Melissa Baldwin  00:00

What do you want? What is your goal? What is the number one most important business goal that you want communications to support? And then, who can give it to you? Who exactly is that target audience? I want you to name the names of the company that you're going after because then I can really dive into. Let's actually picture talking to this person and how are we going to make an impact with them.

Nico Johnson  00:21

Hey, welcome back, Solar Warrior, to another episode of SunCast. I am so honored that you're here, giving us the only non-renewable resource you've got. That is your time. I promise we are going to take good care of you and that investment. You see, the clean energy industry has never had more momentum than it does right now. We've gotten better technology, more capital, more projects, more deployment, and more attention than at any point in the industry's history. And yet, some companies seem to dominate the conversation. Congratulations, next power. And some executives have become the voices that everyone listens to. Some brands show up seemingly everywhere, and meanwhile, equally capable companies and teams struggle just to get noticed. Why is that? It's tempting to think that the answer is bigger marketing budgets. It's a publicly traded company; they've got more content, better customers, better branding, or simply they post more often on social media. What if the company's winning attention aren't actually the loudest? What if they're just the most useful? What happens when the next person who discovers your company isn't a customer searching Google, but someone in an AI system deciding that is itself deciding who deserves to be recommended. Those questions are becoming increasingly important as buyers, investors, policymakers, and communities all look for information in new ways. Today's guest has spent more than two decades helping clean energy companies and their executives earn attention, build trust, and communicate more effectively in an increasingly crowded marketplace, Alyssa Baldwin is the senior vice president at Tigercom, one of the clean economy's leading communications and public affairs firms. She's also the host of Scaling Clean, a podcast I listen to, and I believe you should as well. If you're a founder, or marketer, developer, or executive responsible for helping companies stand out in a noisy world. First of all, thank you for doing what you do and for joining us on this journey. I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. There's still more to learn. Let's get ready to tune up your skills, Solar Warrior, as we tune into another powerful conversation here on SunCast.

Melissa Baldwin  02:40

So, what I think a lot of executives might not be thinking about or don't realize is that communications is the lifeblood of a company. And when I say that, what I mean is that you have got to have a consistent pulse or drumbeat of frequent communication, so that you're out there putting information into the atmosphere so that you can be discovered, and what I've found in working with executives over 20 years is that a lot of time people get worried about what they're going to say, or worried that they might offend someone, or that they're going to say the wrong thing, and what that converts into is silence, and whether or not people realize it, silence is a choice. And so, if you're not putting information out there into the into the marketplace, whether that's updates to your blog, posting on LinkedIn, speaking at an event, commenting on someone else's post on LinkedIn, putting out a press release to give updates, if you're not putting that information out there, you might as well not exist. Right? How are people going to find you? How are people going to know what you're doing? And so, what I suspect is that a lot of executives are so focused on the business of running the business, they're focused. A lot of them have an engineering background, which is great. They're technically brilliant, but they're really focused on that, and they think that hey, if my product is good enough, it's just going to work. It's going to speak for itself, but the reality is, is that it doesn't. There was some research that was done in Harvard back in the 50s, and it was duplicated successfully in 2021. And they put a group of people together in a room, and they they had them work on a task, and then later they asked them to vote on who the leader was, and inevitably the person who they voted as the leader was the person who spoke the most, and so there is something to say for having a volume of content for putting information out there. That is a part of how you can start to build that leadership profile. And what's even more interesting is that people actually might not even like what you said. They might disagree with you. They might not even think that you're that intelligent. But just by having that sheer volume of content that you're putting out in the world, you are taking a step towards being visible, towards being present, and towards being seen, and growing up that leadership ladder. Now, that's a basic function there. What we work with our clients. To do is to take a step above that to say something meaningful to the marketplace, and a lot of times what you have to do in that case is not talk about just yourself, but you have to find something interesting to say about your target audience that's about them, and it might be something they don't already know about themselves. So, for example, I work with a lot of executives, and I've noticed this trend. And you can speak to a trend that you notice in working with your target audience.

Nico Johnson  05:27

What are the leaders you work with often surprised by once you convince them to, and they begin to invest seriously into communications?

Melissa Baldwin  05:37

Oh, there's surprises every day. One that recently came up was just the idea that we really want to focus our communications like a laser target on exactly who the people are that you want to impact. And a lot of times, when people first approach our company, we're a PR firm. They come to us and say, "Hey, we want to gain attention. We want to gain visibility. We need brand awareness. We need thought leadership. And so, I often push them to get more specific on exactly who are they trying to reach, and what do those people need to know.

Nico Johnson  06:13

That's great.

Melissa Baldwin  06:14

And as a part of doing that, I'll have conversations with executives saying, "Okay, you want to reach these lenders of this certain type. What do they need to know about you? What questions have they asked you? And recently, one executive just said, "I had a lender ask me, like, how come I haven't heard from you recently? You know, and so I think that people get so caught up in the day to day that they forget that even just simple tactics like putting out a regular newsletter to the people who are most important to you, not not spamming the whole world with a bunch of you know self promotional stuff, but putting a very specific intentional update to a person who needs to know a very specific thing can be a useful tactic.

Nico Johnson  06:55

We agree that companies are chronically under funding and under investing in comms and public relations, but what what does an appropriate investment actually look like? What's the guidance that you provide customers?

Melissa Baldwin  07:07

Well, it depends on the company and the stage that they're in, right? If you're pre-seed or you're a Series A, you're going to have different levels of budget and attention. But when you think about communication, it's it's nine people's jobs. So you have marketing, PR, website, social media, digital ads, paid media. I think I mentioned PR. So it's just a lot of different, a lot of different jobs that need to get done. And what I historically see is that a company, even a relatively mature company, might have one person on staff, and they're asking one person to do those nine people's jobs, and so I don't know that I could put $1 figure on what's appropriate spend or percentage. But I do know that if you underinvest, you're missing a serious opportunity to really make an impact, and and that's going to show up in your discoverability and also to show up in how investors perceive you.

Nico Johnson  08:07

You've worked with companies that do by definition because they're your clients to invest in communications. What separates companies that consistently command attention from the companies that do equally good work, but struggle to get noticed.

Melissa Baldwin  08:23

So, what I notice is successful in companies that generate attention is that they are able to tell a very specific story, often backed up by facts. And so, they're moving away from generalities, they're moving away from vague claims, and they're moving to something more specific and tangible that people can hang on to, that people can remember, and so a great example of that would be all of the factories that Next Power opened up over the last four or five years. That really gave something to look at, to hang on to, and just the the way that they roll them out consistently over time. They were telling a story that wasn't just one peak of attention, it was a consistent drumbeat of regular updates, and that sustained momentum, I think, really helped them tell a bigger story around the supply chain that they were building out and how they were addressing some of those issues.

Nico Johnson  09:14

Yeah, I agree that consistency frequency is important. Can you talk a bit more about clarity of message and how you help a customer get the refinement around those message pillars.

Melissa Baldwin  09:25

It's actually funny that you brought this up because I don't know about you, Nico, but I've seen a lot of different versions of messaging. I've seen message pillars, message house key messages, talking points. You have it. So there's a lot of different ways that I've seen different communication professionals think about this, and actually, in my opinion, there are different uses for those different types of messaging. So, when we message a company, we help them boil the company down to the three most important points they need to make to the marketplace, and it's not just the marketplace. It's specifically first starting with the goal. What do you want? And here's what what else is interesting. We've done our messaging session with over 2000 people over 20 years, and every single time we do the session, we see every single time the people come into the room, and this is C suite. This is CEO, CFO, marketing people, sometimes a board or investors, anybody who really has stake in the in the company salespeople. Every single time we bring these people into the room, we ask them what is the number one what is the number one most important goal that you want communications to support. And every single time the people are conceptually aligned, we want to sell more stuff, or we need to get an investor. But there are a lot of differences in the details, and it's those details that really, really matter because it's in those details. Well, okay, you want to sell more stuff. Who do you want to sell it to? What do you want to sell them? Why them? You know, what are their pain points? And it's so. What I've noticed is that it's in figuring out those details that really help you refine the message so that it can actually hit its mark and make an impact on the people who you want to reach. So we ask the question every time: What do you want? What is your goal? What is the number one most important business goal that you want communications to support? And then who can give it to you? Who exactly is that target audience? And again, when we get to this question, I see universally people say, "Oh, it's a vague answer, like this type of customer or investors. And it's like, well, no, actually, like name the names. I want you to name the names of the company that you're going after because then I can really dive into. Let's actually picture talking to this person, and how are we going to make an impact with them?

Nico Johnson  11:45

I'd say it's marketing 101. But that avatar is a person with a background. They have likes and dislikes. They read specific magazines. They get home at a certain time every day. They drive a specific kind of car.

Melissa Baldwin  12:00

They go to a certain type of show or not a certain type of show. Yeah, trade shows. Yeah, exactly. Like which, and even in our industry, there's 100 different shows that you go to. But it's like no, specifically this name of this type of bank, this name of this type investor, this this job title of this person. Really, it's important to wrap your head around that and get very specific on it, and and so we feel like we create a lot of value for clients in that way, and that it really forces them to laser on lock onto that target and think about that audience.

Nico Johnson  12:32

Yeah, I'm going to point to and brag on a company I think does this really well that I've been observing a lot lately, simply because I can't get meetings with them, I have to fly to Nashville to get meetings with Silicon Ranch because they don't go to any trade shows anymore. And Nick and Matt and Regan, when I ask them like, "Why are you never at these trade shows? and their answer is because our buyer isn't at those shows. What shows are you at? And they give me the list, and I never heard those shows before. And I listen to Silicon Ranch Radio, their podcast, and I talked to Matt and Nick, and I'm like, "Who's the audience? And they're like, "It's farmers, it's municipal workers, it's politicians in the local community, it's commissioners in the local community, right? Like they are not interested in talking to the solar community at all. And what's really sometimes funny and interesting is even the content that we create that resonates in in our industry in our bubbles and gets like you know gets Dan Sugar 500 likes on LinkedIn,

Melissa Baldwin  13:28

yeah, is

Nico Johnson  13:28

funny stories inside the industry, right? So sometimes that works, and especially for a B 2b company that's trying to sell to the industry, getting that attention and staying in front of mine is important. I bring Dan up very important, very specifically, because you guys have helped navigate some of this conversation with Nextpower who I think is a great exemplar of a company that does it well. Can you talk about the importance, the critical nature of leadership involvement in this messaging and the deploying of this messaging?

Melissa Baldwin  13:58

Yeah, we work with a lot of executives across the board, and one of the things that we ask them actually in this question in the messaging process is how much time are you willing to put into this, right? Because you have to be able to commit time to thinking through what you're going to say that's going to come originally from you, and so at companies, especially, what I've noticed is that the voice of the CEO is incredibly important in both setting the tone for the organization and narrating the story that you want to put out in the world. But I've also noticed that as the company gets bigger, the CEO is a busy guy or a girl, and they have a lot on their plate, and so it's increasingly difficult for them to make time for this, but it's so important, right? Because customers want to know, investors want to know what you're up to, and ideally, you know, the CEO's voice is an important lead narrator for a company. Another trend that I've noticed, and some of the other manufacturing I've worked manufacturing companies that I've worked with, is that. They'll have a beautiful combination of a CEO and a president, and that duality actually enables one person or the other to lean more into the thought leadership that's so important for a company. So I think that it doesn't always have to be the CEO from a media's perspective. If you're working with a journalist who might never have heard of you, the journalist is going to be more interested in hearing from the CEO than from the head of sales, right? But if you are able to just find a person who is senior, who has experience, who's been around the block, has something interesting to say, that's incredibly important to really be able to put yourself on the map.

Nico Johnson  15:42

I find that a lot of folks assume attention comes from talking kind of about themselves or about their company. The way I hear you position sort of earning the right to be heard centers around something a little different. Where does meaningful attention actually come from?

Melissa Baldwin  15:56

I've thought a lot about this, and what we have found to be incredibly successful with our clients over the years, and even with honestly with non-clients who we've observed, is if you are able to take the data that you have access to because of the work that you do, and aggregate that data to say something meaningful about the market or about the environment that you're working in, something that matters to your target audience, and let me give an example that is not even in clean tech. So you've heard of Zillow, you've heard of Redfin,

Nico Johnson  16:27

right?

Melissa Baldwin  16:28

So those companies regularly put out meaningful data sets and reports. For example, you know, here's the top 10 cities that people are moving to that you've never heard of, or here are the top five cities that have the highest or lowest, you know, property taxes. They put out those store those studies. They publish them, and what's incredible is that you see really great pickup from mainstream media. I'm talking Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. They're picking up these studies because they're saying something interesting, not necessarily about you know buy or sell a house from Zillow, but here's the information I know because I've been looking at this for so long, and I can take a step back and say something meaningful about a trend. And so I think that's one really key element that we encourage our clients to do is actually don't just talk about yourself, but look at your data, look at the resources that you have available within your company, and what can you say about a trend in the marketplace because you've been doing this work for so long. And so we really push our clients to do that.

Nico Johnson  17:39

How can a busy, overwhelmed, often executive track things like that? Like, how do you encourage or or even coach your clients to organize their thoughts around it? Do you have any helpful tips there?

Melissa Baldwin  17:56

Yeah. Well, the simple answer is just that you have to put money into it. You have to find a person, a human, or hey, with Claude and co-work. There's a lot of new AI tools that can do some number crunching these days. So there's a lot of opportunity there. So you have to put in the effort to come up with a unique, original number. And I'm not talking about you citing something that was published by somebody else. I mean, you come up with your own research, your own data, your own insight, and actually, this this not only does having that unique original number or unique analysis matter for your media pickup, but it also really helps increase your pickup in AI visibility. And there are some sites that I saw recently that showed that when companies are giving a very specific original number and data set, that they're 30 to 40% more likely to get picked up in AI search overview or AI visibility results. The

Nico Johnson  18:54

way I've heard you phrase this is about usefulness. What what role does usefulness play, and and how do you know that you are providing something that's useful.

Melissa Baldwin  19:03

The key for me is really when somebody repeats it, right? So there's an old saying that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. So you know you have a useful piece of data if you say something and then you hear somebody else parroting what you said. You know you're onto something there, and that's also, by the way, a great way to become a thought leader and to really become the lead narrator of a topic in the industry is to be the one out there coining the phrase or the new description of a solution, an asset, a term, a trend that then you see, you know, even if you see your competitors using some of your terminology, you know that's how you're winning, right? Because if it worked, it's going to get repeated.

Nico Johnson  19:51

Is there a particular activity that I could engage in as a founder to start really thinking about how? I can help the market understand itself. What does that approach look like, and why does it work well to sort of turn the mirror on your customer or the industry? And what does that look like in action?

Melissa Baldwin  20:11

Sure. So I can walk you through the questions that we ask with our clients when we're trying to discover this these content opportunities, and they're probably familiar to me, you, Nico, because you're such a good marketer. But it's questions, objections, pain points. Those are the key things that you want to look at. Okay. Predicates as well. So a predicate is: is there anything? So imagine that you you know what you want. You know who can give it to you. You're talking to the person who you really want to reach, and you have a conversation with them. The predicate is anything that you need to say upfront that they don't already know. Like in order to have this conversation at all, like you need, yeah, to like to have a common currency. Like, hey, you know what, whatever UPS is, and so that's a predicate. Questions, obviously, it's like what are the questions that you get asked again and again? What are the questions that your sales team gets asked again and again? Those are pieces of content, and then pain points. Obviously, this is something huge for marketers. Is like, hey, what is the problem that your ideal customer persona is having, and and and really like describing that in great detail, so that you can make an emotional connection to that audience, that you can be there in their shoes and really understand what they're struggling with. So questions, predicates, pain points, and then objections. And this is another place where we really like to go deep as well. And I think you had another question for me about, you know, how do how do companies earn trust or not earn trust? And what I will say is that while we are communicators and we can help you wordsmith and come up with key messages to connect with your audience, if you have something that's broken, we cannot fix it with words. You actually have to fix what is broken, and so it really comes back to actions from a company, whether it's a developer or manufacturer or software, of just really understanding what those objections are, addressing them, and getting ahead of them. And there's some interesting research that we did in community engagement where we found that a lot of developers will want to go and communicate to a host community. Hey, we want to come build our solar power plant in your community. Hey, it's going to be great. We're going to create all this tax revenue. We're going to create jobs. It's going to be great for you. But nobody is home to hear that message because they have this objection swirling around in their head that they can't get past. I'm worried about what it looks like. I'm worried it'll make my property tax values go down. So until you address that objection head on, nobody's going to hear any of the benefits that you have to communicate. So that's another really important point to make to the marketplace: is to get ahead of that objection and not just use beautiful words to try to spin your way out of it, but actually get to the root of the problem and meaningfully show that you're going to address it.

Nico Johnson  23:04

As marketers, we are held to account for whether or not it works. We tell them you need to spend money.

Melissa Baldwin  23:11

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  23:11

we help them put the campaigns together. We deploy it. How do we measure what works? You know, I imagine the CEO saying, "How do I know that my company is creating value with its content?

Melissa Baldwin  23:25

I think about this all the time, and PR is one of the most difficult things to measure, right? Because PR is, "Hey, I'm going to get you a story in this trade magazine or in this in this you know newspaper, and they don't always correlate directly to sales. It's very hard to prove that this customer saw this article and then went to your website and picked it up. Now you can do things like on your website you should have on your contact form how did you hear about us, and you could have you know social media friend referral or you know from you know article

Nico Johnson  23:57

yeah sort of directional attribution at least

Melissa Baldwin  23:59

yeah yeah so but on measurement, it's it's been very challenging to measure PR. What I can tell you is that we do have plenty of at least conversational evidence of either whether it's an investor or customer who did hear about a client because of some of the stories that we've generated. And then what's more, what's really exciting and what I've just loved diving into in the last 18 months has been AI visibility. Yeah, and so I've been doing this long enough that when I started my career, I actually sent out faxes at Hill and Knowlton, the international PR firm. I'm that old. No, my kids are like, "What's a fax machine? I've had the same conversation with my

Nico Johnson  24:41

kids. I had to fax applications for the California Energy Commission incentive program.

Melissa Baldwin  24:47

Yeah, but so and honestly, the definition of success has changed over the last two decades, and the and the way that we've measured has changed, and and so you know having. Come from that old school mentality. There is this kind of old school purist PR mentality of like you only put out news that matters to reporters. You know you don't spam them, and you also you know you're not gonna just because you got the story in the Wall Street Journal doesn't mean that you're gonna instantly get a spike in sales. You actually have to do the work of putting that story under the nose of your customer, like email it to them, DM it on LinkedIn, you know, like put it in your sales deck. Yeah, but what's beautiful about the AI revolution and AI visibility now, with more and more people using Chat GPT and Gemini and Claude, is that those earned media stories are instantly getting seen by the LLM bots, and when I say LLM, I mean large language model like ChatGPT or Gemini, and they're surfacing companies as a solution to a problem, especially if they're using the right long tail phrases and keywords. So I think that's a really new and exciting way that PR can be measured is through AI visibility metrics and how well you're showing up in very specific prompts.

Nico Johnson  26:11

It's increasingly true. Everybody's got a podcast. I remember when Mike called and said, "Hey, I'm going to start a podcast, and then he launched it, Scaling Clean, and did a number of episodes, and then handed it off to you, which I commend him for. I think it was a great decision. You host Scaling Clean to get perspective specifically on CEOs and how they're building companies and and their perspective on the industry. What's the importance of the podcast for you as a medium, being a PR firm,

Melissa Baldwin  26:44

the podcasts have been incredible for us for two main reasons. The first real reason is just to build relationships, and so for me with Scaling Clean, I have an opportunity to interview incredible CEOs. You know, Blake Blake Nicoon with Geronimo, Dan Sugar, CEO of Doral, just incredible people who really, I think, honestly, a lot of them are flattered to get the kinds of questions that we ask, which are not as much around their business and them selling whatever their widget or service is, but it's more about how do they run the business? How do they treat difficult? How do they address difficult questions? How do they look at hiring and firing? The getting a little bit more into the business of running the business, and so I think that that's been just a great learning experience for me to get to hear from all the CEOs who have been there for years, have made a lot of mistakes, and they share some great advice that I end up recalling day to day. Honestly, Nico,

Nico Johnson  27:53

do you think that a podcast is a tool that every company should consider?

Melissa Baldwin  28:00

I don't know about that. I don't know that I would say that. I think it depends on whether you have time to invest in it, what you want to get out of it, what you want to give to other people with the podcast, and and I actually I'm realizing now I didn't answer the second part of the question. So the the first reason that we do it is build relationships and to learn from executives. That's been really helpful for us to build relationships within the industry. But the other really helpful thing that this week in clean tech has done for TigerCom is that it gives us a reason to have relationships with reporters, and specifically mainstream reporters who are covering this. And it's been so valuable to my team, in particular, my younger team, who are responsible every week for looking across the industry, looking at all the stories, and picking which stories we're going to cover on on the podcast, and then also just having a relationship with that reporter. So when we send them an email that they're they're going to you know respond to our emails. What's more is that, as I said before, it's not just what am I getting out of my podcast; it's what am I giving back to the community? What service am I providing to the community? And for our target audience with this week in clean tech, with the reporters, what's really cool is that reporters these days-it's-it's a tough environment for media right now. Media landscape is shrinking. Reporters are getting laid off, especially like the seasoned reporters who've been there for a long time, and so they're really judged on how many views and likes, or you know, how many how many views or stories are getting. Yeah. And so what we're able to do for reporters is actually promote their stories so that they can we can help them get more views. So it gives us a longer tail.

Nico Johnson  29:43

Yeah,

Melissa Baldwin  29:44

yeah, it's good because it puts us in a position of being able to help out the reporters. So that's been very good.

Nico Johnson  29:52

I'm curious your perspective on what a podcast does well that other channels don't.

Melissa Baldwin  29:56

Oh, podcasts are podcasts are so much more intimate. It's like you're being in the room with the people, and it's just a different feeling completely from, for example, reading a quote in a story. So, I listen to a ton of podcasts. I love them. They are my preferred. I'm the person who learns best when I'm listening. So, I listen to audio books. I listen to podcasts. I listen when I'm in the shower. I actually got you can get a waterproof notepad and you can put it. I have

Nico Johnson  30:25

it. I have a waterproof notepad. I love it. I'm like

Melissa Baldwin  30:29

scrubble because that's where I do my listening when I get up in the morning. You feel like you get to know the person. You just get to get a better sense of who they are. It's a little bit more relaxed. It's a longer form, which is incredibly great for. We have a sometimes some of our clients can be have a lot to say, and so it's a great format for people who aren't as quippy but really have interesting things to say. So

Nico Johnson  30:54

yeah,

Melissa Baldwin  30:55

I love the podcast medium.

Nico Johnson  30:56

I'll add to it. It is a unique business card, so a lot of there, there was a period still exists where folks, industry leaders, would write books because you could get the book in someone's hand and the book is a calling card. Like, hey, I wrote this book, and or I want to interview for my book. Like to have a conversation. Yeah, I would say like in the '90s and early 2000s, the the act of writing a book was had nothing to do with writing a book. It was an excuse to get on the phone with people who could potentially become your customers. Yeah,

Melissa Baldwin  31:27

no, absolutely, yeah.

Nico Johnson  31:29

And sadly, I think some people treat a podcast as a sales tool, and it's rather overt, unfortunately. And the and it feels like a quid pro quo. It feels like a almost like a bait and switch. So I've seen it done really well. I've seen it done poorly. I think that you guys do it extraordinarily well. I think that experts only. I mentioned John Powers. Like John has said to me that the podcast is worth every penny they've invested in it because it gives a natural platform to have a conversation with someone who would otherwise maybe not take your call.

Melissa Baldwin  32:00

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  32:00

and that has been true for me. I've built what has been said of me as the the the one of the best networks in the industry through dogged persistence, but also because people will take the call, they'll take the meeting because they see that I have a thing that people care about and that is noticed and has an audience, and and that wasn't that wasn't the case. And early on, I had to rely on relationships and the networking that I'm particularly good at. But I had to rely on the relationships I had built to get people of import on the show to be useful. That content had to be useful. It couldn't just be you know we've told a funny joke, or I had to tell like insider secrets about how particular markets were being built or how particular companies were growing, but it does give you that intimate access that you are talking about to the to the behind the scenes. It's not. It feels like a less curated medium than an article. An article can be edited and it and it and it looks edited. And a podcast can be edited and it doesn't feel edited.

Melissa Baldwin  33:03

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  33:04

yeah,

Speaker 1  33:04

yeah.

Nico Johnson  33:05

What have you observed interviewing some of the most dynamic leaders in the industry that the strongest communicators do differently than others?

Melissa Baldwin  33:13

What I have found pleasantly surprising is how vulnerable some of the leaders that I've spoken with have been, and one of the things that's memorable for me, and in fact, I just brought it up this morning, was how CEOs, especially ones who have really been there for a while and running huge companies, will say, "I don't need to be the smartest person in the room, and I'm not afraid to hire people who are smarter than me. In fact, I want to hire people who are smarter than me. I found that to be really refreshing. As even as I'm growing Tigercom and thinking about how I'm diversifying the team and the skill sets I have, I know many things about many things, but I don't know everything about everything. And I want to bring in talent that excels in in certain regions, and so that freedom to be okay with not knowing everything, I think, is really refreshing and empowering, and I think it's humbling in a in a pleasant way that's relatable.

Nico Johnson  34:19

It reminds me of a story of Henry Ford. There's a story of how there were journalists talking about or asking him questions about sort of the nature of the factory and how the assembly line worked, or the car worked, or some newfangled sort of innovation that Ford was introducing, and they felt that they had caught him like he was stumped on a topic, and he just paused for a second. He says, "You know, I don't know the answer to this. I actually don't think I should know the answer to this. But you see that? He says, "You see that phone right there? He said, "Every one of those little gray buttons underneath the dial pad leads to one of my top executives. With one press of a button, I can get you the answer to any question you can throw at me." I could bring them in here if you want, but my job is to hire them and to give them a thing to do and to make sure that they have a vision and a direction. My job is not to know how the car works. My job is to get the car built.

Melissa Baldwin  35:10

That's beautiful.

Nico Johnson  35:12

I wonder how Henry Ford would think about AI. I mean, that would just probably blow his mind, but also fascinating, right? Because he would be like, "Oh my gosh! This made my job so much easier. This is going to revolutionize again the way industry works. That would be fascinating to have that conversation with Andy. Just

Melissa Baldwin  35:30

the same way he was a disruptor. AI is the disruptor of our generation of this time in this moment.

Nico Johnson  35:38

For 20 years, companies have worried about Google and how they show up in search, and am I relevant in SEO now? Increasingly, you got to think about ChatGPT and Clode and Gemini, Perplexity, and every other tool. What has changed in the last six to 12 months about the way we show up, the way our customers find us? That is relevant for every CEO and head of marketing out there right now.

Melissa Baldwin  35:59

So, 60% of all Google searches are ending in zero clicks, and they're calling it. Some people are calling it the search apocalypse. Now, what that means is that you used to go on Google, search for a term, you get 10 blue links, you pick through them, pick the one you want. Now you're getting an AI overview, which, by the way, this is interesting. While SEO, which is search engine optimization, it's basically making sure you show up in those 10 blue links from Google. While that does play an important foundational role in your AI visibility, what's really cool is that there's an opportunity for underdogs to actually show up in AI visibility search results. So that's somebody who's searching either in a Google AI overview or in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. There's actually an opportunity for somebody who's not in the top 10 search results to show up in an AI search prompt. What else is different in the difference between SEO, search engine optimization and what some people are calling AEO answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization.

Nico Johnson  37:09

Yeah,

Melissa Baldwin  37:10

there's two key differences that I've noticed between SEO and AEO or GEO, and that is one that in old search used to search for two to four words, a keyword. Now, in the new search, a prompt. The average prompt is 22 words long. So think about what that means. Instead of just searching, you know, best best coffee mug or whatever product you're searching for, you're looking for. I want a purple coffee mug that's made in this country has this material and doesn't have BPA in it, so it's a long tail search, and so companies are now challenged with thinking of what all of those prompts are. Those really matter. So I said there's two big note things that are different. One is that you're going from two to four keywords to 22 word prompts. The other big difference between SEO and AI visibility is an SEO used to chase backlinks, and what that meant is that a company with really big marketing budget could go out there and invest in getting lots of backlinks. A backlink is when somebody else on another website is linking to your website. It's a literal link. Now with AI visibility, you don't actually need that link. You just need a mention. You just need them to say your name and say the context in in which somebody might be searching for something. So you're going from backlinks to mentions, and you're going from two to four words to 22 word prompts.

Nico Johnson  38:38

22 words.

Melissa Baldwin  38:40

Yeah, and they're really important, right? And so we we've gotten super excited about measuring this for Tiger Com. If you Google or if you do a search on any AI, who is the best clean tech PR firm in the U.S. You're going to see Tiger Com come up at the top. That's a longer tail search term. And the other thing is, like, that's not the only search term that we want to optimize for, though, right? So we also want to optimize for, you know, what is the best company to help me help me build my solar farm, help me win approval in a, you know, in rural Idaho or in some other state. And so, the longer the tail, the more opportunity there is to create very specific content to answer that question in a very specific way.

Nico Johnson  39:24

Have you developed sort of toolkits for your clients on how to think about this?

Melissa Baldwin  39:29

I've developed a framework that I use to help me remember what are the things that I need to do to optimize for AI visibility. In the framework, I use an acronym to help me remember it. It's PACT. P A C T. Yeah, and so each letter stands for a different thing that you need to do. P is prove it, so that's proof. A lot of times that's P R, which is great, right? One of the things that I love about AI visibility is that P R is more important than ever because many search engines. Whether it's ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, they are really looking to third-party journalists and media outlets to be that third-party validation. So PR is more important than ever for your search visibility. So P impact is prove it with usually that's with PR, but you can get other third-party mentions like a like an academic article. A is audit, so you want to measure how you're doing, and that starts. There's many different ways that you can measure your visibility. You can just do the search yourself in your preferred LLM and see what comes up. But there's actually lots of new softwares. There's probably dozens of different softwares out there that you can use to check how you are doing on those prompts, so that's measuring what matters. That's a auditing. You should audit at least once a month. We like to check every week how the results are, and they change on a regular basis. Like literally, the LLMs are so fast. You can publish an article, and the next day the LLMs are finding it, and your ranking has changed.

Nico Johnson  41:00

What tends to get ignored? You're talking about what get what does create authority in the AI environment, but what gets ignored?

Melissa Baldwin  41:04

Paid, paid gets ignored. So there's a great study done by Muckrack. Muckrack is a software that PR professionals use. It has a journalistic database of all the reporters out there. It's also a great way to do media monitoring, and they put out a study. They've done actually three versions of this now called "What Is AI Reading, and they found that less than 2% of what gets cited is paid. Over 80% is what they call earned sources, although they have a very lenient definition of earned. So, in earned, they they include, of course, journalistic sources, so articles in Forbes, Axios, well, you know, you name it, like Reuters, AP, those tend to get cited, but they also include government sources, academic sources, and then like listicles and other reference points, like Wikipedia, what have you.

Nico Johnson  41:56

Listicles,

Melissa Baldwin  41:57

yeah, listicles are very popular, actually. No, yeah, yeah,

Nico Johnson  42:02

fascinating. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, and that's the listicles are the kind of things. Like, I actually did the search: who is the best clean PR firm in the U.S. And Sustainable Business Magazine has top clean PR agencies. That's a listicle. Fame Hero has eight best PR agencies, and Tiger Com shows up there. The

Melissa Baldwin  42:18

other thing I'll say is that it actually empowers you to be very niche or to be very specific, and so because the because the search is so many more words because it's so long tail, the more evidence you have of being a very deep, deeply integrated into your vertical, that's actually stands in your favor, right? It's going to help leverage you in the search results.

Nico Johnson  42:44

If I want to be more surgical, and I have not done any of the things that you've talked about today, what what is the prompt that I should put into ChatGPT right now to like take the first step forward? Is there something that I could ask GPT to? Do you want to start

Melissa Baldwin  42:59

by asking it? You think about the name of your company and ask it who is you know who is SunCast and what do they do and see what it says because this isn't a problem as much right now. But when AI search was still rising, let's say 18 months ago, there was this phenomenon where there was a challenge between an LLM's memory. What is this pre-trained data and live search? And because every time an AI goes out and searches the web, it uses energy. It doesn't want to do that, and the LLMs can be lazy. And so there was a challenge 1812, months ago where the LLMs would be lazy and they would use their pre-trained data. Pre-trained data is every time chat comes out with a new model. Think about it: 3.0, 4.0. That is a frozen moment in time. That's frozen in the memory of the LLM, and so the challenge is that it would remember old data. Oh yeah, this was especially a problem for companies who are in stealth, companies who rebrand, or companies who have recently changed things because the memory would not have the most recent data. You'd have to force it to do a live search. This is less of a problem now as the models have evolved and they have more frequent updates. But if you have bad historic data in the memory, it's still not a good thing for you. And so you want to see if that's the case, and you work to fix it by cleaning up your website, making sure that you're really clear what you're saying on your on your site.

Nico Johnson  44:26

One of the things that Tigercom has been doing, spending a lot of time on, that actually really impresses me and catches the attention of folks at conferences and and other places. You guys have been investing a lot into this concept of community engagement, and I say concept because it means different things to different people. I think it is a project risk management tool.

Melissa Baldwin  44:50

Yeah, it

Nico Johnson  44:50

has become. I think I would credit Tigercom with helping to escalate the need for community. Engagement as more than a sort of a trimming to how a project is done, but I think that developers still see it kind of as a communications tool. It's like, oh yeah, and we'll also do this community engagement thing, which is like if somebody did a high school and like 15 other things that sort of are the checklist of playbook or the playbook of ideas. What have you observed the best developers doing differently around community engagement that is working.

Melissa Baldwin  45:26

Starting way earlier than they think they should. You got to start way earlier, and you have to be surgical in your philanthropy. So we talk about strategic philanthropy. It's not just oh, my corporate offices in Europe care about this charity, so that's the charity we give to. No, it's you are going to go find out exactly who is who is responsible for giving you that permit. What do they care about? Doing a deep dive, we do something called influence maps for developers, and we found this consistently across the board. Developers think that they're doing this, but they're not doing it to the depth that we would recommend. Where you're really looking very deeply at each of these individuals who's going to vote on your permit and understanding where do they eat, what do they care about, where do their you know where does their wife go to church, where do the kids you know like really looking at the community deeply. I mean,

Nico Johnson  46:16

hire an investigator.

Melissa Baldwin  46:18

Yeah, it's a lot of Facebook snooping, which

Speaker 1  46:22

is

Melissa Baldwin  46:22

that stuff's all out there on the internet. It's available for us to find out, and then making that investment based on the people who are the decision makers, what they care about.

Nico Johnson  46:34

As we close, I just kind of want to kind of pull back to 30,000 feet. You've been a founder, an advisor, an operator inside of your own business, a podcaster. Eventually, one presumes you'll also be taking the helm at Tiger Com. I think that you will be a leader in our industry for a long time to come. What's a leadership lesson that you understand today that would have been helpful 20 years ago?

Melissa Baldwin  46:58

Talk to your people on a regular basis. I think sometimes when you're working with a variety of people, you can get up in your head about, oh, I have this problem, but I've always found consistently that if I just have a conversation with the person, we can work it out right away. And a lot of times, I'm wrong. Like I made an assumption based on something that was incorrect, and like the more I talk to people, the better I get. the The more quickly I can resolve something, and we can work on something together. So I think it's not letting anything fester, and really just getting right to it and having that conversation, not in a text or an email, but just having a direct conversation with that person.

Nico Johnson  47:43

There's a lot of folks listening that I hope will be taking notes, but also maybe forwarding this to their CEO or CEOs forwarding this their team. What's an assignment that you would give them to complete before the end of the week? Do

Melissa Baldwin  47:54

the search on your company in the different LLMs and see what results you get. See how they're different or the same as what you thought they would be, and try to imagine, try to get into the head of that person that you want to influence, and imagine what the long tail search would be, because those prompts are incredibly important, and it's actually pretty difficult to think with specificity about what those different searches are so that you can start to get ahead of where that is because right now there's still an early mover opportunity to get ahead on AI visibility. Most companies are thinking about AI, but they're thinking about AI and like the whole spectrum of AI, not specifically AI visibility search. Only 20% of companies have actually implemented an AI visibility strategy, and so there's really still an opportunity to get ahead and be a first mover on this, and that's going to make a huge impact.

Nico Johnson  48:50

If you could wave a magic wand, and I say fix influence the thing that is the advice that you give that you see people struggle to act on, what would it be? What is the thing that folks ask you for advice? You give it, and then they don't do. They don't take action on it. If you could wave the magic wand and fix that, what would it be?

Melissa Baldwin  49:13

I would increase their risk tolerance for saying interesting and bold things because inevitably quotes and releases, sound bites. I think people are so afraid of saying the wrong thing or saying something that will offend someone, and so they end up saying something that's safe but not as interesting. And so I think be okay with taking that risk and do it anyway, and see the benefits of being a little bit risky, but getting a lot more attention. And you know it can go both ways. It's a double-edged sword. And yet, you know, at the end of the day, I think there's something to being memorable, right? Over being vanilla and boring. And so, really push yourself to. Step outside your comfort zone and maybe say something that makes you feel a little nervous, because it's going to increase the attention that you can get.

Nico Johnson  50:08

Yeah, I think five years from now, the same as today. Looking back five years, the companies who are memorable are the ones that have figured this out and and are putting it to practice in their PR strategy. They are investing in their comms in a meaningful way, not not just lip service.

Melissa Baldwin  50:25

Yeah, the other thing I would do is triple everybody's budget, triple the comms budget, triple the community engagement budget. That's what we need.

Nico Johnson  50:32

Yeah, absolutely. And if folks are struggling with how to do that and they would like to reach out to you, what's the best way to find you?

Melissa Baldwin  50:39

TigerCom.us, and I'm also available on LinkedIn. So either way, Melissa, me, and Baldwin, and LinkedIn.

Nico Johnson  50:46

Melissa Baldwin's the senior vice president at Tigercom, one of the leading clean tech communications and public relations firms in the world now, with offices outside of the U.S. but certainly here. So it's a joy to spend time with you. I hope that others get the opportunity and pleasure to do it as well. Thank you for joining us here on SunCast,

Melissa Baldwin  51:06

Nico. It's been a pleasure as well. I'm so grateful to you for inviting me into the circle and having me on the show and connecting me as you do. You are such a treasure to our industry. So thank you for all that you do.

Nico Johnson  51:19

That's a wrap on this conversation with my friend Melissa Baldwin. I hope that someday she can become your friend too. I promise she is open too, and looking forward to that opportunity. One thing I'll be thinking about for a while is this idea that companies winning attention are not necessarily the loudest; they're the ones that are useful. And I'm going to be searching SunCast on AI, trying to figure out how are we showing up. I've done it before. I remember one of our team members actually did that for us, and and I didn't really like what came about. So I'll be putting into action some of the things that I've learned from Melissa here, specifically around how to answer those questions for you that get more folks pointed towards SunCast. You know, in an industry full of smart people, sophisticated technology, and genuinely important work, it's easy to assume that the good products and the good intentions are going to speak for themselves. They won't. Melissa reminded us that trust does not happen automatically. Visibility doesn't happen automatically, and increasingly, discovery doesn't either. Whether you're trying to reach customers, investors, policymakers, community leaders, or even AI systems who decide whether you get recommended. The question is not simply whether you're communicating your worth; it's whether you're creating something valuable enough that people want to share it, reference it, and come back for more of it. That's my challenge for you this week. Take a fresh look at your company's communications strategy and how you show up. Are you creating content? Are you creating something that is useful? As always, I want to hear your feedback and thoughts. What resonated most? Would you share that out with your network and help us create more visibility for SunCast? If you're eager to keep learning, we'll link to all the ways that you can find Melissa, Scaling Clean podcast, Tiger Com, and other things that were mentioned today. And I hope that you will keep showing up. Thanks again for showing up this time. Remember, you are what you listen to, and being here is half the battle. See you next time.

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