Navigating the Changing Communications Landscape - Dan Simon, Qwoted

PR's top pros talk, navigating the changing communications landscape featuring Dan Simon, CEO and co-founder of Quoted, and Here's Your Host, Doug Simon. What is Quoted? So Quoted is a network that connects media on the one side, media can be reporters, can big producers, bookers for TV shows, writers, freelancers, with on the other side brands, experts, PR agencies and small businesses. Marketing tech have really been ahead of PR tech. What is your inspiration for starting Quoted? Well, I think you hit it on the head, though, it's that while we've seen technology transforming every industry, particularly network technology hit, whether it's in your personal life or professional life, you probably interact with several technology network technologies every day. Meanwhile, my industry, which I love and have grown up in, which is communications, public relations, media relations, seemed very stuck in the 90s, seemed very opaque, seemed very heavy on the human side, and seemed right for transformation. So what we try to do with Quoted is bring some of that network technology to this rather antiquated industry and with it be able to create efficiencies, cost saving and then also create a lot of data and a lot of insights that our users can benefit from. Yeah, and I think we can also look at sort of maybe outdated slice of the industry, because as you've mentioned, there are many cliques of the industry that are more advanced using technology data analysis. So what are some of the ways that technology is going to be changing public relations over the next couple of years? Quoted is just a piece of this tech revolution. If you think about what public relations is, which is about listening to the market, understanding what stories to tell, uncovering audiences and understanding where, you know, those audiences are getting their information, how to reach them, we're seeing technology transform every piece of that ecosystem, investment is going into natural language processing and AI driven content creation and then distribution channels are changing, so the old fashioned press releases, that's now transformed. How do you get information to audiences? So I think, you know, every aspect of the communications industry is going to see a tech transformation. And unlike, as you said, unlike marketing, MOTEC and had tech, which in many ways have had 10 or 15 or 20 years, in some cases, to run, come tech, PR tech is really in its infancy and we're going to see it really coming to the forward of the next few years. Yeah, well, you're definitely starting out early. One thing that's really interesting that I've found out about it is you're actually able to gain some insights in terms of what reporters actually want based on being able to analyze what you're seeing. What do you see when it comes to what reporters want? I mean, all networks, essentially, are based on persistent data and that's part of our proposition about why we wanted to bring network transformation, not just for the obvious reasons, like it'll make things cheaper when networks happen to think price of things goes down. But also because of data, like PR is a slightly more than anything else, a very opaque industry, and everything's done within to media is over the phone. There's no record of anything. There's no persistence of any data. It's all ephemeral. It disappears. And so we have no idea about what Brandec said last week or how things are evolving, and if you think in the world of say, and that's massively inefficient as well as anything else, like if you think about the reason that you were able to get an Uber to where your standing is because of the persistence of data, it doesn't ask you to register every time. It just remembers who you are, and then it uses geolocation, and it remembers your credit card details. And so there's a vast amount of persistent data in networks, saying we have seamless and instacart and a bunch of other things, right? Remember what you've ordered before, Amazon knows what you've ordered before it puts things on subscription. So when you move to a network technology, you don't just get efficiency and cost saving. You also get a vast amount of data and a lot of transparency of data. And so yeah, we were able to codify what media responds to. And we know that because literally we can see what they respond to quickest, right? And to that end up on that point, that'll also give you some insight into what makes an effective pure professional when it comes to media outreach. What are you seeing there? I know that's nothing our audience is very, very interested in finding out. What can they do to improve, say, their hit rate, their success rate of their media pitches? What our data has showed us is that it's all the things that your PR agency told you were important. It's not any speed is massively important. What we're finding is the media will take, you know, if there's a tier one spokesperson they'd love to hear from, and then tier two and tier three. They will take a tier two if it's quicker than a tier one. So that is to say they won't wait for the Bank of America expert. If the M and T bank or key bank expert will get back to them within half an hour or maybe to use a different, you know, a different industry, you know, they'd love to hear from the CEO of Coca-Cola, but they'll hear from the CEO of A and W if that one is quicker within sort of 30 minutes to an hour. So speed is still probably more important than ever was. Then you get to things like the amount of data, the amount of thinking you can do on the bottom half of the reporter. So what we've done in psych quoted is we enable you to stand up expert profiles and we enable you to enrich those expert profiles with downloadable headshots, example quotes that they've given to the media in the past, places they showed up links to other media coverage, their social feeds, and we put that all into one place. So if you can come in with a very fill out expert profile very quickly, you're giving that media the opportunity to vet that person, they're looking at the pitch, they're looking at the information, then they're clicking into the expert profile, they're saying oh look, they were featured in this magazine, that magazine, that magazine, they're online, I can watch their video from that. Oh, they seem very articulate, great, it's a no brain, you're making it very, very easy for me. So don't put barriers in between you and the pitch, give the media what they need, give it to them quickly. We actually launched a page called the quoted one hundred, which is where we celebrate the hundred best performing PRs and experts inside our platform. It's real live data, so it recalibrates every quarter and say these are the top 100 people inside the platform. And it's based on a set of data that we know matter to the media. So how quickly can you get to the back to the reporters, how quickly the reporters could pitch you or get back to you? How often do you or what's your hit rate, your conversion rate, so if you pitch 10 times, how many of those generate conversations with media? These are the inputs and the top 100 performers, of course those inputs, get a badge inside our platform, so they're quoted 100 remember. We recently did a survey of TV broadcasters, local TV news, asked them how they cover health stories. Surprisingly, the number one way 82% were taking satellite or zoom even more than the number of stations that are sending a crew and reporter out. So it is changing so much, so obviously the media is changing. But to take on how all of this is going to change and affect the communication industry as we wrap up this conversation. I'm going to think a lot of this all stems for that fragmentation in the media that we talked about. The media landscape is changing very, very rapidly. Microcommunities are coming up, so the big guys have kind of fragmented. As a cons person or as a brown, where your audience appears or what they're reading, what your core audience is reading has changed. It's changing. It's a mix. It's not that the big guys or the TV has gone away. It's just someone once said to me that media are like archaeological strata, and I think about that. You know, every time a new media comes out, they always say they were said like the end of radio. It's the end of actually, no, that's not true actually. All those things kind of just pile on top of one another. So you've got podcasts and video casts and YouTube and local TV and national TV and the New York Times and CNN and some of these and the skim were some sort of newsletters. So that was a big transformation happening inside the media itself. And I think if you're a brand or an expert or PR person, you just have to think about that fragmenting universe, I think that's going to change the technologies and the tools and the agencies that brands are using to reach those different audiences via that transforming landscape. And Dan, thanks so much for representing the Simon brand so well in this conversation. I'm guessing you're from now. We'll be here talking about how to get your story out in the metaverse. Thanks so much for sharing your time with us. Thank you for having me.