PR Bunker: Amplify, Don’t Replace

Transcript

Welcome to the PR Bunker podcast. In this episode, Don Martelli sits down with Lianna Serko to talk about how AI is reshaping communications, PR, and content strategy. Lianna shares how she approaches systems building, how she uses AI to amplify creative work, and why audience relevance and human judgment still matter most. From smarter media outreach to building tools that save time and improve results, this conversation is packed with practical insights for modern communicators. Let’s get into it. Here’s your host, Don Martelli. What’s up, folks? Welcome back to the PR Bunker podcast. I’m here with my friend Lianna Serko, who I’ve met through a professional experience years ago.

I’m going to geek out maybe about AI, about comms, about PR, whatever this young lady would like to talk about. Lianna, but thanks for joining me down here in the PR Bunker podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Don. Really excited to be here. Excellent. Excellent. So, I always start these conversations with the interviewee’s journey. I’m a firm believer that we as communicators never plan to be in this job, in this role at this particular time, especially in the way the world works these days. But talk to my audience about you know how you got into communications and what’s your journey been like so far. Sure. Absolutely.

So um I’ll start by saying I have kind of this firmly held belief that communicators have a superpower and it’s that no one would know anything without us. So I’ve kind of always been fascinated by how people consume information. Growing up and into college I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I know that’s your background. But I eventually realized that that was not the career path that I wanted to pursue. At the same time, I never lost the belief that sharing information matters.

And so then I landed at this startup in 2015 2016 called Graphiq and they were doing something that at the time seemed really innovative turning or creating data visualizations and then embedding those data viz into online news articles. So again, today that doesn’t sound revolutionary, but you know, a decade plus ago, unless you were working in the New York Times newsroom, very few newsrooms had that capability in house. And so a company like ours kind of prompted some philosophical debates about the value of journalism, the value of communication. On one side, people are saying no one’s reading anymore and this data viz is making it worse.

And then to me, I thought, well, okay, but if an interactive data viz could keep someone on that article for 2 minutes more or um could help them understand a problem in a new way because they don’t consider themselves a reader, then to me that’s not diminishing journalism. That’s helping information reach people in a way that they’re willing to engage with it. And so that philosophy has kind of stuck with me throughout my career. And to your point, I didn’t think I’d be here in this role today. Certainly not, you know, when I started there at a tech startup in Santa Barbara, California over a decade ago.

So, I guess the through line is like I don’t get particularly nostalgic about the old way of doing things. I’m much more interested in asking, okay, well, people think differently now, they behave differently now, and how do we build for that reality? And that’s kind of where I’ve been noodling for the past couple of years. And that’s I mean I love that statement because you know in today’s media environment with AI which we’ll get into in a second it’s probably the worst it will ever be right because the advancements in technology what’s influencing the work that we do is just going to continue to get better.

I mean Fable was here a week or two ago then it was gone now it’s back and like why is it back and you don’t know the story? Cuz as a former journalist I’m like I want to get into that story. I want to know why you know but anyways before we get into that what are you doing now? What I’m doing now is I work as the director of strategic communications at American University’s Kogod School of Business. So here in Washington DC, leading the strategic communications in-house, but also thinking kind of with this agency mindset.

I’ve been in the DC agency world before this, thinking from this from an in-house mindset. I was in-house at the UN Foundation before this. And so kind of taking all of those various experiences with different types of communication stakeholders but very mission-oriented goals. Um taking that experience to a business school that is in and of itself kind of redefining the genre if you will. Um I don’t know if you have Googled us recently. That could be a huge part of our conversation later.

But the goal is if you have you’ve seen that we’ve kind of embraced AI with everything we’ve got. and not in the check a box way, but in a how do we really instill in students and infuse in their education this tool that is not going to be a nice to have, it’s going to be a must-have by the time they graduate into the workforce. Um, and so I am tackling that challenge from a communications perspective across media relations, content and narrative strategy, editorial development. I also lead our creative services team. So I like we call ourselves a content team. I’m a content person. Love it.

And that’s what I’m doing these days over at American University. Love it. What’s what guides the philosophy in leveraging the tools to to manage well your workflow, your team’s workflow and drive towards the goals to which you’re responsible for at this particular time because you’re overseeing not just your own workflow but others.

I mean, what’s And you know, I mean, you can go really edgy on this stuff and I know from my experience in education, there’s pretty much there’s some guard rails of things you can and can’t do within education, but it sounds like you’re all trying to push that envelope because your leadership team and others with are all about it. So, what’s that stream and the workflow look like for you and the team? 100%. Well, so I’ll tell you the honest answer first, which is that I’m a hugely impatient person.

And uh when I’m met with a challenge that I have to face every single day, I’m not the type to sit around and wait for someone else to tell me or give me permission. Well, why don’t you go explore that? I just simply get too frustrated. And so I try to find my it’s not working around a system. It’s actually how do we fix what might be broken, right? So, I actually love to say like I’ve kind of realized over the years I don’t enjoy doing the same thing every day, but I enjoy finding those broken systems and making them work better.

That systems builder mentality has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a communications professional who loves to write. It’s kind of a mentality and a philosophy to your point that I’ve applied to the way the entire team works. Right. It’s also really tough. You’re leading a creative team, right? I’m sure that you’ve seen on the internet all of the hoopla and uproar about AI generated creative as well there should be. We have to have a thoughtful debate about this. But I don’t think that means that my senior designer can’t innovate with an AI tool to make her admin workflow better. Yeah, agreed. Have more time to create art.

That’s how I think people need to be reconsidering this AI adoption question is not how you can use it to change the work you do. It’s how you can use it to amplify the work that you do best. And most of the time it’s because you don’t want to do you know your report your expense reports or maybe you don’t want to reply to Don Martelli but nobody does. Nobody does. I know.

But that’s kind of the mentality I’m bringing to a communications function where I’m not dictating, hey, you all have to use this GPT, but what I am saying is, hey, on our Friday morning meeting, come to our next one and tell me about an AI loop you created in your workflow last week. We can all learn from that. Love that. what’s your what’s your favorite I don’t want to call it hack, but loop like what’s the what’s the one thing you’ve created for your productivity stack to do those things you don’t want to do that you get most excited about these days? It’s got to be the press releases, man.

It’s got to be the press releases built. It was the first loop I built because it was the thing I wanted to expedite. We can all write a press release, a really good one, in 15 minutes or less. I wanted one to be generated for me in 30 seconds or less. And that is something that we can achieve by training a model that says this is our best 10 press releases that achieve this goal or right and kind of iterating on the setup, right?

And I think that that’s something that might discourage people a little bit from getting into this is like, “Oh, but the setup is so intense.” Yeah, it is. Setting anything up is intense. Setting anything up requires hard work. But the goal for me is if I can set something up that decreases my level of effort but increases my level of output at a quality that matters. Then why wouldn’t I do that thing? Yeah. That investment in time is huge. So imagine Exactly. So imagine every press release. Okay. Well, 15 minutes turns into 30 seconds. We’re not writing press releases anymore.

We are getting to use our time more strategically for doing better reporter research. Tailoring our pitches to our reporters more thoroughly to their line of interest or what their most recent coverage is. That’s the mentality. And I could, you know, we could, if this podcast was 3 hours long, not 30 minutes long, I could kind of explain to you how I’m applying that mentality to every function within the communications function I oversee. The three guiding principles. The three guiding principles is if you can do it in 10 minutes or less, build it now. Love that. If there’s a task that you do every day, build a loop. Heck yeah.

And always go in with your best original idea. Love that. That’s always go in with your best original idea. That that I love that because often people think about I just want to get this thing done and automate it and see it like set it and forget it. Yeah. But what if by Yeah. And then what if in doing that the set it and forget it, you end up sending an email to your good friend Don Martelli that says that you’re, you know, willing to meet with him for dinner on the 9th and you’re going to be away on the 9th, right?

Like there has to be some level of both like premium human input but also premium human discretion on the output. And I think that that’s actually if we could reconsider what I said my three things are. It’s that’s got to be at, you know, can we plus one? That’s got to be on there. Yeah. I mean, we’re the operators, right? it’s the tools can do the work, but it still needs the Jeppetto, right? They could be the Pinocchios, but you got to be the Exactly. Exactly. That’s another old reference. Yeah. Yeah. So let me ask you this.

What are the what are the some of the things in your workflow as a communicator and you managing this brand and all the work you’ve done in the past that are still consistent from when you were working for that previous technology company that exists today? In communications, there’s a lot of just common things that just will never change. What are those things that have that are still consistent and relevant for you as a communicator today as it was when you started your career? Audience is number one. Who are we making this content for? Why are we making this content?

How are we going to get that audience to care about it? If that is not the first question that we are considering at the beginning of a kickoff call, then we’re probably starting on the wrong foot. I think that no matter what realm you’re doing communications in, so again, whether that be in-house in a nonprofit, in-house corporate, in a client services space like agency, you’re always thinking about the end audience, the final audience. Who wants to hear this message? Why do they need to hear this message? Right? Cuz a lot of the time as communicators, we’re actually telling people things they don’t want to hear, but they need to hear.

Whether that be because our client has a policy deadline coming up or whether that be because, you know, this regulation has changed and we need to let people know something that they didn’t vote for, right? Those things still matter. So the target audience, that final recipient of the thing you make, should always still be the driving factor behind what you make and why you make it. And I think that that’s probably the through line that I think is true to comms now will be true to comms regardless of what technology might change in 10 years, right?

So my goal today is still to reach a target audience in the way that they will get my message best. The “get my message best” part of that has changed drastically, not only in the past 10 years, but in the last two. But the goal in 10 years from now is probably still going to be I need this person to get my message. I’m going to have to find as the communicator the way to get it to them. But that’s the exciting part, right? That’s the builder that I the builder mentality I was talking about. Yeah. It’s funny.

I was my follow-up question to that was going to be and this happens to me every single day almost every single minute. are and throughout the course of your day whether you’re on a call with a professor or a colleague does your brain always trigger you to I should build that is is this constant like need to build things with these tools because I mean it’s like for me it’s addicting it’s like what else an absolute burden Don it’s it’s yeah it’s addicting I well so it’s kind you you say it’s addicting it’s like I’m kind of obsessed with how again how expertise gets distributed And so my obsession with that is taking me down this AI AEO rabbit hole, right?

It’s essentially a distribution question. So it’s not right, it’s not a matter of everything has changed. It’s just again that delivery method, that last bit of the puzzle for a content creator has changed. So yeah, of course, every time someone comes with and I think actually I’ll share one tidbit that I think might be a relevant anecdote. That’s I was going to actually I was going to ask you the same kind of thing. Like I you and I are probably on the edge of this and we’re geeking out over it. For the person who’s like just using ChatGPT for content, they’re not even there yet.

So walk me through like today you’re in the office today. You got something to promote. You got some news you need to get out there. What’s that flow? Walk me through that anecdote. Yeah, I’ll walk you through the anecdote which is actually about systems change, right? So you’re you’re asking me like do you just want to build every time you’re on a call? And the answer is yes. And the anecdote is this. I’m a communicator. You might imagine a bunch of people in my world are communicators. We like to geek out about this stuff. And I have been really focused on AEO, right?

So, I love having these conversations with friends. What tools are you using? Oh, you don’t have tools? Well, what’s your, you know, is that a budget restraint? Well, what what are you doing tactics-wise? Right? Um, I actually wrote a piece recently about this about tools versus tactics and where I think the search race is going to go. Spoiler alert, it’s definitely tactics. But I guess the point is this anecdote is I was chatting with a communicator who runs a massive website, way larger than mine. Runs a massive website, thousands and thousands of pages. They don’t have an enterprise AEO tool, and they don’t have access to one within their CMS.

Okay. The conversation turns to, well, where do we start? We don’t have a tool that says these are the top 10 pages you got to focus on. I say, okay, well, what do you want the 10 most visible pages on your website to be? What are the 10 messages that you want your audience to still see? Start there and use some new strategies and some new tactics to be, you know, building out your schema in the back end of that page a little bit better to be making sure that you’re having query fan-out in that page so that AI crawlers can better crawl and index it. Right?

So, I think that there’s this huge massive looming thing in our world that makes people feel like it’s just too big. We don’t have what what we need. Well, no, you have what you need and you have a final audience and you have a message you want to get to them. This builder part is how do you get that message to them? It’s no different. It’s just it’s a it’s a mentality full circle moment right there, you know, because it’s still about the audience, still about the message. now like what’s I can imagine because I look at my tech stack and I’m a beta guy.

I’ll dive into any pool head first. I’m like I’m all in on that. what’s your daily stack look like? I don’t think that people should be considering well what’s the best AI for blank. It’s about creating an ecosystem for yourself that works right because you’re applying the AI to that problem today. But perhaps you want to build an AI that has knowledge of your system to solve a new problem in three months and it’s not the same as the one you started with. Well, I now have a system that understands me, my tone, my style, my the my phrases I refuse to use, right?

Plus a whole bunch of historical knowledge and documents that I have trained it to say this is my best one. Thanks so much. Now use this as my baseline. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s smart. Very smart. I think there’s a there’s a there’s a baseline you start with and if you’re going into the use of these tools with a an agile mind frame and mindset I think you you nailed it.

It’s wherever you started is not where you’re going to end up and tomorrow will be better because as you if you go back to your first point about spending the time to adjust to teach to learn so the outputs get to where you normally would take them if you were doing them manually but you’re right I mean what the tools we’re using now may change in a month or two or three but it’s that the ability to be able to pivot and be agile with your system use I think is really important and I think that that’s another place where communicators can really excel in this space right I think that you have a bunch of people saying, “Oh, but like Lianna, she just does words for a living.” Sure, that’s the output.

You see, it’s not the fundamental way I spend my time, right? It’s not the only thing that matters. And I think that it’s really it is really about building these systems that can tackle tomorrow’s problem. Yeah. And so, let me ask you this. So, you’re a young Lianna coming out of undergrad school going and you’re going to be an aspiring public relations person.

Where do you start as you’re hearing lei and language and all these tools and you think about media and PR is not PR what it once it was when you and I started but like if you are that young Lianna what are you telling her about the space now where to lean in? Pay attention. Pay attention and like always be paying attention to people. This is the one that everyone knows. Pay attention to people who are smarter than you. Pay attention to people who are doing things you don’t understand and then try to figure out what they’re doing. what motivated them and how did they do it?

I just think that there is this mentality that like starting out you have to just know. No one just knows. I didn’t just know. You didn’t just know. I just watched people who were really good at this thing. And then because I am the type of person who will talk to a brick wall, I went up to most of those people and I asked them to tell me everything about themselves. And then I took the bits and pieces of those conversations that I thought could help me develop and kind of focused on, okay, well, is that a skill set that I need to develop?

Is that a relationship I need to keep? Is that a tool I need to learn how to use? Is this a space I need to just be paying attention to? Right? In public affairs in particular, you’re always paying attention to the space because one of your clients definitely has a bill that’s going, you know, to vote tomorrow. But again, it doesn’t have to be thinking less about client services, even just about if I am the type of person who wants to make impact through communications on issues that matter.

What I really need to be doing right now is paying attention to how to scale my productivity and give people an output from a 21-year-old that’s as sophisticated as an output from 31-year-old Lianna. Unfortunately, that is the expectation for a lot of young people right now. It’s to have an output that is much greater than their experience might dictate. But the ways to accomplish that are out there. You just have to have the right mindset. That’s the problem to solve. It’s a different problem than the one I had to solve when I was breaking in. But that’s just the problem to solve.

And I think that we’re at this place that AI can really help or it can hinder you because if you’re using it willy-nilly, if you’re using it without your own like moral compass one, but actual work parameters too, it’s not going to save you time and it’s not going to produce something better for you. And so I think it’s really just about like all the stuff that would be true 10 years ago. Be thoughtful, be intentional, learn from people who are smarter than you. Love that. and then use the tools that are now in our ecosystem to amplify your own intelligence. That’s what I think spot on with that.

I think you you and you touched upon this a couple times. The one other common thing amongst all of this is, you know, brands wanting to talk to people and and that’s just relationship building. and you you kind of danced around a little bit, but when it comes to relationships and running a business and while you work for a well-established well-known university, you’re still running a business unit within a university.

It’s still about as communicators, you know, the value of relationships from a networking perspective and getting to know the faculty, getting to know your staff, getting to know your partners, and you and I still being connected after all this time, right? From a networking perspective, because as you know, I talk a lot about networking on my substack and elsewhere. I mean, what’s as a communicator, we’re naturally gravitated to having conversations with people, but what’s your networking strategy to continue to learn, to continue to meet people and and get in rooms where other smarter people are there? What’s your networking strategy these days when it’s always on?

We got all these tools available to us. But at the core of the people part of the whole process, what’s your networking strategy look like? Talk to interesting people. So I like it sounds so simple but the answer is I am chatting with you today because I posted something on LinkedIn that you thought was interesting. Yeah. And then we had and then we had a conversation about it. That’s my approach to networking. If if I am following someone on LinkedIn that is in a space that I think is really unique or I’ve heard from a friend in the space that they’re doing something totally different.

Well, maybe I don’t know them yet and maybe I can’t reach out via email to say, “Hey, let’s get coffee.” But I can read what they’re putting out there. I can respond to them and say, “This is the part that stuck out to me.” Do you want to find 30 minutes to just noodle on that? Like that’s my approach to networking today is to find the people who are doing interesting things. If I finish reading an article and I’m like, I want to build that. Well, how did Don build it? Why did he build it?

Maybe I don’t want to build that exact same product, but I’m inspired by the approach, right? And so again, I do think, and this is where personality comes into play, right? I can’t imagine it would be as easy for someone who is a little bit less forthcoming or forthright or willing to shake that random person’s hand. The introverts in the room here, we know they’re here. We know you’re creeping in listening to the podcast. Introverts are out there listening to the pot, but I don’t they’re not introverts. It’s like, right, so like there are people who simply Right. It’s not that they’re introverts. It’s simply that it’s not their way.

They’re just not going to introduce themselves to someone random face to face. That’s okay. You don’t have to do that. What you have to do is say, “Hey, this thing you said was really interesting to me and I actually have something to share, too.” Yeah. It’s a good hook. Right. So, because then and I’ve also I’ve always had this mentality. It’s like what’s the worst that someone could do? Say no. Yeah. I mean, PR we get rejected. We get rejected. So, that’s all the time. We get rejected by reporters. This is where right this is where communicators again have a superpower. Like the rejection that people fear is the baseline.

That is how I wake up every morning.

I go into work knowing that half of the stuff that I have thought very dutifully about that I have created crafted might not hit and that’s okay because the ones that do is where the lift comes right and we haven’t even talked about kind of like earned to owned and how we’re increasing visibility maybe that’s a pod part two no like as you’re talking about we talked about your background system build the work for me we get to this part of the podcast it’s like what’s next and clearly we as public relations professionals it was traditionally dealing with the media right but as somebody who oversees that massive department for your fairly large reputable school you are managing a newsroom of sorts so what’s that mix look like for channels how is AI influencing the whole thing how are you the architect and the operator of this entity and business unit within the school using these tools so kind of full circle how we bring this all together absolutely so this is where I want to talk not about how I’m using the tools, but how I’m developing a strategy for what the tools are doing for the consumer.

Okay? So, we are all now optimizing to show up in that little two-line AI summary that shows up when someone Googles something or when someone’s opening up ChatGPT, you want to be that first reference bullet point. Well, how do you do that? That’s super tactical, but let’s talk about the mix. For me, I’m constantly thinking about balancing volume with repute.

And what I mean by that is there is still absolute value in having a ton of media hits in smaller outlets, ones where maybe not going to have a whole ton of readers, but you have volume to say, “Okay, this brand is showing up regularly.” Then you have repeat where you say, “This brand maybe I got one hit in the Wall Street Journal. That’s phenomenal, right? That one Wall Street Journal hit though, that’s ephemeral. that’s gone in the next news cycle. So, you have to balance knowing that that one top tier hit might hold as much weight as 10 smaller hits and balance how you approach that and do both.

You can do it all, Don. You have to do it all. And I think that that’s where people might be missing the mark is leaning all in on one or the other. If you are a PR professional who’s mostly targeting nationals, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to get your expert’s name and an attribution to your brand in a local journal that might get syndicated. Right? That’s the mentality. And so to take that a step further, I’m thinking not only about my media mix and you know who we’re pitching how and why, but what are we going to do with that hit after it comes out?

Because let’s say I got that hit in the Wall Street Journal and I absolutely want to celebrate that. The hit alone, I could post it to LinkedIn. I could share it with my network. It’s not really that important. But if I develop an owned a piece of owned media, right? Something that’s on my domain, my brand’s website that is structured for AI to crawl and index.

And then you’re just using some of our traditional SEO tactics of circular linking and you know things like that, but you’re tying it to an AEO framework that says the way people are going to find out about this Wall Street Journal hit is not because they’re reading the Wall Street Journal. They’re going to find out about this faculty member being quoted in the Wall Street Journal because they’re looking for something themselves and our expertise is cited or referenced. That’s the game play for us right now. And I’m very quick to say that nothing in this world is static.

So by the time you publish this conversation, the playbook might, you know, I might You’re right. Yep. Every single day AI and these tools get worse, right? And just the amount of the volume of information, how it’s being served, where it’s being served, who’s cited, who’s not. It just it’s just this river of information. Well, so I mean, but so how do we avoid the slop, right? Consumers at this point want to avoid the slop. Great. Give them really tight structured owned content that is going to then be referenced alongside all of those media hits because AI machines do not remember moments in time.

An AI machine is not going to remember that one hit in the Wall Street Journal. However, if you have created an ecosystem of credibility, right, across those smaller hits, right, those small publications, no one really reads, maybe a couple of podcast hits where you get to put the entire transcript on your website, you have now created an ecosystem that AI can read and understand as like they’re actually all over the place. So, that’s the mix. Now, you have to figure out, everyone has to figure out what is that mix for my brand. Yep. Right. and my clients brands and everything else brands or whoever it might be.

But I think again all of everything we’re talking about today is about a mentality and an approach to communications not actually the way to do communication. Correct. Correct. It’s not it’s never about the tactics. It’s really never it’s not about and this is it’s like you have chat I have Claude. Okay. That does not dictate the final outcome. What really dictates the final outcome is again I’m going to go back to my point number three from earlier. Go in with your best original idea. That’s what dictates a positive outcome in this environment. You go in with your best original idea.

Then you use AI to amplify that already really good idea. Yeah. Love it. what’s your next big idea? What’s what what do you got cooking now that’s like kind of in the lab that’s in the lab in the lab that’s like simmering? So, a couple of months ago, and this again came from I got very frustrated with a problem that I was facing every single day. Couple of months ago, I developed an app in Google AI Studio for media engagement lead scoring.

Essentially, taking all of our historical pitch data and mapping that to a heat grade that tells us, okay, over the course of time, over the course of all of our pitches on XYZ subjects, this person at this outlet responded in this way. And that intelligence allows us to decide, well, maybe actually I really want this targeted pitch.

I’m going to tailor it really, really closely to this reporter because they responded to us two months ago and said, “Love the topic, just not the right time.” Well, I’ve been working on this app to surface all of that historical data in an interactive dashboard where now when I want to reach out to a small subset of my reporter database, I can simply download my media list based on the parameters I want to target. Nice. So, I’ve been everything I just described to you is currently an MVP. I mean, that thing is minimum viable. Like, it functions, right? It functions. It retains data. But that’s what I want.

I mean, summertime in higher ed is the time to to noodle, to play, to tinker, to build, think, experiment, brainstorm. And, you know, in the day-to-day work, I’m using the app to cut down on how much time we’re spending developing those media lists. But there’s a layer deeper that I’d like to take that and not only have it spit that out, but tell me what I should do. Yeah. Then you can then you can sell that to every agency in the country in the world and make money. Don from your mouth to millions of dollars. From your mouth to someone’s ears. Yeah. Tell me as an investor.

I’m in on that. Right on. Love that. Good stuff. Good stuff. I mean, we could geek out about this all the time. I was going to say that one that one requires like a separate It does. Well, I mean that that’s that goes from you and I putting a press release on Business Wire or PR Newswire or into a fax machine to like it’s the same process. It’s just delivering differently, but it’s so unique, customized, personalized, relevant because, you know, media right now is about I love the story, Lianna, but it’s not now. It might be in three months.

I don’t I got 30 seconds to decide whether I should be writing about this now or or tomorrow or never. And and am I going to remember because I am pitching all the time that so and so from X outlet two months ago said that? Of course not. And is it a waste of my time to go back through my inbox or have to go back through Muck Rack and figure it out? Of course, a thousand percent. So, so all this is done again. It’s saved time, but it’s not just saving time. What do I get to do with the time I’m getting back?

I’m getting to build stronger relationships with reporters. I am getting to build stronger strategies for outreach depending on what’s going on in the world around me because yeah, those 30 minutes I saved this morning can amount to a new coffee chat or a new podcast opportunity for a faculty member. So yeah, I’m going to take all that time back and do something meaningful with it.

Not not that everything we produce doesn’t have value, but for me, I talk about this time I’m saving in the things I’ve created to operate parts of the business allows me to be in higher level value moments. as you pointed out, a coffee with a reporter, you know, time with the kids, you know, time away, doing things that just would take out a massive time suck to allow me to focus on people, my relationships, and the quality to which I’m delivering things I need to deliver for my variety of clients, whether it be my bunker clients, my small business clients, the alignable stuff. So, it just been, it’s incredible.

And I, you talked about it before we started recording, like today’s the worst day AI was ever going to be. And imagine in 10 years from now when you’ve got, you know, you’re doing your thing. I’m doing my thing where this thing entire is going to go, but it’s still going to be about people about a brand or company communicating to an audience and just exactly what cool we’re going to build around it, which I think we’re really excited about. It’s good stuff. So, when people want So, you mentioned LinkedIn a few times and that’s where that article is and lives. I’m sure you’re publishing there regularly.

Can people find you on there and what what’s that look like? How can they find you there? Yeah, absolutely. You could find me. I have a pretty unique name spelled pretty uniquely. It’s Lianna Serko. Definitely find me on LinkedIn because I think that’s the best way again to for people in your network who you know maybe they’re doing the coolest and I just don’t know them yet. Same. Where where else are you uh where else are you publishing at all if you are content? Right now I’m focused on publishing on LinkedIn, but you know I think that I might expand beyond that if I think I have a content engine.

Right. So we’ll see. I’m sure if you haven’t I’m sure you’re going to build it because that’s that’s where your brain is at. That’s where Right. Exactly. Okay. So, in my 25th hour of every day, I’m sure maybe that’s the next thing. But I do think that the main focus for me is again talking to people who are doing interesting stuff and then building my own solutions around that. So, I’m really jazzed to be in the space. I’m really grateful that you had me on the podcast and yeah, definitely have folks reach out on LinkedIn and let’s get connected. Let’s nerd out. Thousand%.

I would highly recommend you all do so because that’s how she and I got reconnected. Lianna, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for joining the PR Bunker podcast. I can’t wait to see what else you build. And I’m like I’m foaming at the mouth on that media application because I’ve got something like that too that there’s a couple things you mentioned like a I forgot about that. I should add that in there. So I think the other lesson I learned today was well we are all communicators and doing different things.

It’s this community of communicators that could help each other provide ideas builds because we every idea we’ve ever come with is is a ripoff of something else that’s been built on right and this is the mode we’re in these days to be operators and communicators. So, appreciate you sharing the insights, teaching this old dog a couple new things. Pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much, Don. I’ll talk to you soon. Excellent. That’s the PR Bunker podcast hosted by Don Martelli. Here’s the thesis. Reputation is the operating system for your business. It’s the one asset that works while you sleep.

When you need to defend it, repair it, or build it, start at prbunker.com. And for a sharper way to build the relationships that actually get you to yes, subscribe to the anti-networking playbook on Substack. New every week. When reputation decides the outcome, be ready. We’ll see you next time. And remember, stay locked in.