve, may distance themselves from your product, and the risk is that you don't do this fast enough, right? So these things spread very fast these days, as we all know. So you want to make sure that you react as quickly as you can and distance yourself as quickly as you can from those, sort of abuse of your product.
00:08:37 Gloria: What about as an insurance policy or just as good practice, that person, that manufacturer, that iPhone case producer puts on their sales page, these are our values, so that if a hate group does use a cell phone, then on their homepage, they know that that's not part of their values. Do you recommend every business to put a values and mission statement?
00:08:57 Oliver: Maybe not every business, but certainly if you're a B2C business, I think it makes a lot of sense. If you're a supplier in a long supply chain, probably not so important, but yes, for most B2C business, I do think it makes a lot of sense to say where you stand. But I would also recommend that you don't choose some niche values. You ideally communicate values that most people would agree to, so you don't narrow your market unnecessarily, right? So if you only sell to people who are exactly like yourself, that becomes a very niche business.
00:09:28 Oliver: However, like overall arching values, respect, for instance, you know, we do not serve these kinds of, so we wouldn't print certain things on our cases, we wouldn't put these things on a t-shirt, et cetera. They make a lot of sense and customers today, they want to know where you stand, right, they want to know your values. They want to know that you have similar values to themselves. So overall, I would say yes, that's usually a good idea.
00:09:51 Gloria: Yeah, like for me, I'm actually in the process of redoing my sales page and one of the things I'm thinking is like, you know, obviously we provide a media database of all the journalists. So, depending on what industry you're in and there are certain industries I just don't want. Like, for example, if you are ammunitions manufacturer or if you produce guns, like I'm not going to give that media list to you, right. I'm not going to, so that's something that I'm doing proactively, just to call in the right people and call out the wrong people.
00:10:17 Oliver: Sounds great.
00:10:18 Gloria: Yeah, so I love what you said about that type of crisis. Is there another type of crisis that we should know about, like, for example, when I think about cyber attacks, I don't think about a PR angle. I think, okay, I need to hire a cybersecurity expert, so why should a small business worry about protecting themselves? Or what can they do just to prepare for, let's say, a cyber attack or using AI, like someone imitating them and pretending to be them?
00:10:41 Oliver: It's a great question. I think the, let's stay with the cyber example, right. So people may steal credit card data, and this probably is a small business only. You're probably relying on other platforms to provide that kind of service, you know, as Stripes of this world. I think it's worth thinking about it in terms of what would happen or what would I do if this ever happened because it would fall back on me as well if my company lost sensitive data. What I always recommend is to do a vulnerability assessment and think about what's the worst case scenarios that could happen.
00:11:12 Oliver: Could my customer data get stolen? Yes, absolutely that could happen. That happens every day. Cyber attacks are real and they are increasing. So what would I do in that instance? And it makes sense to think it through and maybe have some statements ready, right? So based on your vulnerability assessment, you can say okay, there may be three, four things that could cause me sleepless nights. What would I do? Like do I have the number of a cybersecurity expert? Do I know a contact person at Stripe? If I use them, what would I say? What could I put out on social media to apologize?
00:11:42 Oliver: Because when these things happen, they don't happen at convenient times usually and they spread very fast. So you want to make sure that you have thought it through, and even that just means you have a document somewhere that's three pages long where you thought about it and have written out some statements how you would apologize in case of.
00:11:59 Gloria: Yeah, I like that. I like, always be prepared. Can you give me a, I know you've worked on a lot of these cases. Can you give me an example of something where somebody had a crisis like this and how did you mitigate it?
00:12:10 Oliver: Yeah. So, for instance, a friend of mine was ill for a few months and he is a business, he's a solopreneur, and of course then what happened is that he just had to go to hospital. He was out for weeks. And of course, you know, you get all these incoming requests from business partners, customers, people who pay you money on the website. And of course, people then understandably get angry because there's no response and they think they have been ripped off, right. And this can happen to all of us who are solopreneurs or run small businesses that, you know, due to no fault of our own, we can't keep up the level of service.
00:12:45 Oliver: And I think it's worth thinking about what you do in that instance. Is there maybe a person you can call and say, you know, I have to go to hospital for a week. Can you take over? Can you cover for me? Again, this comes back to preparation, right, thinking this through beforehand. And also how to communicate this, and you know, my response to questions like that is always start with the truth, right. If you have a health problem, I think people are generally understandable and you come back to them later and say, I wish I could have done this. I just couldn't. I had to do this thing and you know, it's just the way it is.
00:13:17 Oliver: Now I apologize and I make sure it doesn't happen again, because in the future I'll have a deputy or whatever. So it's worth thinking about this because, you know, there's no usually no safety net for us small entrepreneurs and it's worth having something at the back of your pocket, like some plan you can activate if and when that happens.
00:13:35 Gloria: Yeah, I always think. I always say, like there's so many tools now with autoresponders and like automated. You know, there's so many tools with AI. I love that so much. Is there anything we need to know as small businesses around crisis PR before we switch gears to talk about creative PR campaigns?
00:13:51 Oliver: I would just keep the triple A's and the triple D's in mind, like acknowledge, apologize, act. And it's just common sense, isn't it? So if I step on your toe in the subway, I would also, oh, I'm sorry, right. I would acknowledge and apologize and make sure it doesn't happen again. So it is common sense, and sometimes businesses forget to use common sense when it comes to crises. And the biggest mistake companies, small and large, make is they try to sit it out right. Ignore it, and it becomes too big and it spins out of control, because a crisis is always an evolving story, and this will resonate with you as a PR professional.
00:14:23 Oliver: A crisis is an evolving story and the question is always who's the villain? And you want to make sure that you don't become the villain in that story. Maybe the villain is, you know, customs regulation, force majeure, whatever it is. You don't want to be the villain and you have to be mindful of that narrative that's evolving and, especially if you don't say anything, people will fill in the blanks, right? And it makes it very easy for people who don't have your best interest at heart to say, you know, they are the villain. And that's something we want to avoid. So a crisis is always an evolving narrative, so make sure you get ahead of the curve and apologize and act accordingly.
00:14:58 Gloria: Yeah, I mean, that's a golden rule in PR. Always get ahead of the story or other people will write the story for you. So before we got on this interview, you told me about this really creative campaign that you did, and I cannot wait to dive into it, because, you know, I talk a lot about gift guides and it's kind of straightforward, right. But what I love about what you did is that you actually took an in-person event and you created a campaign around it. So let's talk about this creative campaign that really made a splash.
00:15:22 Oliver: Yeah, so when I was at easyJet, we had to be very creative. As I said, we didn't have the resources the big companies had, so we essentially tried to be very close to journalists, build good relationships, have better stories, be faster to respond because in a small, lean structure you can respond faster, and then also sort of, as you said, have in-person events where you can actually bond with a journalist. So you would fly somewhere, maybe to open a new base and, for instance, you would play football with a journalist, right, or against the journalist and have that bonding session.
00:15:52 Oliver: And there are many things we did in order to sort of, you know, get attention from journalists and also, of course, social media coverage. So, for instance, the airline's color is orange. So when we had, let's say, one million passengers at an airport, the first one million and you want to make it a big splash, if you would just send out a press release, it's not really interesting, right? It's very self-referential. Maybe get a little bit of coverage in the local news, but not really.
00:16:16 Oliver: So what we did, for instance, was always to use the color orange because that was the airline's color. And for instance, put on orange boiler suits to really stand out in an airport environment. And what's orange, oranges or pumpkins? So you would use a pumpkin and imagine seven people in orange boiler suits holding big pumpkins with numbers on it. And you know, it showed the number one million. And of course that's a fun picture that people want to share and take a photo of and the local media will run. And all of a sudden, you turn something that sort of sounds like a dry business number into something that's actually quite entertaining. And you slip in obviously the business news of hey, we're really, really important for the local economy.
00:16:56 Gloria: Oh, I love that so much. So what was the result of that? Obviously, you know, there's some morality around the photos that were shared, but.
00:17:03 Oliver: Yeah, exactly, so. And then you try to come up with these sorts of ideas for every milestone. And it's really, the lesson is that you want to be creative and scarcity creates creativity and you just get more attention. And if you don't have the same resources, you want to box above your weight. And our objective will always be the most visible airline in Europe. So positively visible. Ryanair's more visible but often gets quite a negative headlines. So at the time it's really to let's be the most quoted, “most referred to airline in Europe.” And we can only do that if we are creative and create attention in new and interesting ways that people find amusing.
00:17:44 Oliver: And there's a fine balance here because as an airline, you have to be quite serious and safety focused, otherwise people will not choose you. So you have to protect that image but, at the same time, be the irreverent challenger brand, and that was the ease of the balancing act. You have to. You had to walk every day as a sort of brand representative.
00:18:02 Gloria: Yeah, when I think about that, I think about, like you know, in the US Southwest, they have a really good reputation. And then, you know, that's just the airlines that have, I think it's Lufthansa that they have like those golden retrievers. So it's kind of like what you're saying. It's like bringing a centric element that you don't associate with airline news and then just getting more people to notice. Do you have any other examples of creative PR? Do you have an angle that maybe a small business owner can take who maybe they don't have a million customers yet.
00:18:33 Oliver: No, sure. So, for instance, when easyJet became the largest airline in the UK by passenger numbers, we wanted to surprise journalists with that fact because it wasn't well known at the time. But there's official data to show we fly more people in and out of the UK than British Airways does. So what we did is to basically create cookies. So we had cookies the size of pizza, put it in pizza boxes, put the press release, hey, size matters, that was also on the biscuit. Put that into the pizza box and send, let's say, 20 important journalists that pizza box with a huge cookie that said, size matters. And of course that piqued their curiosity and they ran the story.
00:19:13 Oliver: And this is something small. Everyone can buy a few biscuits, right, and just make it bigger than usual. And this is probably something the journalist shared in the office. So not just the one journalist knew about it, but probably the, you know, 10 colleagues who also participated in eating that huge cookie. So that is something, just sending people something interesting. It doesn't have to be very expensive. It doesn't have to be an expensive gift bag, for instance. It can be a big cookie with an interesting line on it. So that would be something that most people could copy.
00:19:43 Oliver: And still, I think people like receiving physical things if they're either tasty or that some are useful. I think people tend to send things, corporate gifts, that are not very useful, not very nice, they're just mass-produced stuff. So I wouldn't do that. But if you have a nice touch, it's personal, you know, they will take notice.
00:20:02 Gloria: I love that, but now I think about the world of freelancers and how we work remotely, so people aren't really at their desk anymore. So do you have any suggestions on how we can still get on the journalist's radar when we don't know where they are? They're remote, so it's all kind of digital.
00:20:16 Oliver: Exactly, exactly. That makes it more challenging, for sure. So, for instance, we have a big football tournament in Europe at the moment, the Euros, which is huge. It's in Germany, it's one of the biggest sporting events in the world and then obviously followed by the Olympics. So obviously at the time, these sporting events were really interesting for us. But we didn't want to spend the money to become a big sponsor, right, that costs you millions, usually, and what do you get? You just, you know, have your brand, your logo out there, but it doesn't necessarily entice people to fly with you because it's already started.
00:20:46 Oliver: So we took a fresh angle and we said, we are there for the airline. So we are there for the fans, we're the fans airline. And we couldn't use the official title of the sporting events because those are protected, right, and only the sponsors are allowed to use it. So we would have that sort of tongue-in-cheek play on being a sponsor, which we weren't. But we say, hey, we are there for the fans, because a lot of fans had the feeling that they were being ripped off at these sporting events. So we said, no, we make it affordable, we make it fun, we are there for you, we fight the consumer's corner, and all that took was a new, fresh angle to how you talked about a big sporting event that was sort of the big travel event of the month.
00:21:27 Gloria: Yeah, I love taking a contrarian point of view. That's actually one of the 10 angles I teach. So when I think about that, I think about, we had someone who joined our program who was on Etsy. And Etsy always talks about how they're for small businesses and they're the anti-Amazon, but that time Etsy had really predatory policies where they had to force people to have five-star reviews and pay for shipping. And so her point of view is like, you know, here's Etsy saying that they're for the small business, but they're actually not, and here are the actual policies, and so that actually got her an interview. So I love what you said. There is, sometimes, take a contrarian point of view. Are there any other creative angles that we're not thinking about that can give people some ideas?
00:22:06 Oliver: Yeah, for sure. So, for instance, there are quite a lot of regulations around who can fly from A to B. But generally speaking, in Europe you can fly, if you're a European airline, from any European city to any other European city. That's a common market. Yet you know, there's always that tendency to protect your home market. So we had this in Switzerland, we had this in Italy and many other markets that, for instance, in Switzerland, the regulators said oh, you can't offer flights from Geneva to Barcelona because, you know, this is a protected route and so on.
00:22:34 Oliver: So we looked at the regulation and found out that package deal is actually okay, but of course you're an airline, you're not a tour operator. So what did we do? We pitched up a tent outside of Barcelona, took a photo of the tent and said well, it's a package deal now, so whoever wants can sleep in that tent outside the city. Of course, no one ever does, but you know, we went around the regulation that way.
00:22:55 Oliver: And of course, what happens is that the media take notice of this because it's an interesting story. So they write some articles in your favor. And then the incumbent sort of has to give in, in a way, because they look like the big bully who's pushing around other airlines trying to protect a monopoly. So the reputational damage increased and we got to fly that route regularly.
00:23:15 Oliver: And we did sort of a similar thing in Italy when we wanted to fly from Milano to Sardinia, which is a big route in summer. A lot of people go there on holiday. Yet again, the incumbent protected the route and got the local politicians to prevent us from selling tickets. So we said okay, if you don't allow us to sell tickets, we give them away for free. So the passengers who have booked the flight, we reimbursed them and said hey, we fly you there for free. And of course we did this in the airport in a sort of impromptu press conference.
00:23:47 Oliver: That didn't work well, unfortunately, because the police came and threatened to arrest us if we take any passengers completely without any legal basis. But we decided we didn't want to spend the night in an Italian jail and flew off with our passengers. But it just shows, sometimes you can bend reality in your favor, even if the sort of powers that be are not in your favor, by pulling things into the open and being creative about creating attention, always, of course, in the service of the passenger, the customer who has a right to your service, and we believe that competition is better than monopolies, as most people do.
00:24:23 Oliver: And we use that belief to show people that what are they afraid of? Let's, you know, let the customers decide who they want to choose. It's their right to choose, and so that was always the angle we came from, protect the customer, fight the consumer's corner.
00:24:39 Gloria: I love that and I love how, in a way, it's kind of the underdog story, right. You just become more creative and you pull things into the open. Yeah, I love that so much because obviously, as you heard the intro, we're all about the small business underdog. I feel like I could talk to you for so many hours. You have so much expertise. I think one question I would love to know is you've been in this for 20 years and obviously things are changing. Not only are people no longer staff reporters, there's a lot of freelancers, it's harder than ever to send packages, but now we have social media.
Gloria: So do you have any, like, tips for small businesses who maybe, you know, don't have the way, that to leverage? You know, like a stage kind of in-person thing, how they can get on the radar of journalists, whether it's using social media or conferences?
00:25:24 Oliver: I spoke to a friend last week and he's an editor in a big newspaper here and he said something interesting. He said that they're really craving authenticity because most of the big guys really stopped giving them access. They get ignored more. They're really trying to rewrite the articles, otherwise they don't give them access to the athlete or the executives and so on. So they're really craving the authenticity of a small business, potentially that doesn't do with all that bullshit and is really there and gives them a straight story.
00:25:53 Oliver: So I think we can use that to our advantage, the fact that a lot of journalists are fed up with the big organizations and they sort of spin everything and play them, whether it's politicians, whether that's, you know, the big sports clubs, whether it's big corporates. So I think that's where the advantage is. It's not easy, I totally agree. It's getting harder, but if you have a reputation among journalists for being a straight shooter, for being authentic and delivering good stories, maybe the size of the business plays a secondary role. I think that's the opening that we can use.
00:26:28 Gloria: Yeah, 100%, and I think, like you said, when you get too big, you have so many departments and then the journalist feels like they're under pressure, working for the Fortune 500 companies. So this whole notion that journalists only want to cover big companies, that's actually false. They actually are dying for fresh perspectives and to cover everyday people, because that's also how they stay credible and ethical, because otherwise they just become the spokesperson of Fortune 500 companies. So I also love what you said about that. One question that I get a lot from my audience is the role of AI and PR. How do you think that those two things are connecting now?
00:27:02 Oliver: Great question. I think there's definitely a role for AI in communication, very much so. Absolutely a lot of what people do in PR and comms can be automated by AI. So certainly I would look at things and say, okay, can the press release be written by AI? Surely, that's already happening. Can incoming media requests be dealt with by AI? Yes, that's also possible. What AI won't do is the human connection part, and to me it frees up time to connect with humans, whether it's journalists, business partners, whoever people you care about. So it frees up our time and headspace and energy to connect with humans at a very personal level.
00:27:40 Oliver: So that's what I like about it, that we have that opportunity. And I do think the opening is that the more AI takes over, the more important your unique voice will be, because AI draws on everything that's already existing. But if you're original, if you're contrarian, if you're different, then AI is no match for you. So hey, to Team Human.
00:28:02 Gloria: Yes and again, the contrarian angle is so good and we already talked about that, but I really encourage anyone that's listening, whether you make candles or if you are an executive, to think about how you can be a little bit contrarian, because right now, so many people, there's just so much noise, and to go against the grain is something that will get you to stand out. Oliver, this was so awesome. I know you have a busy schedule. You have your own podcast. How can people find you and learn more about you?
00:28:29 Oliver: Yeah, so the easiest thing is, find me on LinkedIn. It's Oliver Aust, that's A-U-S-T. And from there, you can connect with me or sign up to my newsletter. It's called Speak Like a CEO. It's the number one newsletter in the world on leadership communication, and I share lots of strategies, a lot of things we talked about freely on the newsletter. And there you also find my podcast, episode books, and so on.
00:28:51 Gloria: Awesome, we're going to have you come back. We're going to have to get your brain on this leadership, communication and kind of words and phrases. We didn't even get to that, so until next time.
00:28:59 Oliver: Love to. Thank you, Gloria. Thanks for having me.
00:29:02 Gloria: Thank you, Oliver.
00:29:05 Gloria: Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connections? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert.
00:29:33 Gloria: Now, if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig, or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at GloriaChouPR.com/Masterclass. That's Gloria Chou, C-H-O-U-P-R.com/Masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free. So get in there and let's get you featured.