How to get AI to cite and celebrate you + ‘Authority flywheels’ + Getting rich, ‘Big Woe’ and the despair industry

Hi

It’s been a huge week with Labor handing down a budget that seeks to rewrite the rules of the economic and wealth creation games in Australia. As I’ve noted before, Labor has put itself in a strong position with its intergenerational frame.

As highly skilled communicators, Labor knows the art of persuasion lies in the realm of emotion, existing beliefs and prejudices. Their frame plays to the sense young Australians have that the system is against them.

Angus Taylor can’t win on Labor’s intergenerational turf. He’s given himself a fighting chance by attempting to shift the frame to inflation/bracket creep and immigration, which has given him some clearer air.

In this edition, I look at

• How AI rewards high-quality thought leadership and PR

• How, as with the budget framing battle, we also need to focus on the ‘big picture’ strategic elements of our communication

• And I look at a fascinating new book that busts two myths – that media is dead, and that we’re all financially doomed!

Ben

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

The two big ways to get AI to celebrate and cite you

Everyone is bracing for huge upheaval from AI.

But when it comes to PR and communications, not much has changed.

As Matt Dzugan, senior director of data at AI communications platform Muck Rack, says, “The whole goal of these AI systems is to be credible”.

AI is awarding visibility to exactly what thought leadership and PR delivers: authority and credibility.

Research shows there are two ways to get cited by AI, both of which align closely with the thought leadership and media playbook.

1. AI rewards authoritative content

The first is to produce high-quality content.

A group of academics looked at what content gained a ‘visibility boost’ on AI.

The ‘Princeton GEO’ paper coined the term ‘GEO: Generative Search Optimisation’, which is replacing conventional SEO as more people use AI to search.

The Princeton Paper found that if you include three things in your content, you increase the chances of being cited by AI by 30-40%:

· Adding relevant statistics (statistics addition)

· Incorporating credible quotes (quotation addition)

· Citations from reliable sources (cite sources)

Additionally, two stylistic changes boosted visibility by 15-30%:

· Fluency (fluency optimisation)

· Readability (easy to understand)

AI is groundbreaking, but the content it rewards certainty isn’t.

The five factors above are all part and parcel of high-quality writing thought leadership.

Similarly, Muck Rack’s Dzugan highlighted three additional factors that boost AI citations:

· Bullet points

· Statistics and data

· Objective language

Again, nothing new. This is conventional best-practice online writing.

2. AI rewards media coverage

The second way to get cited by AI is to gain coverage in credible corporate content and media.

Muck Rack’s ‘What is AI reading’ report found that when AI cites information, the two areas it most turns to are:

· Corporate blogs and content (24%)

· Journalism (27%)

(For finance/insurance, journalistic citations are higher at 32%.)

But how do you get referenced by corporate content and journalists in the first place?

By producing credible, high-quality thought leadership (step 1 above.)

Interestingly, rather than making journalism irrelevant, AI misinformation is making people turn to the media more to find credible information.

The game covered

Getting AI citations may not be your main game.

But by the same token, it’s good to know that if you are producing high-quality thought leadership and leveraging that into the media, then you have the bulk of the AI game covered.

(Update: apparently, as a highly credible source, The AFR’s GEO traffic has surged.)

STRATEGY

To win the perception battle in a trust economy, focus on the big picture elements of your ‘authority flywheel’

The main lesson from this week’s budget is that game is usually won or lost at the big picture, strategic level. Will Australians buy into the ‘intergenerational inequality’ or ‘aspiration’?

It’s no different for finance, knowledge and professional services firms. We are also fighting a ‘big picture’ perception battle.

As I keep saying, with AI creating so much uncertainty and cratering trust, we are now operating in a ‘trust economy’.  You can’t just garner attention; you also need to be winning authority and credibility.

In short, you need to be building an ‘authority flywheel’ (illustrated above).

But the trap that many will fall into is to focus only on step 3 and 4 of the flywheel – crafting thought leadership assets, trying to get media coverage, and distribution on channels like LinkedIn.

However, you need to spend just as much time in the first two ‘big picture’ steps that involve:

· Getting close to what your audiences really feel and believe.

· Carving out a bold and distinctive position in the market.

· Creating sharp points of view (POV).

· Building a disciplined messaging matrix.

It will be those big decisions around ‘positioning’, ‘sharpening ideas’ and ‘messaging’ (and in policy ‘framing’) that will largely determine your success.

MEDIA POSITIONING

Debunking myths on media and getting rich in America

One of the more interesting books I’ve read recently is How to Get Rich in American History.

Joseph S Moore was a Marxist-inspired history professor who became interested in wealth-building after a near-death financial experience around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

He set out to find – from history and by trying to get rich himself – what has, and hasn’t, worked over the past 300 years in the US when it comes to getting ahead financially.

The book is a great read and busts many myths: that women only started working in the 1960s; that AirBNB and bitcoin are new; that stocks always work; that passive index investing is a sure thing, etc.

Another myth Moore has debunked is that the mainstream media no longer matters.

Moore wrote an interesting Substack on how he got his book published and what helped it become a surprising bestseller.

Moore had been frantically running around talking to podcasters and influencers. His book wasn’t selling. Then suddenly it started climbing the best-seller lists.

What worked?

“Traditional media,” Moore says.

His book had been reviewed by Bloomberg and sales suddenly began surging.

It was interviews on radio, television and in newspapers, not podcasts, Moore found, that spiked sales.

“The legacy media is alive and well,” he concluded.

I’ve noted this many times in the past: despite all the new mediums, traditional media is still extremely powerful and a platform everyone should be cultivating as part of their marketing and comms mix.

POINT OF VIEW (POV) DEVELOPMENT

‘Big Woe’ and the despair industrial complex

The biggest thing Moore exposes in his book is what he calls ‘Big Woe’. 

“Big Woe – a despair industrial complex driving clicks for journalists, votes for politicians and tenure for academics – relies on a simple claim: someone broke the system and they can fix it.”

Moore, as a Marxist, was chastened to find the opposite: Americans have never been better off and it’s never been easier to get ahead.

I think Australia is slightly different from the US. Our standard of living is falling, and our economy is less dynamic.

But there’s no doubt we are also suffering a form of Big Woe, particularly with this notion of ‘intergenerational inequality’, which as we saw above, savvy politicians are translating into votes.

It is usually good business and communication to focus on people’s problems. After all, as Moore found, one of the best ways to ‘get ahead’ in US was to solve other people’s problems.

But I do think ‘Big Woe’ opens the door to an optimistic outlook becoming a competitive advantage. (Shane Oliver made this point in my interview with him.) 

As Harvard marketing professor, Youngme Moon, says in her book ‘Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd’, when we have an abundance of something, we crave what is scarce.

At the moment we have an abundance of gloom; so perhaps we’re craving some sunny optimism.