AI Insiders with Peter Shankman on PR AI and Building Source of Sources
Peter Shankman · January 22, 2026
prpitching to journalist
**Introduction to Peter Shankman**
(0:05) Hey everyone, I'm David Berkowitz, back with another edition of AI Insiders by AI Marketers Guild, and very excited. I'm always excited with our guest today, but Peter is a longtime friend, someone I've gotten to know very well in New York, and gotten to bond over AI and family stuff and all kinds of things where our paths have intersected. He's someone, well,
**Peter Shankman's Reputation and Source of Sources**
(0:34) before I got to know him as a person, I got to know him by reputation because he's been one of the most prolific masters of PR and communications and communicating what PR and comms are all about. He's now got this incredible platform, Source of Sources, where you can be a source or request sources for any journalistic endeavors. It's a tremendous free
**Source of Sources Conference and Gratitude**
(1:01) resource. It's an incredible Source of Sources conference debuting in New York, February 11th. We'll do a drawing for some passes by the end of this. Peter, I can't say enough about you, but I have to. I need to let you speak sometime. Thanks for being our source of wisdom today. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. That was a
**Peter Shankman's Opening Remarks**
(1:25) conversation. No, it's good. I recognize a lot of people. So, hi everyone, to those I know and those who I don't. I see Dave. I see Savio. I see good people here. I wouldn't expect anything less from something that you're running, Berkowitz. So, thank you. I appreciate you having this, and I'm glad to be here for a little bit to
**AI, PR, and Peter's Career Beginnings**
(1:46) chat on AI and the whole PR, where we see the PR, marketing, advertising, mostly PR, thing going with AI. I think that I didn't prepare a deck or anything, but I will tell you what I've seen. I've been doing PR since '96. I started my career. I had one job out of college. I was one
**Founding the AOL Newsroom**
(2:10) of three founders of the newsroom at America Online back in Vienna, Virginia. For those in this room under 35, AOL used to be the internet. It was how we talked to everyone in the world, and we invented it. So, I worked for America Online down in Vienna, Virginia, and we built AOL News. I took AOL
**Post-AOL and Starting a PR Firm**
(2:37) along with a bunch of other people from about 500,000 members to well over 10 million. It was an amazing time, but I left AOL in '96 and moved back to New York in '97, '98, and the internet was just getting started as many people knew it. I had all this internet knowledge from Virginia, and I said I should start a PR
**The Geek Factory Agency**
(3:01) firm, and I did. That was my first ever working for myself. It was an agency called The Geek Factory if anyone remembers the New York New Media Association, those back in those days, Ninma. >> I ran Geek Factory. We repped, we were right below a sweatshop on 38th Street and 8th Avenue. We repped clients like Napster and Juno and
**Post-Geek Factory and Autobiography Idea**
(3:23) AOL, and just it was a blast. We, I wanted to write an autobiography after I sold the agency in '01 called "We Ate All the Sushi and Drank All the Alcohol." There's none left, but it was an amazing experience, and I left when I sold the agency to a larger agency. I walked away and I tried
**Consulting, ADHD, and Early Source Matching**
(3:44) to take a year off. That lasted a week. I realized I didn't know how to relax. I blame my mother. I wound up consulting in PR for years and years and years, doing a whole bunch of other things. Eventually, because I have massive ADHD and talked to everyone, I had a giant rolodex, and reporters would call me from all over the world: "Hey, I'm
**From Rolodex to HARO**
(4:01) doing a story on whatever, who do you know?" And I'd find them someone. That started taking way too much time. So, I turned it into a mailing list, and that mailing list became "Help A Reporter Out" or HARO. HARO blew up between 2007 and 2010. It added about 300,000 people to it. It was selling ads, and it was incredibly successful, and it was acquired in 2010 by a company called VO
**HARO Acquisition and Post-HARO Endeavors**
(4:26) or a company called Vocus, then became Cision. Now Cision is part of PR Newswire. I walked away. Over the next 15 years, I did a bunch of other things. I wrote books. I have a couple of bestselling books on marketing, a couple of bestselling books on ADHD and neurodiversity in the workplace because I'm massively ADHD, and I just kept
**Re-launching Source of Sources**
(4:48) getting emails from people over and over saying that HARO has declined severely, and it's been ruined ever since I sold it, and why don't I start over? I didn't want to do that because you can't go home again. But because I have ADHD, I wound up starting it over. I run a company now called Source of Sources. Source of Sources is about a 50,000
**Source of Sources: How It Works**
(5:08) person strong mailing list supported by advertisers. We have two emails that go out every day to 50,000 people. Each email has roughly 10 to 20 queries from journalists all over the world, ranging from New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, MarketWatch, you name it. You read the emails. It takes you about 10 seconds to scan the table of
**Simplicity and Effectiveness of Source of Sources**
(5:33) contents. If you are knowledgeable about something a journalist is looking for, you reply to the journalist directly, and you can get quoted in the media, and that's it. It is unbelievably simple. It's not HTML, it's all text. Email, I still believe, is still the killer app. It's doing well. At some point, I'm sure I'll sell it again, but
**The Downfall of HARO and SEO Spam**
(5:55) it's a very easy process as long as people don't abuse it. The thing that took HARO to its death was the rise of SEO farms, and SEO companies out of Asia and the Middle East and Africa who reply to every single query hoping for a backlink, and that really destroyed the credibility that HARO had. One of the things that it did was it wound up
**SOS Rules: No Spam, No Off-Topic, No AI Pitches**
(6:20) causing journalists to go other places. So when I relaunched SOS, my rule was very simple: no spam farms. Pitch on topic. If you pitch off topic, I ban you. I ban entire countries. Most of the Middle East and a lot of Asia cannot use Source of Sources because it's all spam farms. One of the other rules I've had to put into play is no AI because
**AI Pitches are Easily Detected by Journalists**
(6:44) people are very confused when it comes to PR. They believe that AI can do all the writing for them, and reporters will love that. Here's a tip: reporters do not love that. Reporters can instantly tell if you've written your pitch in AI. They don't bother even going through AI checkers or anything like that; they simply know. If you've been a journalist for any amount
**Small Businesses Misuse AI in PR**
(7:09) of time, you know what's real and you know what's not. The problem is that small businesses, entrepreneurial-type people who are doing so much more with so much less, have succumbed to the belief that AI will save them time and is as good as their own writing, and that has, without
**Peter's Personal Use of AI (Math Tutor)**
(7:38) them realizing it, destroyed their ability to get most of their. I'm not anti-AI. I'm a big fan of it. I use it frequently. I'm a single dad to a 12-year-old daughter, and I can tell you that AI has single-handedly taught me math, because she's in seventh grade now, and I finally understand the math she's doing. Prior to AI, I gave up after third
**Modern Math and AI Fan**
(7:57) grade. They don't do, for those who don't have kids, they do not do the same math we learned. The numbers sound the same, but that math is just entirely different. They do not do the same math the way we learned it, and it's really annoying. >> I'm a huge fan. >> I use it constantly, but here's the thing: from a PR standpoint,
**AI Doesn't Make You a Better Writer**
(8:18) if you are not a good writer, AI will not make you a better writer. >> Pretty much, if you're not good at anything, AI will not make you better at that thing. If you're not good at writing, AI will allow you to broadcast to the world that you're not good at writing, and it will allow you to do it faster and at scale. That is a problem. What winds up
**Ineffective AI Pitches**
(8:41) happening is that people go in, they say, "Here's my product. Please write a press release about it." Or, "Here's my product. Here's the query that I got off SOS that the reporter wants. I need you to quickly write a pitch to the reporter about my product's great." And that will immediately be thrown in the trash, and the reporter will not pay attention to you ever
**Effective AI Use: Journalist List Building**
(9:01) again. That being said, there is very much a place to use AI when you are trying to get media attention. There are several places you can use it. One of the first things that I strongly recommend everyone does is use AI to cultivate a list of journalists who write about your market, your segment, your topic. It does it
**Advanced AI Prompts for Journalist Discovery**
(9:25) much better than Google does. Ask it: "Find me 20 reporters who work in print, who work online, who have in the past six months covered the following subjects and use the following terms." By saying "use the following terms" and throwing those terms into your request, your prompt, what you're doing is you're avoiding the cursory, pay-for-play
**Avoiding Low-Quality News Sites**
(9:52) stories. There are a lot of websites out there that are being built as news sites, but their goal is eventually to get acquired, to get flipped. They're writing about everything and writing a very broad, top-level view that no one really cares about, and it won't help you by getting quoted there.
**Targeting Quality Journalists with Specific Terms**
(10:10) They'll talk to a tree and quote a tree if they can. So, by putting in terms specific to your industry that go deeper than just top-level, you're asking it to bring you back a list of journalists who actually write about this for media outlets that matter. So, that's the first thing I would suggest. There are
**Accessing Journalist Contact Information**
(10:30) services that will then give you the contact information for those journalists, services such as Muck Rack, Cision, things like that. They are expensive. Your best bet for finding contact info for the journalist you want is to partner or work with someone who already has a subscription. Go halves, go quarters, whatever it is.
**Muck Rack: A Recommended Service**
(10:52) PR Newswire used to have a deal where you could put up to 10 people on an account, and they don't do that anymore. I don't think any of them do, but you can still get the information from someone who does have an account. It's a simple search of these databases. I'm a big fan of Muck Rack. They are an advertiser on SOS, but I'm a big fan because they tend to keep, they have a
**Keeping Journalist Contacts Up-to-Date**
(11:11) couple hundred people working for them overseas who tend to keep up with what the journalists are doing. There's nothing worse than writing a great pitch for a specific outlet for a specific journalist and having it bounce because they don't work there anymore. You also need to understand that the majority of journalists out there are doing 10 times more with five times less, and they
**The Golden Rule for AI in Pitching**
(11:30) don't have time for pitches that are off topic or pitches that waste their time. The rule is simple: if you want to use AI, you can use AI to better your pitch, but make the pitch perfect first. So, I look, and this is a 30-second
**How to Structure a Media Pitch**
(11:51) class on how to pitch the media, but here's what I recommend everyone do when pitching a reporter: three paragraphs, no more than three paragraphs. The first paragraph: "Hi, here's my name. Here's what I do. Here's my company." Second paragraph: if you're answering a query from SOS or something similar,
**The Three-Paragraph Pitch Format**
(12:09) here's why my answer, product, or topic is perfect. Here's the answer to what you requested. Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Third paragraph: here's how to contact me. It literally does not need to be deeper than that. This is your very first date. You're not trying to get into bed with anyone. You're simply letting the
**Value Proposition for Journalists**
(12:29) reporter know that you have information that will benefit them, help them write their story, and save them time. I used to send, when I was running my agency doing PR for other companies, I used to send out pitches that read something like, "Hey, just want to let you know, I know you've written a lot about
**Building Relationships: The 'Just Letting You Know' Pitch**
(12:50) rocketry or a related topic. Just want to let you know I have a new client in the space. They did X billions of dollars in revenue last year. They're doing this. No specific pitch here. Just want to let you know to put them in your rolodex. I'm always happy to help. Feel free to reach out anytime, and I can get them for you on a second's
**Ensuring Source Availability**
(13:08) notice." That's the key. Also, make sure you're letting the reporter know that, "Hey, if you do wind up using my source, this CEO who I work for, who I handle PR for, I have access to him. If you call me and say you want to speak to him, I'll have him on the phone for you in 5 minutes." The biggest problem I hear journalists talking about all the time is that someone
**Journalist Blacklists and Unresponsive Sources**
(13:27) says, "I have this great CEO. I'll get him." "Oh, well, he doesn't really want to talk to the media right now." "Well, then why is he pitched?" That's a guaranteed blacklist. Journalists share blacklists constantly. There's actually a text file; I've seen it. It's a gigabyte long now of PR people
**Using AI to Refine Pitches**
(13:44) they'll never work with again. Chris Anderson at Wired used to send out what he called the PR blacklist, and he was famous for these things. If you pitched Wired off topic once, you're on this list. So, one of the key things is what I usually do: I write my pitch. I put it into AI, I put it into ChatGPT or similar, and I say, "Hey, I'm emailing the journalist with very little time.
**AI as a Sharpening Tool, Not a Writer**
(14:05) Make this pitch stronger and tighter. Don't change the words. Don't change the subject. Don't change the keywords that I put in. But make it stronger and tighter. Did I miss anything? Is my grammar right?" You just want to sharpen it. You don't want AI writing your pitches. You don't want AI doing your PR for you,
**AI for Cleaning Up, Not Creating**
(14:22) but it can always clean things up. I think that is one of the most underrated features of any GTP type concept: it will make whatever you've already written stronger. But if you're writing poorly, it's just going to make it slightly less poor. I don't recommend that. I use it anytime it's needed. I use it anytime I
**AI for Personal Communication and De-escalation**
(14:45) have to email my ex-wife to talk about my daughter's Bat Mitzvah right now. I run everything through it: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much, with everything you know about her, how much will this piss her off?" If it's above three, I rewrite it. So, it's key to understand that you can't have
**The 'Too Sweet' AI Pitch**
(15:04) AI do it for you, but you can have it help you. Again, journalists are smart. They're savvy. They understand if it's been written by AI because it just seems... The best description I ever heard was that when someone pitches me AI, it seems "too sweet." Like if you expected a coffee with one Splenda and they put five of them in, it just tastes like too much Splenda.
**AI-Generated Social Media Content**
(15:30) That really is a perfect example because I've started seeing people post on social media, on Facebook or whatever. They think they're being all smart by having AI write some really smarmy thing, whether it's political or whatever, but you can tell it tastes too sweet. Some of the best advice I can give you, and I'll give you another great piece
**Preparing Pitches in Advance**
(15:53) as well. If you're using a service like Source of Sources or anything similar, have a pitch ready. Reporters use Source of Sources, and they know when their pitch has gone out and hit my list because they will go from zero to 100 pitches in their email in under five
**Timing is Key: Tailor and Send Quickly**
(16:15) minutes. My emails come out at 6:30 in the morning and 1:30 in the afternoon Eastern time. My recommendation is to have a pitch ready. The second you see something that fits, tailor it. The second you see something that fits, add words into the blank spaces in your pitch that's waiting to go. So, the contact info is already there.
**Pre-writing Pitches for Speed**
(16:38) The "here's who I am" part is already there. All you're doing is answering the specific question in their query within your pitch. You create that so it's already ready, and all you have to do is add a couple of words, and then click send, or run it through AI to get it stronger and then click send, because it really is a timing game.
**Immediate Response Strategy**
(16:59) I know people who set a specific email chime to my emails, the first one that comes out at 6:30 and then 1:30, so that they are awoken by my email. They read it, they scan it. If there's nothing to respond to, they say they go to the gym, but they probably go back to bed. So, make sure that you're answering immediately because that is, hands down, one of the best ways to get
**Source of Sources Advertising and AI for Copy**
(17:19) quoted: to be one of those first 5-10 answers from a source to a journalist. I use AI a lot. SOS is supported by a small text ad at the top of each email, and then an even tinier one-line text ad under the table of contents. It's very small, but they work. When I ask my advertisers to send me their copy, they, without
**AI for Ad Copy Shortening and Impact**
(17:43) question, send me too much. What I use AI to do is, by keeping the same gist of this advertisement, shorten it to three lines, make it just as impactful, keep it small. Then I'll look back on it. I'll read it again. I'll make sure it doesn't sound too sweet, and I'll usually use it. It is phenomenal for quick fixes, but it is
**AI Won't Replace Writers & SOS Success Rate**
(18:04) never going to replace the writer in you. It simply won't. At least not in our lifetimes. I want to answer questions because I speak too fast, and everyone says, "Give me an hour." I'm like, "I'm not going to need it." So, happy to take questions or answer more. I can tell you that 94% of the journalists
**Strict Enforcement of SOS Rules**
(18:26) who use Source of Sources do come back, which is a great number. I think it's because we're pretty tight on blocking people and kicking people out and off the list if they pull some nonsense. So, if you're pitching off topic, if you're spamming, I don't know. I'm also not above suing companies who violate our terms of service, similar companies to what I do, who
**Journalists Need Help: Become a Trusted Source**
(18:49) violate terms of service by pitching reporters to get them to use their service. My basic premise is this: journalists do need our help. The more you can offer them in the quickest amount of time to make their jobs easier and do their job faster, the more they'll come to refer to you as a source. It's like online dating
**Building Direct Journalist Relationships**
(19:08) in the respect that if they are using Source of Sources and they find a good source for their niche, for their industry, and you have proven to them that you're worthwhile or beneficial, they're going to come back to you directly. That's what you want to work for and build towards. If you're pitching a journalist without using
**Reading Journalists' Current Work**
(19:28) any source-matching service like mine, one of the things I suggest is to use AI to generate and build those lists of journalists who are working in your field. Make sure you're reading what they write. Just because a journalist is, AI, I've seen it. It'll send you a list of 20 reporters, and four of them have moved on and are doing something
**Avoid Pitching Outdated Topics**
(19:48) completely different. If you pitch the journalist on an old topic, that tells you that you're not reading their current work. If you pitch someone who writes a column, a blog, anything like that, just do yourself the favor of spending five minutes and reading their latest work. It's all available. It's all free. It's
**Journalist's Humorous Rejection Method**
(20:05) all there. I used to have a friend of mine who worked for the Journal, and she would always say, she'd keep the pitches that were off topic, and she'd write back, "Hey, got your pitch about product X. Great to hear from you. This is exactly what I covered 10 years ago, so
**The 'Do Better' Slapback**
(20:29) no, I will not be covering you now. Do better." I like to think that that was a double rebuke, because not only did it tell them that they're not paying attention, but it gave them the idea that they might actually be covered, and then she just slapped them down, and I always respected that. Peter, can you talk about the event in New York City?
**Introducing Small Giants 2026 Conference**
(20:45) >> I'm running this event for small to mid-size businesses, but primarily small business entrepreneurs. It's called Small Giants 2026. I came up with the idea because I got a ton of people who use Source of Sources who are one-man shops, two-man shops. Maybe they've hired their first person, and they're building small companies, and this might be their first
**Addressing the Gap in Resources for Startups**
(21:01) small company or their 10th. But they feel there are great resources once you start making a little bit of money, and there are not a lot of resources when you're just starting out that don't cost a lot. I actually found that funny because when I sold "Help A Reporter Out," that was a game changer for me.
**Expensive Masterminds for New Entrepreneurs**
(21:20) I was shocked when it sold for as much money as it did. I never expected that. But one of the things that came from that was I immediately started getting emails from masterminds and conferences: "Hey, saw that you sold your business. We would love you to join our mastermind for only
**The Inspiration for Small Giants Conference**
(21:37) $50,000 a year. You can get access." I'm like, "If I had $50,000 when I was starting my company, I wouldn't have needed you." The whole reason I needed something was because I didn't have any funds and was just starting out, and was, read the room. So my premise was to create a conference that was helpful and that wasn't full of fluff.
**Small Giants Conference Speakers and Value**
(21:58) We have about 10-12 speakers, including people like David, Jeremiah O'Yang, Scott Monty from formerly Ford. We have an accountant. Everyone who comes, we have a photographer who's going to do professional headshots for everyone who comes. Just trying to add value to this thing, because there's too much content without benefit out there where
**Diverse Topics at Small Giants**
(22:16) people come in and there's no benefit. We have two people talking on AI. We have an accountant who's going to tell you how to save money on your taxes. We have a travel person who's going to tell you how to save money and how to make sure your flight isn't canceled, or you don't wind up in the back of the plane or underneath it.
**15-Minute Talks for ADHD Audiences**
(22:31) says the guy who's going to Malta for a keynote on Friday and knows damn well he won't be able to get back to New York on Sunday because of the snowstorm going in, but he's still going. So, we have a ton of people speaking, and they're each speaking 15 minutes because I don't know about you, but I'm absolutely ADHD, and if someone's talking to me for more than 15 minutes,
**Focus on Health and Well-being**
(22:47) I lose their attention. I look at half of you have shut off your cameras because I know you're not even there now. You're just whatever. So, it's a focus on mental health. It's a focus on actual health. We have one of the top physical trainers in the country who's coming in and telling you what you can do every
**Conference Details and Peter's Motivation**
(23:02) single day, even if you never go to a gym, to not die early. Simple things like standing up, walking, treadmill desk, things like that. So, it's going to be in Midtown Manhattan on February 11th, all day, breakfast and lunch. It's going to be pretty fun. Everything I've ever done, everything I've ever built, has really been built with the desire to help
**ADHD and the Drive to Help Others**
(23:20) people because when you're undiagnosed ADHD all your life, and you're told that you're broken your entire life, you tend to want to help people. It's in your nature because you don't want anyone else to feel as awful as you did growing up. That's what this conference is all about. The website is sourceofsources.com/conference.
**Conference Website and Q&A Invitation**
(23:36) Would love to see you guys there. Source of Sources, by the way, is sourceofsources.com. You can sign up, and you'll get those two emails today, and they're pretty easy to read. I'd love to take questions and hear what you guys are thinking about, or how I can help with PR and give you some advice on any of that. I'm happy to share whatever I know.
**Opportunity to Win Conference Passes**
(23:53) >> Yeah. And a reminder, if you are off camera or something and not checking the chat, then you can go to highcaliberi.com/sos for Source of Sources and win one of the handful of passes I
**Meet Peter and the Crew**
(24:12) have to give out and be great to meet some of you there. You'll get to meet Peter. Come on. After seeing this, how would you not want a chance to meet Peter and this amazing crew in person? Feeling good about my standing desk setup right now, too. Okay. Jazella. >> Hey there. Big thanks
**Jazella's Question: Imagery in PR**
(24:31) for the candid conversation. This is awesome. Peter, I'd love to hear, both with regard to Source of Sources specifically, but also in general, how you see imagery factoring into the PR conversation these days. Is it still helpful to attach images, headshot, whatever? Is it the kind of thing you wait to follow up on? Is that possible to even share through
**No Attachments in Pitches**
(24:52) Source of Sources? >> That's a great question. Two things: number one, no attachments ever. If you're emailing a reporter, no attachments ever. That goes without saying. But the second thing, there's something about offering too much information. One of the things that SEO farms do out of, they all
**SEO Spam Tactics and Red Flags**
(25:10) follow the same playbook. One of the things the SEO farms are doing out of Asia and all that is they're saying, "Hi, here's my answer to your query. It's totally off topic. This is written by AI. I'm happy to talk to you more. Here's my name. Here's my LinkedIn profile. And here's my headshot." The headshot is hosted by some cloud, the LinkedIn is
**Fake Profiles and Website Flipping**
(25:30) fake, and that is a dead giveaway that it is not a real person answering. A lot of what these people do is they buy a website, "We will buy your home in Austin, Texas.com" for instance. They try desperately to get some backlinks from media outlets using Source of Sources, using HARO, things like that. When they do, and they get high enough SEO juice, they flip the
**The Generic Spam Template**
(25:56) website to someone else who wants it because now it's backlinked. If they were smart, they would not all use the same outline for their emails, because it is: "Here's my information. Here's why I think this is useful. Here's my LinkedIn, and here's my headshot." It is 100% the same in every single thing, and you think, "Okay, this person does not exist."
**LinkedIn's Fake Profile Problem**
(26:17) LinkedIn has a massive fake profile problem. I don't think they have any desire or need to fix it because it probably generates them more revenue somehow, but they have a massive fake profile problem. Some numbers are one out of four, one out of five are fake. It's obscene. Every single SEO farm, the first thing they do is create a fake profile for
**Leave Journalists Wanting More**
(26:42) this expert, and that's their website expert, and that's what they pitch. So, do not include a headshot. You want to leave them wanting more. It's like a first date at a bar. If I tell you everything about me, and I show you my family tree, and I give you measurements and whatever, there's no excitement left.
**The Power of Scarcity in Pitching**
(27:04) We're probably not going to get together for a second date. Where's the magic? But if I leave you wanting more, you're going to come back. If you give the journalist just enough, say, "Hey, I know my subject, I know what I'm talking about. I'm happy to help you. Reach out anytime." That's enough. They'll come back to you. Here's the thing,
**Journalists Prefer Their Own Photographers**
(27:24) 99.999% of the time, no journalist is ever going to need your headshot. If you're lucky enough to get a media outlet that wants a photo, they're going to send a photographer. >> So, headshot might have been a bad example, but as someone who previously represented, >> You can give them a link to a
**Providing Media Kits on Request**
(27:40) media kit if you have it. Give them a link to your website, but no LinkedIn, no headshot. Give them a link to a website. Give them a link to, "Here's what I do. Here's my company name." Highlight the company name with a URL. >> As someone who previously represented architecture and design firms,
**Visual Pitches and Architect Firms**
(27:57) a visual medium, to be fair, this was 10 years ago, I would basically be ignored if I didn't include imagery so they could get a sense of the quality. But I hear you. >> I wouldn't put it in the email. Instead, I'd offer to provide high-res photos upon request. I have a good friend of mine who handles PR for about 85% of
**PR for the Adult Industry Example**
(28:17) the adult industry. It's something he fell into, and he's repped the ABNs for 15 years. He's an awesome guy, a nice Jewish guy out of LA. We've been, he's one of my closest friends, and even he, he has a mailing list that for some reason I'm on, and you haven't really lived until you know that some specific porn star is
**Links on Request for Images**
(28:40) releasing two new anal scenes. It changes things. The reason I bring it up is because even he knows better than to put photos in, not even sexual, just photos of the porn star. He puts them, he says, "Links available on request, high-res available on request," whatever. It's not worth it, because keep in mind
**Mobile Readership and Image Loading**
(29:02) someone somewhere is reading one of your journalists is reading this on the subway, and they just went underground, and all they got was the first two paragraphs, and now the email, the rest of it's not loading on their iPhone because they have no service, and it's waiting for the image. If they want images, if they want imagery, if they want quality photos of your
**Diane's Question: Breaking into National Media**
(29:19) product, your this or that, factory plant, they'll let you know. >> Diane was asking in the chat: "I got local media covered. How to break into national media better?" >> If you have local and national media, international is actually surprisingly easier. For some reason, reporters
**International Media Insights**
(29:43) still want sources from the USA when they're overseas. I, at this point, don't know why, but they still want sources from overseas. So, one of the best things you could do is start subscribing to a lot of the journalists who have subsects, outside of who they're covering. Start subscribing, start interacting with them
**Engaging with Journalists Directly**
(29:59) one-on-one. Start letting them know, "Hey, I'm here in New York," which, it's New York City, it's not part of America, "and I'm happy to give you whatever you need if you're looking for XYZ, whatever." You'd be surprised how many of them will actually respond. It's just you're not wasting their time. You're saying, "Hey, I'm a source, or I rep a source, and I'm happy to help.
**Building Journalist Connections**
(30:18) It works in your industry. Here's what you need." I've made some of my closest journalist connections by doing just that, by following. It used to be that you follow them on Twitter. No, I don't recommend that anymore. But, threads, Instagram, Substack, things like that. Just figure out where they are and
**Understanding Journalist's Language and Beat**
(30:36) become passionate about what they're reading, and actually take the time to read them because learning all that stuff will actually give you a good background on them. The added bonus of that is that you're then starting to learn it in their language. I don't mean a different language, English versus French; I'm talking about the
**Approachable Language and BlueSky**
(30:54) language the journalist uses when they're talking about their specific beat. There are certain keywords and trigger words that you'll find that they're using on a regular basis. If you start using that, it makes you more approachable. >> I don't want to say BlueSky is dead because I don't think it is. There's still a base, but I don't
**Threads and Meta Products**
(31:12) most of the journalists I know who went there. As much as we all don't want to be on Threads and don't want to be in a Meta product, I was watching the season finale of Land Man this morning at 5 AM on my Peloton, and I felt the same way. I don't like that I like that show, but I have no choice but to come back for season 3 in six months.
**Blue Sky Engagement**
(31:31) >> It's the same thing. I'm still a skater, but also the folks I follow on BlueSky are politicians and folks I don't necessarily need to care about if I can reach them or not, or if they pay attention to me. >> Brian has a good question here. No, because there's something about the entire email versus one line.
**AI for Single Lines vs. Full Emails**
(32:01) I think you get a pass if you use one line because sometimes that one line is valid. It's the same thing with M-dashes. I like M-dashes. I think M-dashes get a bad rap, but I don't use them. But every once in a while, I'll slip one in. It's not the end of the world. Again, I think there's a difference between writing the entire email, having the entire email written
**Maintaining Your Voice with AI**
(32:17) by AI versus one line. If it's your voice, they start to know your voice. It's a lot easier. And Jim misses the word "delve." I can't tell you how often I have no random bolding in all my instructions on Gemini and ChatGPT, and I'm always telling it: "No bolding."
**David's Open Question to Peter**
(32:50) Stop. What else do you have for Peter? This is an opportunity here. I can ask him a ton. >> Okay, here's the thing. I've heard some of these complaints, and I've experienced them myself, the bolding, the M-dashes, the N-dashes. I think that one of
**Custom GPTs and AI Training**
(33:11) the advantages that I have using custom GPTs is that I instruct it to speak and respond in the way I choose, including no unnecessary bolding and no M-dashes. So, I think part of the issues that people are highlighting are just lack of training on our part. >> Yeah. >> But I think one of the challenges I'll
**The Importance of AI Training**
(33:30) push back on anybody is if there's something wrong with the AI where it's not doing what you want to do, my challenge to anyone is: are you training it or teaching it? Are you building it in a way to avoid those issues? >> I think you're saying what I'm saying, but in different wording. If you're not, but that's the thing, because if you're
**AI as an Editor and Writing Coach**
(33:46) training it and you're not a great writer, you're not training it well. >> Right. The way I would frame it is that you change the role of the AI. Instead of a writer for you, it's your editor that can copy check, watch, and train you how to write better. For example, I'm a better speaker
**Continuous Improvement in Writing**
(34:05) than I am a writer, so I have a custom GPT that helps me improve my writing and gives me coaching feedback based on information I give it. Everyone who's ever worked for me has been allowed to take as many writing classes at local CUNY or whatever college as they want, and I'll pay for it, because you can never be too good of a writer.
**Impact of a High School Writing Teacher**
(34:26) And, I'm a huge fan. I still take writing classes whenever I can. I think that I had a teacher, I grew up in New York City. I went to public school here, and I had a teacher in high school who gave me a journal, and she saw something in me and said, "You should write more." I'm so glad and thankful she did it. She's actually still alive. I'm
**The Importance of Writing Skills for the Future**
(34:44) taking her to dinner in a couple weeks. She changed the trajectory of my life. If you have any skill at writing, you can always get better. I see some of the kids in my daughter's class. I see her texts, and the things that, I weep for the future in a lot of ways. I think that
**David on AI and Authentic Communication**
(35:04) as much as you can do to become a better writer, it's never a bad thing. >> No, I was just saying someone in the comments said they heard some tips to use voice to help capture voice better. I will say the one thing I've discovered that relates to a lot of what Peter's talked about today is that there are so many things in either
**Value in Human Messiness**
(35:30) one-on-one communication or LinkedIn that I'm intentionally not using AI for. Peter, I even have gone the opposite way with some of what you've said about cleaning things up, because some of that messiness, even if it's not all the AI tells and all that, I feel some of that messiness is such a tell that here's a person who's communicating
**Authenticity Over Polish**
(35:52) his ideas well enough, but isn't trying to polish this. It's so clearly this person that they haven't gotten that exact message today. I'm kind of relieved when I know for sure that even something as simple as a LinkedIn comment, I'd rather have it be one of those automated "congrats" or "thumbs up" things than
**AI as a Thinking and Writing Partner**
(36:18) someone who I know used AI to help them write it. >> 100%. >> I look at it a little differently. The way I look at it is that I'm not writing for polish or to create an extra tone or style. I look at it like a writing partner. I'm making sure that I'm communicating my ideas clearly.
**AI for Clarity, Not Generic Slop**
(36:39) There may be typos. There may be grammatical mistakes, but the idea for me is that I use AI as a thinking partner and as a writing coach. That way I can communicate my ideas effectively and clearly, not necessarily to make polished, generic AI slop that everybody's seeing on LinkedIn. It depends on your
**Training AI for Your Voice and Tone**
(36:58) relationship you have with your AI. It does. I think that, again, journalists are a different breed. They're going to see and they're going to know if you're able to. I've been training my AI to speak in my voice, and it always asks, the one thing it always asks, and this is
**Voice Prompts and Contextual Writing**
(37:17) probably more of a tell to me, "Is it snarky enough for you?" [laughter] There's something to be said for that. >> I've also created voice prompts. In similar fashion, you've trained your AI. I've created voice prompts based on the context I'm writing, because it's trained
**Self-Promotion: Keynote Speaker & Neurodiversity**
(37:32) on my writing style. But I have to write in different style and formats depending on who I'm talking to and what I'm talking about. It's a mental training and how you teach it. That's what I always push back. I will say this, the one thing I didn't mention, if I have a second to self-promote: I've been a keynote speaker for 20
**Companies and Neurodiversity**
(37:53) years, and I've spoken to companies as big as Morgan Stanley Worldwide to as small as startups. I speak on customer experience, and I also speak on neurodiversity. One of the things that I'm finding is that more and more companies are starting to ask themselves what they're supposed to do with their neurodiverse
**Mental Capital Consulting**
(38:10) employees. So, I launched a company about a year ago with a doctor friend of mine called Mental Capital Consulting. We work with companies like Morgan Stanley, Adobe, Google, and a lot of small companies, helping them to create neuro-inclusive environments, because whether companies know it or not, 20% to 30% of their employees are
**Productivity Spike in Neurodiverse Employees**
(38:32) neurodiverse. What we saw during COVID is that when everyone got to work from home, there was a spike in productivity from the percentage of employees who were neurodiverse, because for the first time in their lives, they got to work the way they wanted to. Then, when they came back, it dropped off. So, companies are starting to learn that there's a benefit to that. So if
**Supporting Neurodiverse Kids and Adults**
(38:52) I could ever help you out on the neurodiverse side, or if you have a kid who's ADHD, take comfort in the fact they're going to take over the world. I've written a couple of kids' books on this and a couple of adult books on this. Peter, I have a question about that because in the last month I've talked to three different people who introduced
**Neurodiverse Individuals and AI**
(39:09) themselves as neurodiverse, which I appreciated. >> And all of them, in a different way, said they love AI because it's the only thing that can keep up with them. >> Yeah, that's 100%. Absolutely. >> And they're doing amazing work with it. >> The only downside I would say to that is that I want to get a t-shirt that says this: "AI should not be your
**AI as a Thinking Partner, Not a Therapist**
(39:30) therapist." I have absolutely no problem. I talk to my AI all the time. Sometimes it's as stupid as, "Why are people so stupid?" And it's smart enough to go, "Okay, what happened now? Let's walk through it. Don't stab anyone." But, as long as it's not replacing an
**Dangers of Untrained AI Therapist Apps**
(39:48) actual therapist. I think that the rise of these AI therapist programs and the rise of these AI therapist apps, a lot of whom have absolutely zero cognitive training behind it, is dangerous. But in terms of using it because it's that quick, 100%. >> The one woman I spoke with said that she describes herself as having 25 to 100
**AI Handling Mental Overload**
(40:17) tabs open in her mind at any time, and AI can handle all of that, and no human can. >> My introduction is that I have only two speeds: I have namaste, and I've got "get things done," and there's no middle ground. But, I'm petershankman.com. I answer all my own email. I'm
**Peter's Take on Meta**
(40:37) at Peter Shankman on all the socials except Twitter. I want to answer Daniel's question: "Is my hot take on Meta considering that they literally shut down the metaverse yesterday?" It's not going anywhere. It still has Facebook. It still has Threads. Facebook, as long as old people exist, Facebook exists.
**Meta's Declining Relevance (Facebook, Instagram, Threads)**
(40:56) It has Instagram. So, it's not going anywhere per se. But I think it's starting to become slightly less relevant. I could tell you that I don't keep Facebook on my phone anymore. If you told me that I wouldn't be doing that 5 years ago, I'd have thought you were crazy. Also, I can tell you from a 12-year-old's
**Gen Alpha and Social Media**
(41:15) perspective, my kids see very little value in social. They're much more private than we were even 10 years ago. I'd be curious what Stella says about that, David. I don't let my kid on social. The one thing they all do have, and every single girl in my daughter's class, they're addicted to
**Pinterest and Chick-fil-A's Gen Alpha Popularity**
(41:37) Pinterest. >> It's amazing. >> I don't think they thought about that as the target market. >> The two brands that have surprised me the most with Gen Alpha: Pinterest and Chick-fil-A. I cannot believe my daughter's in middle school and has this "out to lunch" thing a
**The Chick-fil-A Phenomenon**
(41:57) number of days a week, and I can't tell you how often the brand Chick-fil-A comes up in the parent group chat, that this is what the entire school wanted to know: "Is Chick-fil-A within the out-lunch zone?" They're obsessed. I went to take her there on Friday. It was the most entertaining mob scene I've ever seen in a fast-food restaurant. It's
**Why Pinterest is Popular with Gen Alpha**
(42:24) just full of 12 and 13 year olds. It was kind of amazing. >> Why do you think Pinterest is so popular amongst them? >> I think there are a couple of reasons. One of the big ones is that parents, for better or for worse, we think it's okay. It's not TikTok, it's not Instagram, it's not YouTube. So, I
**Parental Approval and Privacy on Pinterest**
(42:46) think for whatever reason, we think it's okay. Mind you, half the content she sees, I'm sure, comes from TikTok on Pinterest. But, if she has a Pinterest board about sewing, my daughter likes sewing for some reason, and she has three Pinterest boards about different stitches. I love
**Pinterest: Perceived Safety & Private Boards**
(43:02) that for her. I think the number one reason for parents is we don't think it's that dangerous, so we let them on. And the second reason is because they can create these Pinterest boards that are only viewable by their friends that we've approved to be their friends. So, they feel they don't feel like it's a public space.
**Daughter's Concern for Privacy**
(43:23) As long as I can remember, she's, I called her, she was bothering me on the subway a couple of years ago, and I said, "Jess Shankman, Dad!" And she said, "Now everyone knows my name, and they're going to come up to my house and hack me!" That was literally what she was worried about. It's that feeling of safety.
**Pinterest Content and Buzzfeed Quizzes**
(43:40) >> It is wild, and it's also funny. So much of Pinterest is just a feeding ground for Buzzfeed slop and poorly produced content. But, I'll actually get on there and do the quizzes with her. "What kind of fruit are you?" This stuff is still all over
**Peter's Instagram and Travel Reels**
(44:04) Buzzfeed. I put my Instagram link. I do a lot of reels with my daughter. We make a lot of fun stuff when we travel and things like that. Feel free to share if you want some fun eye candy. I don't know. >> Great. I have to go catch a flight and not be able to come home in a few
**Farewell and Thank You**
(44:22) days. So, I want to thank you guys for having me. David, thank you for setting this up. I hope that was useful, guys. Feel free to stay in touch and reach out, please. >> This is awesome, Peter. Safe travels. Many of us will see you next month. >> I hope to see you guys. I hope you guys show up on February 11th. We
**Conference Seats and Discount Code**
(44:39) have about 15 seats available. It's sourceofsources.com/conference. If you use the code SOS100, it drops a bunch of money off the ticket. So, feel free to use that and see you guys soon. >> Thanks, Peter. We'll see you next week with David Levy.
**Closing Remarks**
(45:01) Anything else you need? Thanks, everyone.
(0:05) Hey everyone, I'm David Berkowitz, back with another edition of AI Insiders by AI Marketers Guild, and very excited. I'm always excited with our guest today, but Peter is a longtime friend, someone I've gotten to know very well in New York, and gotten to bond over AI and family stuff and all kinds of things where our paths have intersected. He's someone, well,
**Peter Shankman's Reputation and Source of Sources**
(0:34) before I got to know him as a person, I got to know him by reputation because he's been one of the most prolific masters of PR and communications and communicating what PR and comms are all about. He's now got this incredible platform, Source of Sources, where you can be a source or request sources for any journalistic endeavors. It's a tremendous free
**Source of Sources Conference and Gratitude**
(1:01) resource. It's an incredible Source of Sources conference debuting in New York, February 11th. We'll do a drawing for some passes by the end of this. Peter, I can't say enough about you, but I have to. I need to let you speak sometime. Thanks for being our source of wisdom today. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. That was a
**Peter Shankman's Opening Remarks**
(1:25) conversation. No, it's good. I recognize a lot of people. So, hi everyone, to those I know and those who I don't. I see Dave. I see Savio. I see good people here. I wouldn't expect anything less from something that you're running, Berkowitz. So, thank you. I appreciate you having this, and I'm glad to be here for a little bit to
**AI, PR, and Peter's Career Beginnings**
(1:46) chat on AI and the whole PR, where we see the PR, marketing, advertising, mostly PR, thing going with AI. I think that I didn't prepare a deck or anything, but I will tell you what I've seen. I've been doing PR since '96. I started my career. I had one job out of college. I was one
**Founding the AOL Newsroom**
(2:10) of three founders of the newsroom at America Online back in Vienna, Virginia. For those in this room under 35, AOL used to be the internet. It was how we talked to everyone in the world, and we invented it. So, I worked for America Online down in Vienna, Virginia, and we built AOL News. I took AOL
**Post-AOL and Starting a PR Firm**
(2:37) along with a bunch of other people from about 500,000 members to well over 10 million. It was an amazing time, but I left AOL in '96 and moved back to New York in '97, '98, and the internet was just getting started as many people knew it. I had all this internet knowledge from Virginia, and I said I should start a PR
**The Geek Factory Agency**
(3:01) firm, and I did. That was my first ever working for myself. It was an agency called The Geek Factory if anyone remembers the New York New Media Association, those back in those days, Ninma. >> I ran Geek Factory. We repped, we were right below a sweatshop on 38th Street and 8th Avenue. We repped clients like Napster and Juno and
**Post-Geek Factory and Autobiography Idea**
(3:23) AOL, and just it was a blast. We, I wanted to write an autobiography after I sold the agency in '01 called "We Ate All the Sushi and Drank All the Alcohol." There's none left, but it was an amazing experience, and I left when I sold the agency to a larger agency. I walked away and I tried
**Consulting, ADHD, and Early Source Matching**
(3:44) to take a year off. That lasted a week. I realized I didn't know how to relax. I blame my mother. I wound up consulting in PR for years and years and years, doing a whole bunch of other things. Eventually, because I have massive ADHD and talked to everyone, I had a giant rolodex, and reporters would call me from all over the world: "Hey, I'm
**From Rolodex to HARO**
(4:01) doing a story on whatever, who do you know?" And I'd find them someone. That started taking way too much time. So, I turned it into a mailing list, and that mailing list became "Help A Reporter Out" or HARO. HARO blew up between 2007 and 2010. It added about 300,000 people to it. It was selling ads, and it was incredibly successful, and it was acquired in 2010 by a company called VO
**HARO Acquisition and Post-HARO Endeavors**
(4:26) or a company called Vocus, then became Cision. Now Cision is part of PR Newswire. I walked away. Over the next 15 years, I did a bunch of other things. I wrote books. I have a couple of bestselling books on marketing, a couple of bestselling books on ADHD and neurodiversity in the workplace because I'm massively ADHD, and I just kept
**Re-launching Source of Sources**
(4:48) getting emails from people over and over saying that HARO has declined severely, and it's been ruined ever since I sold it, and why don't I start over? I didn't want to do that because you can't go home again. But because I have ADHD, I wound up starting it over. I run a company now called Source of Sources. Source of Sources is about a 50,000
**Source of Sources: How It Works**
(5:08) person strong mailing list supported by advertisers. We have two emails that go out every day to 50,000 people. Each email has roughly 10 to 20 queries from journalists all over the world, ranging from New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, MarketWatch, you name it. You read the emails. It takes you about 10 seconds to scan the table of
**Simplicity and Effectiveness of Source of Sources**
(5:33) contents. If you are knowledgeable about something a journalist is looking for, you reply to the journalist directly, and you can get quoted in the media, and that's it. It is unbelievably simple. It's not HTML, it's all text. Email, I still believe, is still the killer app. It's doing well. At some point, I'm sure I'll sell it again, but
**The Downfall of HARO and SEO Spam**
(5:55) it's a very easy process as long as people don't abuse it. The thing that took HARO to its death was the rise of SEO farms, and SEO companies out of Asia and the Middle East and Africa who reply to every single query hoping for a backlink, and that really destroyed the credibility that HARO had. One of the things that it did was it wound up
**SOS Rules: No Spam, No Off-Topic, No AI Pitches**
(6:20) causing journalists to go other places. So when I relaunched SOS, my rule was very simple: no spam farms. Pitch on topic. If you pitch off topic, I ban you. I ban entire countries. Most of the Middle East and a lot of Asia cannot use Source of Sources because it's all spam farms. One of the other rules I've had to put into play is no AI because
**AI Pitches are Easily Detected by Journalists**
(6:44) people are very confused when it comes to PR. They believe that AI can do all the writing for them, and reporters will love that. Here's a tip: reporters do not love that. Reporters can instantly tell if you've written your pitch in AI. They don't bother even going through AI checkers or anything like that; they simply know. If you've been a journalist for any amount
**Small Businesses Misuse AI in PR**
(7:09) of time, you know what's real and you know what's not. The problem is that small businesses, entrepreneurial-type people who are doing so much more with so much less, have succumbed to the belief that AI will save them time and is as good as their own writing, and that has, without
**Peter's Personal Use of AI (Math Tutor)**
(7:38) them realizing it, destroyed their ability to get most of their. I'm not anti-AI. I'm a big fan of it. I use it frequently. I'm a single dad to a 12-year-old daughter, and I can tell you that AI has single-handedly taught me math, because she's in seventh grade now, and I finally understand the math she's doing. Prior to AI, I gave up after third
**Modern Math and AI Fan**
(7:57) grade. They don't do, for those who don't have kids, they do not do the same math we learned. The numbers sound the same, but that math is just entirely different. They do not do the same math the way we learned it, and it's really annoying. >> I'm a huge fan. >> I use it constantly, but here's the thing: from a PR standpoint,
**AI Doesn't Make You a Better Writer**
(8:18) if you are not a good writer, AI will not make you a better writer. >> Pretty much, if you're not good at anything, AI will not make you better at that thing. If you're not good at writing, AI will allow you to broadcast to the world that you're not good at writing, and it will allow you to do it faster and at scale. That is a problem. What winds up
**Ineffective AI Pitches**
(8:41) happening is that people go in, they say, "Here's my product. Please write a press release about it." Or, "Here's my product. Here's the query that I got off SOS that the reporter wants. I need you to quickly write a pitch to the reporter about my product's great." And that will immediately be thrown in the trash, and the reporter will not pay attention to you ever
**Effective AI Use: Journalist List Building**
(9:01) again. That being said, there is very much a place to use AI when you are trying to get media attention. There are several places you can use it. One of the first things that I strongly recommend everyone does is use AI to cultivate a list of journalists who write about your market, your segment, your topic. It does it
**Advanced AI Prompts for Journalist Discovery**
(9:25) much better than Google does. Ask it: "Find me 20 reporters who work in print, who work online, who have in the past six months covered the following subjects and use the following terms." By saying "use the following terms" and throwing those terms into your request, your prompt, what you're doing is you're avoiding the cursory, pay-for-play
**Avoiding Low-Quality News Sites**
(9:52) stories. There are a lot of websites out there that are being built as news sites, but their goal is eventually to get acquired, to get flipped. They're writing about everything and writing a very broad, top-level view that no one really cares about, and it won't help you by getting quoted there.
**Targeting Quality Journalists with Specific Terms**
(10:10) They'll talk to a tree and quote a tree if they can. So, by putting in terms specific to your industry that go deeper than just top-level, you're asking it to bring you back a list of journalists who actually write about this for media outlets that matter. So, that's the first thing I would suggest. There are
**Accessing Journalist Contact Information**
(10:30) services that will then give you the contact information for those journalists, services such as Muck Rack, Cision, things like that. They are expensive. Your best bet for finding contact info for the journalist you want is to partner or work with someone who already has a subscription. Go halves, go quarters, whatever it is.
**Muck Rack: A Recommended Service**
(10:52) PR Newswire used to have a deal where you could put up to 10 people on an account, and they don't do that anymore. I don't think any of them do, but you can still get the information from someone who does have an account. It's a simple search of these databases. I'm a big fan of Muck Rack. They are an advertiser on SOS, but I'm a big fan because they tend to keep, they have a
**Keeping Journalist Contacts Up-to-Date**
(11:11) couple hundred people working for them overseas who tend to keep up with what the journalists are doing. There's nothing worse than writing a great pitch for a specific outlet for a specific journalist and having it bounce because they don't work there anymore. You also need to understand that the majority of journalists out there are doing 10 times more with five times less, and they
**The Golden Rule for AI in Pitching**
(11:30) don't have time for pitches that are off topic or pitches that waste their time. The rule is simple: if you want to use AI, you can use AI to better your pitch, but make the pitch perfect first. So, I look, and this is a 30-second
**How to Structure a Media Pitch**
(11:51) class on how to pitch the media, but here's what I recommend everyone do when pitching a reporter: three paragraphs, no more than three paragraphs. The first paragraph: "Hi, here's my name. Here's what I do. Here's my company." Second paragraph: if you're answering a query from SOS or something similar,
**The Three-Paragraph Pitch Format**
(12:09) here's why my answer, product, or topic is perfect. Here's the answer to what you requested. Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Third paragraph: here's how to contact me. It literally does not need to be deeper than that. This is your very first date. You're not trying to get into bed with anyone. You're simply letting the
**Value Proposition for Journalists**
(12:29) reporter know that you have information that will benefit them, help them write their story, and save them time. I used to send, when I was running my agency doing PR for other companies, I used to send out pitches that read something like, "Hey, just want to let you know, I know you've written a lot about
**Building Relationships: The 'Just Letting You Know' Pitch**
(12:50) rocketry or a related topic. Just want to let you know I have a new client in the space. They did X billions of dollars in revenue last year. They're doing this. No specific pitch here. Just want to let you know to put them in your rolodex. I'm always happy to help. Feel free to reach out anytime, and I can get them for you on a second's
**Ensuring Source Availability**
(13:08) notice." That's the key. Also, make sure you're letting the reporter know that, "Hey, if you do wind up using my source, this CEO who I work for, who I handle PR for, I have access to him. If you call me and say you want to speak to him, I'll have him on the phone for you in 5 minutes." The biggest problem I hear journalists talking about all the time is that someone
**Journalist Blacklists and Unresponsive Sources**
(13:27) says, "I have this great CEO. I'll get him." "Oh, well, he doesn't really want to talk to the media right now." "Well, then why is he pitched?" That's a guaranteed blacklist. Journalists share blacklists constantly. There's actually a text file; I've seen it. It's a gigabyte long now of PR people
**Using AI to Refine Pitches**
(13:44) they'll never work with again. Chris Anderson at Wired used to send out what he called the PR blacklist, and he was famous for these things. If you pitched Wired off topic once, you're on this list. So, one of the key things is what I usually do: I write my pitch. I put it into AI, I put it into ChatGPT or similar, and I say, "Hey, I'm emailing the journalist with very little time.
**AI as a Sharpening Tool, Not a Writer**
(14:05) Make this pitch stronger and tighter. Don't change the words. Don't change the subject. Don't change the keywords that I put in. But make it stronger and tighter. Did I miss anything? Is my grammar right?" You just want to sharpen it. You don't want AI writing your pitches. You don't want AI doing your PR for you,
**AI for Cleaning Up, Not Creating**
(14:22) but it can always clean things up. I think that is one of the most underrated features of any GTP type concept: it will make whatever you've already written stronger. But if you're writing poorly, it's just going to make it slightly less poor. I don't recommend that. I use it anytime it's needed. I use it anytime I
**AI for Personal Communication and De-escalation**
(14:45) have to email my ex-wife to talk about my daughter's Bat Mitzvah right now. I run everything through it: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much, with everything you know about her, how much will this piss her off?" If it's above three, I rewrite it. So, it's key to understand that you can't have
**The 'Too Sweet' AI Pitch**
(15:04) AI do it for you, but you can have it help you. Again, journalists are smart. They're savvy. They understand if it's been written by AI because it just seems... The best description I ever heard was that when someone pitches me AI, it seems "too sweet." Like if you expected a coffee with one Splenda and they put five of them in, it just tastes like too much Splenda.
**AI-Generated Social Media Content**
(15:30) That really is a perfect example because I've started seeing people post on social media, on Facebook or whatever. They think they're being all smart by having AI write some really smarmy thing, whether it's political or whatever, but you can tell it tastes too sweet. Some of the best advice I can give you, and I'll give you another great piece
**Preparing Pitches in Advance**
(15:53) as well. If you're using a service like Source of Sources or anything similar, have a pitch ready. Reporters use Source of Sources, and they know when their pitch has gone out and hit my list because they will go from zero to 100 pitches in their email in under five
**Timing is Key: Tailor and Send Quickly**
(16:15) minutes. My emails come out at 6:30 in the morning and 1:30 in the afternoon Eastern time. My recommendation is to have a pitch ready. The second you see something that fits, tailor it. The second you see something that fits, add words into the blank spaces in your pitch that's waiting to go. So, the contact info is already there.
**Pre-writing Pitches for Speed**
(16:38) The "here's who I am" part is already there. All you're doing is answering the specific question in their query within your pitch. You create that so it's already ready, and all you have to do is add a couple of words, and then click send, or run it through AI to get it stronger and then click send, because it really is a timing game.
**Immediate Response Strategy**
(16:59) I know people who set a specific email chime to my emails, the first one that comes out at 6:30 and then 1:30, so that they are awoken by my email. They read it, they scan it. If there's nothing to respond to, they say they go to the gym, but they probably go back to bed. So, make sure that you're answering immediately because that is, hands down, one of the best ways to get
**Source of Sources Advertising and AI for Copy**
(17:19) quoted: to be one of those first 5-10 answers from a source to a journalist. I use AI a lot. SOS is supported by a small text ad at the top of each email, and then an even tinier one-line text ad under the table of contents. It's very small, but they work. When I ask my advertisers to send me their copy, they, without
**AI for Ad Copy Shortening and Impact**
(17:43) question, send me too much. What I use AI to do is, by keeping the same gist of this advertisement, shorten it to three lines, make it just as impactful, keep it small. Then I'll look back on it. I'll read it again. I'll make sure it doesn't sound too sweet, and I'll usually use it. It is phenomenal for quick fixes, but it is
**AI Won't Replace Writers & SOS Success Rate**
(18:04) never going to replace the writer in you. It simply won't. At least not in our lifetimes. I want to answer questions because I speak too fast, and everyone says, "Give me an hour." I'm like, "I'm not going to need it." So, happy to take questions or answer more. I can tell you that 94% of the journalists
**Strict Enforcement of SOS Rules**
(18:26) who use Source of Sources do come back, which is a great number. I think it's because we're pretty tight on blocking people and kicking people out and off the list if they pull some nonsense. So, if you're pitching off topic, if you're spamming, I don't know. I'm also not above suing companies who violate our terms of service, similar companies to what I do, who
**Journalists Need Help: Become a Trusted Source**
(18:49) violate terms of service by pitching reporters to get them to use their service. My basic premise is this: journalists do need our help. The more you can offer them in the quickest amount of time to make their jobs easier and do their job faster, the more they'll come to refer to you as a source. It's like online dating
**Building Direct Journalist Relationships**
(19:08) in the respect that if they are using Source of Sources and they find a good source for their niche, for their industry, and you have proven to them that you're worthwhile or beneficial, they're going to come back to you directly. That's what you want to work for and build towards. If you're pitching a journalist without using
**Reading Journalists' Current Work**
(19:28) any source-matching service like mine, one of the things I suggest is to use AI to generate and build those lists of journalists who are working in your field. Make sure you're reading what they write. Just because a journalist is, AI, I've seen it. It'll send you a list of 20 reporters, and four of them have moved on and are doing something
**Avoid Pitching Outdated Topics**
(19:48) completely different. If you pitch the journalist on an old topic, that tells you that you're not reading their current work. If you pitch someone who writes a column, a blog, anything like that, just do yourself the favor of spending five minutes and reading their latest work. It's all available. It's all free. It's
**Journalist's Humorous Rejection Method**
(20:05) all there. I used to have a friend of mine who worked for the Journal, and she would always say, she'd keep the pitches that were off topic, and she'd write back, "Hey, got your pitch about product X. Great to hear from you. This is exactly what I covered 10 years ago, so
**The 'Do Better' Slapback**
(20:29) no, I will not be covering you now. Do better." I like to think that that was a double rebuke, because not only did it tell them that they're not paying attention, but it gave them the idea that they might actually be covered, and then she just slapped them down, and I always respected that. Peter, can you talk about the event in New York City?
**Introducing Small Giants 2026 Conference**
(20:45) >> I'm running this event for small to mid-size businesses, but primarily small business entrepreneurs. It's called Small Giants 2026. I came up with the idea because I got a ton of people who use Source of Sources who are one-man shops, two-man shops. Maybe they've hired their first person, and they're building small companies, and this might be their first
**Addressing the Gap in Resources for Startups**
(21:01) small company or their 10th. But they feel there are great resources once you start making a little bit of money, and there are not a lot of resources when you're just starting out that don't cost a lot. I actually found that funny because when I sold "Help A Reporter Out," that was a game changer for me.
**Expensive Masterminds for New Entrepreneurs**
(21:20) I was shocked when it sold for as much money as it did. I never expected that. But one of the things that came from that was I immediately started getting emails from masterminds and conferences: "Hey, saw that you sold your business. We would love you to join our mastermind for only
**The Inspiration for Small Giants Conference**
(21:37) $50,000 a year. You can get access." I'm like, "If I had $50,000 when I was starting my company, I wouldn't have needed you." The whole reason I needed something was because I didn't have any funds and was just starting out, and was, read the room. So my premise was to create a conference that was helpful and that wasn't full of fluff.
**Small Giants Conference Speakers and Value**
(21:58) We have about 10-12 speakers, including people like David, Jeremiah O'Yang, Scott Monty from formerly Ford. We have an accountant. Everyone who comes, we have a photographer who's going to do professional headshots for everyone who comes. Just trying to add value to this thing, because there's too much content without benefit out there where
**Diverse Topics at Small Giants**
(22:16) people come in and there's no benefit. We have two people talking on AI. We have an accountant who's going to tell you how to save money on your taxes. We have a travel person who's going to tell you how to save money and how to make sure your flight isn't canceled, or you don't wind up in the back of the plane or underneath it.
**15-Minute Talks for ADHD Audiences**
(22:31) says the guy who's going to Malta for a keynote on Friday and knows damn well he won't be able to get back to New York on Sunday because of the snowstorm going in, but he's still going. So, we have a ton of people speaking, and they're each speaking 15 minutes because I don't know about you, but I'm absolutely ADHD, and if someone's talking to me for more than 15 minutes,
**Focus on Health and Well-being**
(22:47) I lose their attention. I look at half of you have shut off your cameras because I know you're not even there now. You're just whatever. So, it's a focus on mental health. It's a focus on actual health. We have one of the top physical trainers in the country who's coming in and telling you what you can do every
**Conference Details and Peter's Motivation**
(23:02) single day, even if you never go to a gym, to not die early. Simple things like standing up, walking, treadmill desk, things like that. So, it's going to be in Midtown Manhattan on February 11th, all day, breakfast and lunch. It's going to be pretty fun. Everything I've ever done, everything I've ever built, has really been built with the desire to help
**ADHD and the Drive to Help Others**
(23:20) people because when you're undiagnosed ADHD all your life, and you're told that you're broken your entire life, you tend to want to help people. It's in your nature because you don't want anyone else to feel as awful as you did growing up. That's what this conference is all about. The website is sourceofsources.com/conference.
**Conference Website and Q&A Invitation**
(23:36) Would love to see you guys there. Source of Sources, by the way, is sourceofsources.com. You can sign up, and you'll get those two emails today, and they're pretty easy to read. I'd love to take questions and hear what you guys are thinking about, or how I can help with PR and give you some advice on any of that. I'm happy to share whatever I know.
**Opportunity to Win Conference Passes**
(23:53) >> Yeah. And a reminder, if you are off camera or something and not checking the chat, then you can go to highcaliberi.com/sos for Source of Sources and win one of the handful of passes I
**Meet Peter and the Crew**
(24:12) have to give out and be great to meet some of you there. You'll get to meet Peter. Come on. After seeing this, how would you not want a chance to meet Peter and this amazing crew in person? Feeling good about my standing desk setup right now, too. Okay. Jazella. >> Hey there. Big thanks
**Jazella's Question: Imagery in PR**
(24:31) for the candid conversation. This is awesome. Peter, I'd love to hear, both with regard to Source of Sources specifically, but also in general, how you see imagery factoring into the PR conversation these days. Is it still helpful to attach images, headshot, whatever? Is it the kind of thing you wait to follow up on? Is that possible to even share through
**No Attachments in Pitches**
(24:52) Source of Sources? >> That's a great question. Two things: number one, no attachments ever. If you're emailing a reporter, no attachments ever. That goes without saying. But the second thing, there's something about offering too much information. One of the things that SEO farms do out of, they all
**SEO Spam Tactics and Red Flags**
(25:10) follow the same playbook. One of the things the SEO farms are doing out of Asia and all that is they're saying, "Hi, here's my answer to your query. It's totally off topic. This is written by AI. I'm happy to talk to you more. Here's my name. Here's my LinkedIn profile. And here's my headshot." The headshot is hosted by some cloud, the LinkedIn is
**Fake Profiles and Website Flipping**
(25:30) fake, and that is a dead giveaway that it is not a real person answering. A lot of what these people do is they buy a website, "We will buy your home in Austin, Texas.com" for instance. They try desperately to get some backlinks from media outlets using Source of Sources, using HARO, things like that. When they do, and they get high enough SEO juice, they flip the
**The Generic Spam Template**
(25:56) website to someone else who wants it because now it's backlinked. If they were smart, they would not all use the same outline for their emails, because it is: "Here's my information. Here's why I think this is useful. Here's my LinkedIn, and here's my headshot." It is 100% the same in every single thing, and you think, "Okay, this person does not exist."
**LinkedIn's Fake Profile Problem**
(26:17) LinkedIn has a massive fake profile problem. I don't think they have any desire or need to fix it because it probably generates them more revenue somehow, but they have a massive fake profile problem. Some numbers are one out of four, one out of five are fake. It's obscene. Every single SEO farm, the first thing they do is create a fake profile for
**Leave Journalists Wanting More**
(26:42) this expert, and that's their website expert, and that's what they pitch. So, do not include a headshot. You want to leave them wanting more. It's like a first date at a bar. If I tell you everything about me, and I show you my family tree, and I give you measurements and whatever, there's no excitement left.
**The Power of Scarcity in Pitching**
(27:04) We're probably not going to get together for a second date. Where's the magic? But if I leave you wanting more, you're going to come back. If you give the journalist just enough, say, "Hey, I know my subject, I know what I'm talking about. I'm happy to help you. Reach out anytime." That's enough. They'll come back to you. Here's the thing,
**Journalists Prefer Their Own Photographers**
(27:24) 99.999% of the time, no journalist is ever going to need your headshot. If you're lucky enough to get a media outlet that wants a photo, they're going to send a photographer. >> So, headshot might have been a bad example, but as someone who previously represented, >> You can give them a link to a
**Providing Media Kits on Request**
(27:40) media kit if you have it. Give them a link to your website, but no LinkedIn, no headshot. Give them a link to a website. Give them a link to, "Here's what I do. Here's my company name." Highlight the company name with a URL. >> As someone who previously represented architecture and design firms,
**Visual Pitches and Architect Firms**
(27:57) a visual medium, to be fair, this was 10 years ago, I would basically be ignored if I didn't include imagery so they could get a sense of the quality. But I hear you. >> I wouldn't put it in the email. Instead, I'd offer to provide high-res photos upon request. I have a good friend of mine who handles PR for about 85% of
**PR for the Adult Industry Example**
(28:17) the adult industry. It's something he fell into, and he's repped the ABNs for 15 years. He's an awesome guy, a nice Jewish guy out of LA. We've been, he's one of my closest friends, and even he, he has a mailing list that for some reason I'm on, and you haven't really lived until you know that some specific porn star is
**Links on Request for Images**
(28:40) releasing two new anal scenes. It changes things. The reason I bring it up is because even he knows better than to put photos in, not even sexual, just photos of the porn star. He puts them, he says, "Links available on request, high-res available on request," whatever. It's not worth it, because keep in mind
**Mobile Readership and Image Loading**
(29:02) someone somewhere is reading one of your journalists is reading this on the subway, and they just went underground, and all they got was the first two paragraphs, and now the email, the rest of it's not loading on their iPhone because they have no service, and it's waiting for the image. If they want images, if they want imagery, if they want quality photos of your
**Diane's Question: Breaking into National Media**
(29:19) product, your this or that, factory plant, they'll let you know. >> Diane was asking in the chat: "I got local media covered. How to break into national media better?" >> If you have local and national media, international is actually surprisingly easier. For some reason, reporters
**International Media Insights**
(29:43) still want sources from the USA when they're overseas. I, at this point, don't know why, but they still want sources from overseas. So, one of the best things you could do is start subscribing to a lot of the journalists who have subsects, outside of who they're covering. Start subscribing, start interacting with them
**Engaging with Journalists Directly**
(29:59) one-on-one. Start letting them know, "Hey, I'm here in New York," which, it's New York City, it's not part of America, "and I'm happy to give you whatever you need if you're looking for XYZ, whatever." You'd be surprised how many of them will actually respond. It's just you're not wasting their time. You're saying, "Hey, I'm a source, or I rep a source, and I'm happy to help.
**Building Journalist Connections**
(30:18) It works in your industry. Here's what you need." I've made some of my closest journalist connections by doing just that, by following. It used to be that you follow them on Twitter. No, I don't recommend that anymore. But, threads, Instagram, Substack, things like that. Just figure out where they are and
**Understanding Journalist's Language and Beat**
(30:36) become passionate about what they're reading, and actually take the time to read them because learning all that stuff will actually give you a good background on them. The added bonus of that is that you're then starting to learn it in their language. I don't mean a different language, English versus French; I'm talking about the
**Approachable Language and BlueSky**
(30:54) language the journalist uses when they're talking about their specific beat. There are certain keywords and trigger words that you'll find that they're using on a regular basis. If you start using that, it makes you more approachable. >> I don't want to say BlueSky is dead because I don't think it is. There's still a base, but I don't
**Threads and Meta Products**
(31:12) most of the journalists I know who went there. As much as we all don't want to be on Threads and don't want to be in a Meta product, I was watching the season finale of Land Man this morning at 5 AM on my Peloton, and I felt the same way. I don't like that I like that show, but I have no choice but to come back for season 3 in six months.
**Blue Sky Engagement**
(31:31) >> It's the same thing. I'm still a skater, but also the folks I follow on BlueSky are politicians and folks I don't necessarily need to care about if I can reach them or not, or if they pay attention to me. >> Brian has a good question here. No, because there's something about the entire email versus one line.
**AI for Single Lines vs. Full Emails**
(32:01) I think you get a pass if you use one line because sometimes that one line is valid. It's the same thing with M-dashes. I like M-dashes. I think M-dashes get a bad rap, but I don't use them. But every once in a while, I'll slip one in. It's not the end of the world. Again, I think there's a difference between writing the entire email, having the entire email written
**Maintaining Your Voice with AI**
(32:17) by AI versus one line. If it's your voice, they start to know your voice. It's a lot easier. And Jim misses the word "delve." I can't tell you how often I have no random bolding in all my instructions on Gemini and ChatGPT, and I'm always telling it: "No bolding."
**David's Open Question to Peter**
(32:50) Stop. What else do you have for Peter? This is an opportunity here. I can ask him a ton. >> Okay, here's the thing. I've heard some of these complaints, and I've experienced them myself, the bolding, the M-dashes, the N-dashes. I think that one of
**Custom GPTs and AI Training**
(33:11) the advantages that I have using custom GPTs is that I instruct it to speak and respond in the way I choose, including no unnecessary bolding and no M-dashes. So, I think part of the issues that people are highlighting are just lack of training on our part. >> Yeah. >> But I think one of the challenges I'll
**The Importance of AI Training**
(33:30) push back on anybody is if there's something wrong with the AI where it's not doing what you want to do, my challenge to anyone is: are you training it or teaching it? Are you building it in a way to avoid those issues? >> I think you're saying what I'm saying, but in different wording. If you're not, but that's the thing, because if you're
**AI as an Editor and Writing Coach**
(33:46) training it and you're not a great writer, you're not training it well. >> Right. The way I would frame it is that you change the role of the AI. Instead of a writer for you, it's your editor that can copy check, watch, and train you how to write better. For example, I'm a better speaker
**Continuous Improvement in Writing**
(34:05) than I am a writer, so I have a custom GPT that helps me improve my writing and gives me coaching feedback based on information I give it. Everyone who's ever worked for me has been allowed to take as many writing classes at local CUNY or whatever college as they want, and I'll pay for it, because you can never be too good of a writer.
**Impact of a High School Writing Teacher**
(34:26) And, I'm a huge fan. I still take writing classes whenever I can. I think that I had a teacher, I grew up in New York City. I went to public school here, and I had a teacher in high school who gave me a journal, and she saw something in me and said, "You should write more." I'm so glad and thankful she did it. She's actually still alive. I'm
**The Importance of Writing Skills for the Future**
(34:44) taking her to dinner in a couple weeks. She changed the trajectory of my life. If you have any skill at writing, you can always get better. I see some of the kids in my daughter's class. I see her texts, and the things that, I weep for the future in a lot of ways. I think that
**David on AI and Authentic Communication**
(35:04) as much as you can do to become a better writer, it's never a bad thing. >> No, I was just saying someone in the comments said they heard some tips to use voice to help capture voice better. I will say the one thing I've discovered that relates to a lot of what Peter's talked about today is that there are so many things in either
**Value in Human Messiness**
(35:30) one-on-one communication or LinkedIn that I'm intentionally not using AI for. Peter, I even have gone the opposite way with some of what you've said about cleaning things up, because some of that messiness, even if it's not all the AI tells and all that, I feel some of that messiness is such a tell that here's a person who's communicating
**Authenticity Over Polish**
(35:52) his ideas well enough, but isn't trying to polish this. It's so clearly this person that they haven't gotten that exact message today. I'm kind of relieved when I know for sure that even something as simple as a LinkedIn comment, I'd rather have it be one of those automated "congrats" or "thumbs up" things than
**AI as a Thinking and Writing Partner**
(36:18) someone who I know used AI to help them write it. >> 100%. >> I look at it a little differently. The way I look at it is that I'm not writing for polish or to create an extra tone or style. I look at it like a writing partner. I'm making sure that I'm communicating my ideas clearly.
**AI for Clarity, Not Generic Slop**
(36:39) There may be typos. There may be grammatical mistakes, but the idea for me is that I use AI as a thinking partner and as a writing coach. That way I can communicate my ideas effectively and clearly, not necessarily to make polished, generic AI slop that everybody's seeing on LinkedIn. It depends on your
**Training AI for Your Voice and Tone**
(36:58) relationship you have with your AI. It does. I think that, again, journalists are a different breed. They're going to see and they're going to know if you're able to. I've been training my AI to speak in my voice, and it always asks, the one thing it always asks, and this is
**Voice Prompts and Contextual Writing**
(37:17) probably more of a tell to me, "Is it snarky enough for you?" [laughter] There's something to be said for that. >> I've also created voice prompts. In similar fashion, you've trained your AI. I've created voice prompts based on the context I'm writing, because it's trained
**Self-Promotion: Keynote Speaker & Neurodiversity**
(37:32) on my writing style. But I have to write in different style and formats depending on who I'm talking to and what I'm talking about. It's a mental training and how you teach it. That's what I always push back. I will say this, the one thing I didn't mention, if I have a second to self-promote: I've been a keynote speaker for 20
**Companies and Neurodiversity**
(37:53) years, and I've spoken to companies as big as Morgan Stanley Worldwide to as small as startups. I speak on customer experience, and I also speak on neurodiversity. One of the things that I'm finding is that more and more companies are starting to ask themselves what they're supposed to do with their neurodiverse
**Mental Capital Consulting**
(38:10) employees. So, I launched a company about a year ago with a doctor friend of mine called Mental Capital Consulting. We work with companies like Morgan Stanley, Adobe, Google, and a lot of small companies, helping them to create neuro-inclusive environments, because whether companies know it or not, 20% to 30% of their employees are
**Productivity Spike in Neurodiverse Employees**
(38:32) neurodiverse. What we saw during COVID is that when everyone got to work from home, there was a spike in productivity from the percentage of employees who were neurodiverse, because for the first time in their lives, they got to work the way they wanted to. Then, when they came back, it dropped off. So, companies are starting to learn that there's a benefit to that. So if
**Supporting Neurodiverse Kids and Adults**
(38:52) I could ever help you out on the neurodiverse side, or if you have a kid who's ADHD, take comfort in the fact they're going to take over the world. I've written a couple of kids' books on this and a couple of adult books on this. Peter, I have a question about that because in the last month I've talked to three different people who introduced
**Neurodiverse Individuals and AI**
(39:09) themselves as neurodiverse, which I appreciated. >> And all of them, in a different way, said they love AI because it's the only thing that can keep up with them. >> Yeah, that's 100%. Absolutely. >> And they're doing amazing work with it. >> The only downside I would say to that is that I want to get a t-shirt that says this: "AI should not be your
**AI as a Thinking Partner, Not a Therapist**
(39:30) therapist." I have absolutely no problem. I talk to my AI all the time. Sometimes it's as stupid as, "Why are people so stupid?" And it's smart enough to go, "Okay, what happened now? Let's walk through it. Don't stab anyone." But, as long as it's not replacing an
**Dangers of Untrained AI Therapist Apps**
(39:48) actual therapist. I think that the rise of these AI therapist programs and the rise of these AI therapist apps, a lot of whom have absolutely zero cognitive training behind it, is dangerous. But in terms of using it because it's that quick, 100%. >> The one woman I spoke with said that she describes herself as having 25 to 100
**AI Handling Mental Overload**
(40:17) tabs open in her mind at any time, and AI can handle all of that, and no human can. >> My introduction is that I have only two speeds: I have namaste, and I've got "get things done," and there's no middle ground. But, I'm petershankman.com. I answer all my own email. I'm
**Peter's Take on Meta**
(40:37) at Peter Shankman on all the socials except Twitter. I want to answer Daniel's question: "Is my hot take on Meta considering that they literally shut down the metaverse yesterday?" It's not going anywhere. It still has Facebook. It still has Threads. Facebook, as long as old people exist, Facebook exists.
**Meta's Declining Relevance (Facebook, Instagram, Threads)**
(40:56) It has Instagram. So, it's not going anywhere per se. But I think it's starting to become slightly less relevant. I could tell you that I don't keep Facebook on my phone anymore. If you told me that I wouldn't be doing that 5 years ago, I'd have thought you were crazy. Also, I can tell you from a 12-year-old's
**Gen Alpha and Social Media**
(41:15) perspective, my kids see very little value in social. They're much more private than we were even 10 years ago. I'd be curious what Stella says about that, David. I don't let my kid on social. The one thing they all do have, and every single girl in my daughter's class, they're addicted to
**Pinterest and Chick-fil-A's Gen Alpha Popularity**
(41:37) Pinterest. >> It's amazing. >> I don't think they thought about that as the target market. >> The two brands that have surprised me the most with Gen Alpha: Pinterest and Chick-fil-A. I cannot believe my daughter's in middle school and has this "out to lunch" thing a
**The Chick-fil-A Phenomenon**
(41:57) number of days a week, and I can't tell you how often the brand Chick-fil-A comes up in the parent group chat, that this is what the entire school wanted to know: "Is Chick-fil-A within the out-lunch zone?" They're obsessed. I went to take her there on Friday. It was the most entertaining mob scene I've ever seen in a fast-food restaurant. It's
**Why Pinterest is Popular with Gen Alpha**
(42:24) just full of 12 and 13 year olds. It was kind of amazing. >> Why do you think Pinterest is so popular amongst them? >> I think there are a couple of reasons. One of the big ones is that parents, for better or for worse, we think it's okay. It's not TikTok, it's not Instagram, it's not YouTube. So, I
**Parental Approval and Privacy on Pinterest**
(42:46) think for whatever reason, we think it's okay. Mind you, half the content she sees, I'm sure, comes from TikTok on Pinterest. But, if she has a Pinterest board about sewing, my daughter likes sewing for some reason, and she has three Pinterest boards about different stitches. I love
**Pinterest: Perceived Safety & Private Boards**
(43:02) that for her. I think the number one reason for parents is we don't think it's that dangerous, so we let them on. And the second reason is because they can create these Pinterest boards that are only viewable by their friends that we've approved to be their friends. So, they feel they don't feel like it's a public space.
**Daughter's Concern for Privacy**
(43:23) As long as I can remember, she's, I called her, she was bothering me on the subway a couple of years ago, and I said, "Jess Shankman, Dad!" And she said, "Now everyone knows my name, and they're going to come up to my house and hack me!" That was literally what she was worried about. It's that feeling of safety.
**Pinterest Content and Buzzfeed Quizzes**
(43:40) >> It is wild, and it's also funny. So much of Pinterest is just a feeding ground for Buzzfeed slop and poorly produced content. But, I'll actually get on there and do the quizzes with her. "What kind of fruit are you?" This stuff is still all over
**Peter's Instagram and Travel Reels**
(44:04) Buzzfeed. I put my Instagram link. I do a lot of reels with my daughter. We make a lot of fun stuff when we travel and things like that. Feel free to share if you want some fun eye candy. I don't know. >> Great. I have to go catch a flight and not be able to come home in a few
**Farewell and Thank You**
(44:22) days. So, I want to thank you guys for having me. David, thank you for setting this up. I hope that was useful, guys. Feel free to stay in touch and reach out, please. >> This is awesome, Peter. Safe travels. Many of us will see you next month. >> I hope to see you guys. I hope you guys show up on February 11th. We
**Conference Seats and Discount Code**
(44:39) have about 15 seats available. It's sourceofsources.com/conference. If you use the code SOS100, it drops a bunch of money off the ticket. So, feel free to use that and see you guys soon. >> Thanks, Peter. We'll see you next week with David Levy.
**Closing Remarks**
(45:01) Anything else you need? Thanks, everyone.