CBS Los Angeles interviewed graduating student Iryss Nunez. She spoke with CBS last month about her journey through major facial reconstruction surgery and how attending California Virtual Academies (CAVA) allowed her to continue her education while maintaining her GPA throughout her recovery. She was accepted to multiple UC schools and will attend UCLA this fall as the first in her family to attend a four-year university.
An Arizona man got a chance to meet the team that saved his life. Without their specialized heart pump, this would be a tragic story.
Playing a video game is a perfectly ordinary moment for a 21-year-old. But Anthony Rojas savors every moment, no matter how small, because he should not have them.
“They told me my coronary arteries turned into aneurysms,” Rojas said.
Before spending a day walking his dog, Rojas was a 14-year-old kid in Arizona with a cold that was not clearing up.
“I was sick for about a week,” Rojas said. “My mom kept taking me back and forth to the hospital.”
He was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, which damaged his heart. A month later, he had a heart attack.
“It was like the movies, where you go in through the double doors in a hospital and the white light shining, and it ends like that’s exactly how it ended for me,” Rojas said.
Dr. Hursh Naik of St. Joseph’s Hospital recalled the critical moment during treatment.
“We decided, because he was basically about to die on the table, that we needed to pump his heart for him,” Naik said.
Naik and St. Joseph’s Hospital had used an Impella pump.
“It’s the difference between life and death, and I’m not saying that facetiously,” Naik said.
It worked. Rojas lived and is thriving. He spent his 21st birthday with his girlfriend hiking in the Grand Canyon.
“Hiked all the way down the next day and all the way up in one day,” Rojas said. “12, 13 hours. A long time. But it was the most surreal moment.”
It was surreal because the moments of a happy life very well may never have happened.
“They pretty much saved me without their device,” Rojas said. “I pretty much would have different whole new heart and a whole new set of problems that come with it or just be not here. Which is crazy to think about.”
Dallas musician Addison Kelley thought he was in excellent health until a sudden cardiac emergency nearly took his life.
Doctors turned to the Impella heart pump, which supported his circulation and gave his heart a chance to rest and recover. Addison told that story on CBS Texas this week, then picked up his guitar and played the Police classic ‘Every Breath You Take’ live on air.
Next, he travels to Danvers, Massachusetts, home of Abiomed, the maker of Impella, for the annual Patient Summit on July 23. The Summit brings heart recovery patients together with the engineers who build the pumps and other survivors who understand what the experience feels like from the inside. Addison plans to perform classic rock hits for the celebration.
For most patients, the people behind the technology stay anonymous. The Patient Summit changes that, and Addison gets to say thank you the way he knows best, with a guitar in his hands.
Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Spin Sucks, host of the Spin Sucks podcast, and author of Spin Sucks (the book). She is an innovator in public relations, NOT a spin doctor.
Dietrich is this month’s guest of our Talk PR interview series, where she spoke about the PESO (PAID, EARNED, SHARED, OWNED) Model® she built, which social platforms are vital for GEO, and the state of today’s public relations industry.
IN THE NEWS
Los Angeles Daily News spotlights iQ Academy California–Los Angeles (iQLA) student’s graduation performance
OWC secured coverage in the Los Angeles Daily News for iQLA graduate Gabriel “Gabby” Ortizo from Granada Hills. Ortizo spoke to the publication about graduating from online school and his superstar performance at the graduation ceremony. Read the full story here.
KRON4’s LIVE! in the Bay features California Virtual Academies (CAVA) student
KRON4’s LIVE! in the Bay featured CAVA fourth grader Isaiah Joshua Felix during their “A-MAY-ZING Kids” segment. Isaiah was recently named a national finalist in the K12 Talent Showdown after impressing judges with his opera performances. Watch the full coverage here.
ImpactAlpha covers Nuvve’s focus on battery storage
ImpactAlpha recently spotlighted Nuvve’s battery energy storage strategy. Battery makers and investors are pivoting to grid storage for renewable energy in Europe. Battery energy storage is taking off around the world, partly due to surging demand for power. Read the full story here.
Label & Narrow Web features Infigo’s Q2 growth
Infigo, a global provider of enterprise-grade web-to-print software, has announced significant Q2 growth driven by rising demand for automation, personalization, and digital ordering across the $125B US commercial print industry. Read the full story here.
TALK PR
Tracy Williams: Gini Dietrich is a true innovator in the public relations profession; she created the PESO model, which stands for paid, earned, shared, and owned. Thousands of us follow her on LinkedIn and everything she has to say. It’s also a term that every public relations person I know uses in their first client meeting because it’s a good way to explain things to a new client. So thank you so much for joining me today, Gini. But first, you created the peso model and built it into this full operating system. So what problems were you trying to solve?
Gini Dietrich: Oh man, I think initially it was really-I mean, you’ll relate to this. I was running a PR firm, and we did crisis, reputation, events, and media relations. And clients kept saying, “This is great. How do you measure this?” “Thank you for getting us on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times and all of the other newspapers. How do we measure it?” That conversation kept happening over and over and over again. I was building my agency when Twitter became a household name. Facebook became available for business owners. It wasn’t just for college kids anymore. LinkedIn and WordPress launched, making it easier for you to do website stuff without hiring a developer, and suddenly we had all these other tools at our disposal. And because it was all digital, we could start measuring the work we were doing. That really was the genesis of it all: how do we take the work that we’re doing and understand that some of it, and I say to clients, 30 or 40% of it is brand awareness and reputation. We can’t measure that, but we can measure some of this other stuff. And here’s how we do it. And so that’s really what we were trying to solve: how do we measure the work and demonstrate to a client that the work we do affects their business’s growth?
Tracy Williams: Well, this may be a stupid question, but at the end of a report, would you include PESO and give a measurement for each?
Gini Dietrich: You know, so what we used to do, and we’ve evolved it since then, but we used to have it broken down like that. So we paid, and then you’d have like your Google ads and your social media ads and your native and boosted content, and then you had earned, so you had like share of voice and impressions and things like that in there, and it was in the spreadsheet broken down that way. And then the executive summary showed that this is how it was. But what I found was that it was still relegated to tactics, and we wanted to elevate it to strategy and outcomes, so we did away with that probably about five years ago. But yeah, that’s how we did it to begin with for sure.
Tracy Williams: Yeah, really helped put it in everybody’s brain. Yeah, you also started Spend Sucks when public relations had a reputation for spinning stories, and every one of your colleagues and competitors loves that term. Of course, what were professionals actually doing at the time that made you want to call it out?
Gini Dietrich: You know, it was less what the industry was doing and more that every time I introduced myself to somebody new and said that I was a PR professional. They would say something like, “Oh, you’re one of the liars. You lie for a living, or “Oh, you’re a spin doctor. And you’re like, “No, I’m neither of those things. And I think from an industry perspective, we follow a code of ethics. We’re all generally ethical human beings. We don’t spin stories. Certainly, Hollywood and DC do, but we’re like, those are very small segments of the industry. I think that the industry at large is not full of spin doctors, and so that’s why we named it that, because I was so tired of having that conversation. I’m like, no, I don’t lie for a living.
Tracy Williams: Okay, well, let’s get to the question that we talk about every day as we embrace AI. I talk to CEOs of smaller companies who ask, ‘Why do we even need a PR person to tell our story?’ We’ll create a PR AI agent.
Gini Dietrich: Oh, good luck!
Tracy Williams: Because that is something that a lot of CEOs don’t necessarily understand what PR is. They do understand AI and SEO. They understand some of these other terms that seem more complicated, but it’s like, wait, why do I need a human?
Gini Dietrich: I think it’s a couple of things. I also run a business, and I use AI to enhance tasks I would otherwise hire a professional to do. So, of course, I have an internal CFO. We also have an accounting firm. I have an attorney on retainer, like all of those things. But I still use AI to educate me, help me understand, or, like, when my attorney sent an email the other day saying I need this, this, and this, I was like, I don’t know what that means. And so I used AI to help me figure out what she was asking for and how to provide the context that she was looking for, so I think that AI is incredibly helpful for things like that, right? But you can absolutely use a PR or AI agent to write your news releases, send them out, and do all those things. It’s not going to get you the results you want. It will not garner you the results you want.
Tracy Williams: I can hear the CEO saying, “Why not? What if you just did that in large numbers? And aside from the fact that you’re annoying a lot of reporters.
Gini Dietrich: You know, no one on earth is going to respond to you because they’re annoyed.
Tracy Williams: That’s true. Well, maybe that’s the answer. If it’s a human component, AI, unless they’re talking to AI reporters, right?
Gini Dietrich: And journalists know exactly what AI is coming. They know they’re like, ‘this is crap,’ they know, and they don’t respond. I get pitched all the time because of my podcast and my blog. I know if it’s AI or human, and I ignore the AI ones.
Tracy Williams: Well, let’s get on to GEO now because that’s what people want to talk about in a lot of meetings that I’m going to, so optimizing for GEO, right? Do PR people make this happen, or does it fall outside their purview?
Gini Dietrich: We keep hearing, over and over and over again, through all the research being done, that owned and earned media are what’s driving it. We’re seeing a little bit of shared content as well with Reddit and Wikipedia, and some LinkedIn newsletters. Like the LLMs, they’re crawling that. They’re not crawling social media posts, but they are crawling longer-form content. So we keep saying that if you have a really nice foundation of content on your website and it’s corroborated or validated through third-party credible sources, media influencers, creators, podcast hosts, newsletter authors. Then, if those two things match, it’s going to show you in AI answers.
Tracy Williams: So, for example, social media is critical for GEO.
Gini Dietrich: For some reason, the LLMs love Wikipedia, which I guess makes sense because it’s, you know, a third-party, credible resource that you can’t control. You can’t use Reddit or LinkedIn newsletters. So not your LinkedIn post, but if you’re actually doing a newsletter through LinkedIn, the LLMs love those two things. Reddit scares the crap out of me, so I’m always like, “Okay, well, I open it,” but they love it. One of the things we find clients doing is shifting some of their distribution to those places. But everything lives on the website as their foundation, and then they use that to distribute third-party credibility through Reddit and LinkedIn.
Tracy Williams: Interesting. What about YouTube? Where is YouTube in your thinking?
Gini Dietrich: It’s not yet. I just had this conversation with the board of an organization, and their marketing person is video, video, video, and I’m like, that’s great. That’s five years ago because the LLMs can’t crawl it. So if you have a YouTube strategy, which I think you should have because people are visual learners, you have to have transcripts and other things that the LLMs can learn from. Otherwise, you’re just putting it out there into the void because it’s not. It’s great for SEO, but it’s not great for GEO.
Tracy Williams: What is it good for in terms of posting video on your LinkedIn? You said that is a value.
Gini Dietrich: I don’t think it’s a valuable posting. I think it helps the LinkedIn algorithms show you in feeds, but it’s not helping with GEO because the LLMs can’t do audio or video yet.
Tracy Williams: Okay, that’s really, really good information here. So, what do CEOs need to understand about today’s PR, and how much more is it going to cost? Because all of these tools have to be addressed.
Gini Dietrich: This is the way I think about it. You have an accounting firm, you have a law firm, you hire experts to do their jobs because it’s significantly cheaper in the long run to have an expert who knows what they’re doing and can deliver the results that you need to achieve. Now, if you don’t have a good business plan, a good strategy, and an understanding of what you’re trying to achieve as an organization, no PR person is going to be able to help you achieve it. But if you know those things and you know what you are trying to achieve as an organization, a really talented PR and experienced PR professional is going to help you, just like a lawyer, an insurance agent, an accountant, all of the things. Right?
Tracy Williams: Should a CEO be looking internally, hiring internally, or should they be looking for people like us, an agency?
Gini Dietrich: Smaller, small-to-mid-sized organizations, what I find is that if you have somebody internally who understands how PR works, then hiring internally probably works. But if you are trying to manage that role yourself and don’t have PR or marketing expertise, hiring someone internally won’t work. So you need someone from the outside who understands your business and industry, who can bring that expertise in-house and help you grow faster.
Tracy Williams: So, what do you think are the top critical issues or problems that CEOs are facing right now in PR?
Gini Dietrich: I think we’re in a brave new world with AI, and things are changing. My husband and I just had a conversation about this the other day about how it feels like Google search is almost crap now because you’re so accustomed to getting responses and real answers and AI answers and overviews that now you look at Google results. You’re like, this isn’t helpful at all, so you have this whole idea that you have to change the way that you’ve done work because you have to show up in AI answers and overviews, and then of course you have those that think, well, I’ll build a PR agent, and I’ll do it. Do it myself, and there’s all of that, right? Like maybe that’s true. It might not get you the results you want, but you know. So I think it’s a brave new world, and I think those are the big things. I am old enough to remember that crises for organizations were few and far between. You know, it would be a global disaster. It would be a natural disaster. It would be white collar crime. It would be a manufacturing plant blowup or something like that. But now it’s not if. It’s when. Like every organization is going to have a crisis, at least one crisis a year, and I think most organizations are not built for that. And that’s where an expert, as a PR expert, will help with that.
Tracy Williams: What do you think PR is getting right right now? And then, conversely, where is it failing?
Gini Dietrich: I think we are getting this GEO thing right now. You know, we’ve seen so many waves of opportunity over the last six years, really since the pandemic, when organizations said, ‘ We need to stand up for our values now. Still, we don’t know how to do that, and so that was a great job for a PR professional because that’s what we help with, right? And we’ve seen all these opportunities, which I think we haven’t, as an industry, glommed onto them the way that we should have, and so they’ve faded into the background. This one, I think, we’re really glomming onto really well because earned media is what we do. Media relations is the backbone, is the spine of what we do, and that is how LLMs learn. So we have this huge opportunity. I think, as an industry, we’re not measuring right. We can’t, and it’s the bane of my existence. I’m out there every day saying, “Here’s how you do it. These are the tools you need, and you know, we just had this conversation internally. I think it’s just how your brain works: as PR professionals, we tend to be really right-brained and creative, and you need the measurement piece to be very left-brained, sort of logical, and most people can’t do both. So I think that that’s why, as an industry, we’re still failing at measurement.
Tracy Williams: Well, this is the million-dollar question for every client meeting I go into: how do we know that all this great PR you’re getting me is really driving business results?
Gini Dietrich: So we look at a few things. We look at. Certainly, now, if you’re showing up in AI Answers, there are three ways you can appear: you can be mentioned, sourced, or cited. It’s a mention if you’re part of two or three other options. It’s a source if you’re a good part of the answer, but it doesn’t include links, and then you’re cited if it includes links to your website or to websites where you’re quoted, right? Like Forbes, the New York Times, or something like that. We definitely look at that. We look at share of narrative. So it used to be share of voice, which was really a volume play. Now we’re looking at share of narrative: what sets, which says, are we actually showing up in the places we need to, and not just from an AI perspective? But are we showing up in the trade publications where we need to, and is that showing up in AI answers? Are we showing up in newsletters and podcasts where we need to, and are those appearances reflected in AI answers? So we’re looking at those kinds of things. We look to see, like, are those things driving traffic to the website? It’s not like it used to be because we’re in a zero-click world, but there is still some. And if they’re coming to the website, what are they doing? So we look at that as well.
Tracy Williams: Are websites going to go the way of the horse and carriage?
Gini Dietrich: I don’t think so. I think at least because that’s where LLMs are starting, where they start to get their information. So, you have to have it from that perspective; otherwise, you won’t show up at all. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the point where websites are going away. Maybe eventually, but I don’t think we’re there. I don’t even think we’re within five years of that.
Tracy Williams: Thanks so much, Jenny. It’s been great to meet an actual PR legend. Didn’t know there was one, but if there is one, it’s you, and all of us in this profession value you and appreciate your contributions. We really do. So thank you so much for being here.
Gini Dietrich: Oh my gosh, you’re so nice. Thank you for having me.
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