Using AI for PR and Branding Strategies

The AI surge is on, and every professional is trying to understand two things: how to use AI and avoid losing their jobs to AI. While I’m no futurist, I don’t see it as quite that stark. I think there will be a long period where those who harness AI tools outpace those who don’t.

While the most visible AI for marketing is generative AI, AI is changing how marketing and PR operate in other interesting ways. For example, Vurvey combines crowd-sourced personas with generative AI to create new product ideas. Artifact is taking huge amounts of incoming customer service data and making sense of it for marketers and product developers alike.

In both these cases, what once took months is now taking weeks or even less. However, all these tools still need people who understand the context and know what to DO with these outputs. Why do they matter, and how? This is where I think today’s marketing and PR executives can make an impact by using AI for PR and branding strategies.

AI for Content Strategy in Digital PR

Never mind using AI to scale content. While there’s no evidence that Google is punishing AI content, if you’ve read any AI content, you know it just doesn’t feel all that useful. And all search engines want to present useful, authoritative content.

My experience with AI content suggests that the results are iterative, no matter the prompt. Google is saying that it wants new ideas from authoritative sources. As I write this, if you do a Google search, you’ll see Reddit is at the top, as are heavy and many times legacy content producers. I think these results will balance out, but from a digital PR standpoint, it’s an idea generation landmine.

What to Do with an AI Agent for SEO-Friendly Content

You can run these articles through an AI agent, determine why this content does well in search, and create content accordingly. Whether you’re creating content for paid or owned content, having a unique point of view while incorporating a distinct point of view will be valuable. More and more content will come from an experiential or editorial point of view; Google isn’t surfacing much self-promotional content these days (that’s what ads are for).

For any owned content that could use an update, you can run that through an agent and find out what updates would make it more relevant and useful.

Using agents versus a single-question source is a more efficient way of doing this, but it could be done on a query-by-query basis. Ideally, you can train your agent on your brand voice by giving examples of your existing content and directing it to make brand-consistent recommendations. Test your agents out when it comes to content ideas. Run those suggestions through a search to see how they perform and what other ideas surface. You can even ask an agent what’s missing or what could make an article more useful.

AI for Media Monitoring and Sentiment

Let’s start with media monitoring. It’s not enough to watch the news; PR experts must understand the underlying trends and sentiments. AI is excellent at this. Again, you can use an agent to analyze thousands of pieces of content to provide you with key themes. You can ask it to review the sentiment, see how it stacks up against your existing sentiment analysis tool, and dig into the sentiment with deeper questions about what’s creating positive or negative cues.

PR experts of tomorrow will know how to do this, and most importantly, they will know what to do with this information and how to use it in broader content like key messaging from executives.

More and more media monitoring tools are incorporating AI into their platforms. But again, synthesizing the information won’t be enough; the important thing will be understanding how to make it relevant to your brand. Now, AI will get better at helping you contextualize this, but I think having a human at the helm makes the difference because humans are complicated machines, too. They can frequently sniff out inauthenticity subconsciously.

What makes AI so valuable to experts in PR and marketing is the time it saves synthesizing data. YOu can really ask an AI agent to be critical of the hypothesis you make, too, so you have a leg up on your ideas and their validity. Now, AI isn’t the overlord of all we do; you’ll still need to make your C-suite happy, so use your emotional intelligence to smooth out the edges of the data.

AI for Partnerships and Collabs

AI for Influencer Identification

Imagine you’re considering collaborating with an influencer. Again, you can run their content through an AI agent to review the key themes and even identify the themes most relevant to their audience by scraping and scanning the comments. I recently did this with YouTube content as part of our Fingerprint Strategy.

What I surfaced was the type of content people responded to, and in what way, I surfaced brands most frequently mentioned; I surfaced topics and it spun out a few ideas that the client can use to attract the best audience. When scanning comments, consider whether to keep bots in the mix. It’s easy to say, “Remove the bots because they skew the information.” Still, the reality is those bots are commenting because something triggered them, too, so building on that intelligence might also be useful to you. 

You can even analyze content over time and see how it’s changed and evolved. You might even be able to do some risk analysis by asking your agent how their content resonates with viewers.

All of this will likely be incorporated into more and more influencer identification programs, but for now, I personally think this is a solid use of time because it will give you insight into what you need to know and how to wrangle AI into a tool that’s useful to you. Your AI agent might even learn to be unique to you enough that suggestions and ideas come faster. 

AI for Collabs

These days, if I were considering a brand-to-brand collab or a brand-to-nonprofit collaborate, I would use an AI agent to see how they align in values using press releases, executive interviews, and statements. I would also use AI to analyze their engagement on social media, both in terms and sentiment and key messages.

Humans still put all this together for the best insights; I recently tested this on a post from Coca-Cola, scraped many comments from posts, and removed obvious bot comments about politics and religion. I took out duplicates (likely to be bots) and then asked my AI agent to tell me the key themes. They were overwhelmingly negative. As a brand-watcher, I know this isn’t a complete view of a global brand. So, to enrich my data, I added news articles and even their press releases to my agent. The Coca-Cola news was about the release of the new soda, as well as the lawsuit against Coke and Pepsi over plastic bottles. Now, my agent could get to the core: Coca-Cola is facing sustainability and corporate responsibility issues in the public, and the project about a message in a bottle (which, honestly, was quite cool) was poorly timed.

I then ran this through my media monitoring software for the past thirty days, which uses AI for analysis but is limited to media, not social media. The media coverage was almost equal in positive, negative, and neutral sentiment, so they are getting negative news coverage, too; sometimes consumers get all up in arms over something, but the media doesn’t care. It’s really important to know where the impact is to decide what to do – or not do.

So if I was looking to highlight my brand’s commitment to the environment, now probably wouldn’t be the time to connect with Coca-Cola brand.

 

AI for Crisis Communication

Is this going to take down Coca-Cola? Hardly. However, it is likely influencing current campaigns and content, and Coca-Cola could use AI to help them determine the next steps.

Plenty of crisis platforms are using AI to signal crisis early, and to predict the potential impact. True, those are largely enterprise AI products, but using agents is at your disposal right now and can help even startups or pre-IPO analyze the extent of a situation. Like I always say, the most important part of a crisis plan is identifying when its a crisis.  This is definitely where technology, PR expertise, and emotional intelligence come together and an area where we will see more and more AI integration.

 

The hardest part of analyzing this data is putting together enough of it to make an impact. For the agents I use, incorporating the multiple sources was really manual work. I could easily train an intern or EA to help me with that portion so I could stick to high-level strategy analysis. But the insights, ideas, and time saved are all worth the busy work right now.

AI will become easier and easier, and we will all laugh someday at how we had to source, copy, and paste content to get it analyzed, similar to how we all laugh about those early brick cell phones. No, this won’t take 40 years to unravel; it’s happening quickly. Make AI a tool you’re exceedingly comfortable using, and you’ll be well on your way to being the best marketing and PR expert you can be. If you’d like to discuss how we use AI to make strategic PR recommendations, contact us.