Episode 319 · 16 July 2026 · 47:06
Why Nobody is Listening to You at Work, with Strategic PR Director, Ellie Glason
Featuring Ellie Glason
Why Nobody is Listening to You at Work, with Strategic PR Director, Ellie Glason
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Al's 19-year-old press release disaster and why nobody listened
Meet Ellie Glason: PR consultant for founders
The biggest mistake founders make: not thinking about the audience
interview#founders#audience#storytelling
The Baby with Tall Hair phenomenon: why data dumps fail
The Seven Basic Plots of storytelling
interview#storytelling#booker#seven-plots
Process over outcome: the key to engaging stories
interview#storytelling#process#engagement
Data-driven storytelling: the skeleton and the flesh
Selling a point of view: the Dove example
Using the Seven Plots with your team
interview#storytelling#team#seven-plots
The Pub Test: is your story interesting?
interview#storytelling#emotion#engagement
Handling tough messages: return-to-office, budget cuts, transformation
interview#return-to-office#budget-cuts#transformation#communication
The Credibility Ladder for introverts
The future of PR in the age of AI
interview#ai#public-relations#future
Top 3 takeaways and where to find Ellie
Show notes
Why Nobody Is Listening to You at Work — with Ellie Glason
Guest: Ellie Glason — strategic PR consultant for founders, former publishing specialist and journalist, with placements everywhere from the Financial Times to national broadcast media.
You've written the perfect, data-backed email. You've built the airtight slide deck. And still — silence. Meanwhile, a story about a baby with impossibly tall hair gets everyone talking.
Ellie joins Al and Leanne to explain why our brains are hardwired to ignore dry information dumps, and how leaders can borrow the classic "Seven Basic Plots" of human storytelling to get instant buy-in from their team, their board, or the media. They unpack the inverted triangle of communication, the "Pub Test" for whether your message is actually interesting, and why the future of PR in the age of AI is looking a lot more niche.
Top 3 Takeaways
Think about the audience, not just the message. The biggest mistake founders make is using their own language and jargon instead of meeting people where they are. Match the tone, the words, and the format your audience already consumes.
Run the Pub Test before you send anything. Would someone actually repeat this to a friend over a pint? If it doesn't have emotion, tension, nostalgia, relief, or transformation — it's not a story yet.
Pick your story on purpose. Overcoming the Monster, The Quest, Rebirth — whatever change you're announcing, frame it as one of the seven plots humans have connected with for centuries. Talk about the process, not just the outcome.
More From Ellie Glason
- Website: ellieglasonpr.com
- Book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker: amazon.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ellie-glason
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
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Al Elliott19 years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a press release for mainstreaming news. It had stats, it had solutions, it had everything I thought mattered, and it landed with a thud. It was completely ignored.
Leanne ElliottI remember that day. Do you know what the papers ran instead?
Al ElliottI remember exactly what they ran.
Leanne ElliottIt was a story about a baby whose hair was too tall for her passport photo.
Al ElliottMe and Chris, my business partner, were absolutely gutted. And I'll be honest, I spent the last, like, 20 years wondering what went wrong. It turns out there's an actual answer. And it's the same reason your team ignores your big announcements, or maybe your investors skim past your pitch, and your best ideas at work just don't land.
Ellie GlasonYou've committed to a new digital system. You've got completely new databases, accountancy system, like everything's gonna be different. And you're getting everybody together to tell them about this and talk about this transformation. And basically everyone's gonna have to train, and it's gonna take everyone double the time to do everything for about a month, and it's gonna be really annoying. So, Is it a quest? No, we're banishing the monster. We fought the monster. So, the monster is this old system that basically meant we could only do kind of half of what we could potentially do.
Leanne ElliottOur guest today is Ellie Glason, a PR consultant for founders who's placed clients everywhere from the Financial Times to the BBC. And she's about to tell us something that has nothing to do with PR and everything to do with why nobody's listening to you at work.
Al ElliottEllie explains there are only really 7 stories in the whole of human Every novel, every film, every legend you've ever heard, it's one of those 7. And Ellie's gonna show us how to use them to get your ideas actually heard, whether that's for a journalist, your board of directors, or your own team on a Monday morning.
Leanne ElliottThis one is going to change how you pitch everything. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and The audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.
Al ElliottMy name is Al. I'm a business owner.
Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of work.
Al ElliottEllie Glason runs a PR consultancy for founders. Her background's in journalism and publishing, and before she went out on her own, she spent years reading manuscripts for a living. This is where she first noticed something.
Leanne ElliottThe difference between writing that's polished and writing that actually connects always comes down to the same Today we are stealing her playbook, not just for press releases, for performance reviews, town halls, return to office emails, the lot. Because if you've ever wondered why your perfectly reasonable, perfectly logical idea got completely ignored, this episode is going to explain exactly why.
Al ElliottSo after this short break, we'll find out what happens with my press release and the 7 stories you need to know.
Leanne ElliottBack in a sec.
Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scary how often scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems, and in our case, about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story, and when you know more, you grow more.
Al ElliottNice. Check out hopspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Joined here today by an incredible woman who I am pleased to say is now a friend. We've known each other for about 18 months. Feel like I've known you all my life. Ellie Glason, you are amazing. Tell us who you are and what you do.
Ellie GlasonOh, thank you, Al. That's amazing. And I also feel like I've known you forever. I'm very happy and glad to be here. So I'm Ellie Glason. I run a PR consultancy for founders. My background is journalism and publishing, which means that as well as placing my clients in titles such as the Financial Times and the BBC, I also help them tell their stories.
Al ElliottSo you've worked with a lot of brands, a lot of founders getting their story out there. What do you see as the most common mistakes they make when they're trying to get their stories heard?
Ellie GlasonI think that one of the biggest mistakes founders can make is not thinking about their audience. And when I say founders, actually anyone, from an HR leader to a founder who wants to be in The Telegraph. One of the key mistakes people make is not thinking about who their audience is, how their audience speaks, and how to communicate with them in a way that they will find interesting.
Al ElliottSo what you're saying is potentially that they use their own language and jargon rather than something other— no, tell me what you mean by that.
Ellie GlasonYou need to think about Not just the language that you use. So, an example of this is if you work in the tech sector and you have terminology that you use that seems really obvious to you, you obviously do not use that with consumer-facing, customer-facing communications. And this is the same as if you are talking to journalists within that sector. You really want to dial down the technical language. You want to make it— plain English is really important. And you want to think about—
Al ElliottYeah.
Ellie Glasonoutlets and how they write, the copy that they use and the words they use, you want to match that in tone. So if you want to be in a lifestyle magazine, obviously the press release and the comms will be quite different to if you want to be in a broadsheet. But also what's important, more important than language, is thinking about what your consumers or what the public, your audience, is going to find interesting. And just because you find it interesting, Yeah. It really doesn't mean they will. And in fact, I'd almost go as far as to say that if you find something interesting, take a step back, assume that no one else will, and start again.
Al ElliottSo when, like a million years ago, when I did a press release myself for the Manstreaming News, and I packed it full of, it was about repossession, and I packed it full of stats, and I packed it full of how we fixed that problem by helping homeowners get outta debt and all this. And we were devastated because that was just totally ignored. And instead, the next day there was a picture, it was a story about a baby whose Whose hair was too tall for their passport photo. And we were like, what have we done wrong? Tell us now, 20 years later, what did we do wrong with that?
Ellie GlasonSo by the sounds of it, it was an information kind of brain dump. And journalists, they have hundreds, Manchester Evening News, probably thousands of emails a day. And so what they're looking for is a summary really quickly of the story, of the narrative. If you go, and lots of people do this, if they've got exciting things to talk about, is they put everything possible into that press release. And the journalist will have kind of seconds to look at it and decide whether to go forward or not, because they're time-pressed. And they will literally go, it's not easy for them. And they will look at this picture of the baby with the tall hair, and they'll think, this is really straightforward and simple. I know what this is. And they'll publish that. So, it's really important. One of the key things about press releases is deciding what your story is in your simple kind of black and white way, because the media are quite simple. They want straightforward stories. And then you have notes to the editor at the end. You have lots of places within that release that you can put information in, but the beginning of it has to be really strong and story-led.
Al ElliottSo, What I'm hearing there is that it should have been a story, and I didn't write a story. Is that what I've understood about it?
Ellie Glason100%. Yeah. Well, all comms, again, whatever that comms is, if it's a kind of notice to your team about things they should and shouldn't be doing, or whether it's a press release to the media, it needs to have a narrative. Story is so important for humans.
Al ElliottI'm sure I've heard you talk something about Christopher Booker or something, or 7. Is that something you've talked about before?
Ellie GlasonChristopher Booker wrote a book called 7 Basic Plots. He analyzed novels and legends and films, and he identified there were 7 storylines. So in all of literature, there's only 7 storylines. And he thought about and wrote about the psychological meaning of each of these storylines. This is quite— it's something I've known about for years. I trained as a journalist, and then I worked for 10 years in publishing before I kind of accidentally fell into PR. And so this was something that was on my radar when I was reading novels that would come in. We called them the slush pile. So people would send their manuscripts in, and you could tell really quickly if something was really well written but didn't have a kind of strong narrative. And if it did have a strong narrative, it would have been one of these 7 plotlines. So, story number 1 is overcoming the monster. So, if you were to do a press release about your business, if you have got over trials and tribulations, if things have been thrown in your way and you've overcome them, especially if there may be bigger forces, maybe kind of legislation, this is a good thing to put to the fore. Rags to riches is another really powerful storyline. You can think about Cinderella perhaps, but you can also think about Dragon Den's founders, the way that For example, Gymshark was built in a garage and became this huge empire. So, the media love that, business journalists love that. So, rags to riches is really important for founder storytelling. The quest is the third storyline. It's a mission with obstacles on the way. Think about Lord of the Rings, but also think about a climate startup, a climate action startup who wants to work to decarbonize business. So, that story is really appealing for the media. That kind of brand purpose story works incredibly well. You've got voyage and return. So, you go off, think about the Odyssey, you go and you explore the world and you come back and you've learned new things. So, founder burnout stories kind of adhere to this principle to some extent, or people, the pandemic was a great kind of, not great, but was a vehicle for this too, where people changed their lives, started working from home, started working in different ways, and then came back and reformed what they were doing.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Ellie GlasonThe key with all of these stories is you don't just talk about the outcome, you talk about the process. So how you got there. And again, the media find that interesting, readers find that interesting. We've also got comedy, which is, we can all see why comedy works so well from The Taming of the Shrew through to Ryanair on TikTok, if I can make that comparison. But it gets people to relate to you, people laughing. You don't want them laughing at you, you want them laughing with you, but it's such a strong mechanism for emotion. And on the flip side of that is you have tragedy, which is the downfall story. Now, the media, obviously as founders, we don't really want to talk about that. However, the media are always on the lookout for this. So, this is where kind of reputation management is really important. They will jump on stories where they think people are failing. So, the flip side of the purpose-driven, like I'm on a quest and I'm doing things well, Yeah. Talking about your kind of wider mission makes you more susceptible for the tragedy downfall narrative because the audience and consumers and the media are really on the lookout for inauthenticity. So that gap between kind of what you're saying and reality. So that's kind of almost like the flip side. And then you have rebirth, which I think is probably one of the most powerful storylines. This is a person or organization that basically almost lost everything, changed what they were doing, and they were redeemed. So, if this is part of your business story, your founder story, your personal story, talk about it. So, examples of this, sort of from a brand perspective, Lego almost went bust in the early noughties, and then completely reframed itself, leaning into creativity and community, and is now one of the world's most loved brands.
Al ElliottYeah.
Ellie GlasonWe've also got Pamela Anderson, who was seen as very tabloidy. And then through sort of, I suppose, careful, intentional media appearances, being in thoughtful documentaries, has recast herself or been recast as this cultural persona, person with gravitas. So this is a powerful story too.
Al ElliottSo you talked about tragedy there. Now I can see At the current time of recording, BrewDog, they were huge, they were riding high. And now it seems that a lot of stories about them being like, oh, look how bad they were run. And that's what the tragedy, that's the tragedy angle, is it?
Ellie GlasonAbsolutely. And it's that kind of kick 'em while they're down mentality that we, that the media, and because when I say the media, I kind of mean people because the media are producing what people want to read and consume. You could argue against that to some extent, but yeah, people love that story of a failure. And think about those celebrity kind of cancellation arcs as well. Think about the royal family and Harry and Meghan. You know, there's a kind of glee to some extent where people are seen to have fallen from favor and politicians too. And we kind of metaphorically kick them while they're down.
Al ElliottThis makes perfect sense because everything you're saying here, I'm just looking at my notes here and we've got overcoming the monster. Yeah, reform. I think personally I'm not aligned in any way with Trump or reform or The whole, like, um, the whole Brexit thing. But the campaign technically was incredible. And they did the Overcome the Monster. I love all this. This is all making sense. Now what I'm thinking is, actually, if I was to do my PR story again, the story of me starting this company was I was helping people who were getting repossessed because I had gone bankrupt and had 2 houses repossessed.
Ellie GlasonOkay.
Al ElliottNow that's, and I was like, I almost like, I created a mission. We were called the Homeowners Advice Center. We were there to help homeowners who were drowning in debt. And so that, that I can immediately see, right, based on your framework, I can immediately see we've got here, we've got voyage and return, we've got a quest. Mm-hmm. Uh, we've got rebirth.
Ellie GlasonMm-hmm.
Al ElliottI, I, I was bankrupt, I got my house repossessed. Now I'm stopping other people from doing it.
Ellie GlasonYeah.
Al ElliottIt, I almost like, I feel like with your framework, I could write now something that would probably get placed with your help, probably get placed much more than me just put— putting out down a figure of saying 100,000 homeowners are gonna get repossessed this year. Yeah.
Ellie GlasonAbsolutely. Also, what's important is data is incredibly important. So data-driven storytelling. Before I set up my consultancy for founders, I worked for 6 years as the MD of a research division for a PR agency. So we were running research and helping to tell stories that would hit the media for a huge variety of clients from eBay through to the Met Office. And What was important was having this data because the media like the data because that shows them a bigger picture. But then you need the human stories, the human-shaped storytelling. And this is why case studies work so well. So if you are talking about, if you're working with an organization who has this data, you want case studies of the people who have been affected to bring it to life for readers. So with your story, it could have been I probably would've gone in with your personal story and what that felt like. And then the fact that you were then on a mission to help other people, and then that's when your data would come in. So it's a combination. We often say that the stats, the quantitative research is the skeleton of a story. And then the qualitative research is the flesh, which is essentially people's experiences and case studies and interviews.
Al ElliottI love this and things are starting to fall into place here. Again, using the same example, we bought a few advertorial spaces in the Manchester Evening News and I just basically made it look like a news story. I didn't put any adverts in there, just bought the space and wrote the story myself. That worked really well because we were telling people a story of this is the government was the baddies because they were like not doing things. We're like saviors coming along. That sounded to me like I was more selling our point of view than I was sort of selling our product. Is that a distinct something I need to be thinking about?
Ellie GlasonYeah. And it's often quite counterintuitive for people who've started a business and are focused on selling their product, whatever that is, whether that's sustainable shampoo or creative services. And so what they want to do is talk about what they deliver, But actually, going back to those 7 storylines, what people are interested in is kind of how you got there. It's the tension, it's the emotion, it's the, yeah, to some extent, the positioning. So I think once you broke through and you were able, you bought the advertising space, you were able to then have that space and tell the story in the way you wanted. It worked well.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Ellie GlasonAnd that's why they said that in terms of storytelling, there are different platforms. You have your media circle. So you have your paid media, which is your advertising spend. You have your owned media, which is your own channels where you can say what you like. And then you have earned media, which is PR, which is media platforms, reviews, et cetera. And so it's a different, you can have your story and have it there, which would be brilliant on social channels or in an advert. But the skill is to get someone else to be interested in your story. So to do that, it's a kind of sideways thing. I'm going off slightly on a tangent, but you have to frame your story in a way that they can understand really quickly. You don't have that space to unpack it in the way that you do once you've got that space. The product almost becomes a— for editorial opportunities, the product almost becomes a kind of, and finally, we've got this product. So what you want to show is the the point of view and the problem that your product will solve. I think that's probably the key thing. So it's less, going back to my sustainable shampoo, it's less, I've made some sustainable shampoo. It's going to make your hair beautiful and it's not going to cost the earth. Well, actually, that sounds quite snappy. It would be more effective to say, I've spent years with my dry curly hair trying to make it look amazing, and I've used bottles and bottles of plastic shampoo, God knows what chemicals I'm flushing down the toilet. And I got to the point, I'm a mother, I know the way that the world is going and I have this terrible dry hair. And actually I thought, is there something that can help my hair and not cost the earth? And this is why I came up with my sustainable shampoo. By positioning it like that, I have a point of view people have bought into me and I'm not just having to compete with the 1,000 other sustainable shampoos. on kind of price or what my bottle looks like.
Al ElliottSo this idea of you are selling a point of view, is there kind of, is there maybe a bigger brand or something we might have heard of where they did exactly this?
Ellie GlasonDove is probably the most famous modern example that everyone talks about as a brand that went beyond the products to basically create a point of view and actually make changes with that point of view, you know, for the good. So they beauty products they were producing. They then took the decision to take a much wider view and look at the beauty industry and beauty as a concept. And they critiqued the industry. They talked about real beauty for real women. So they critiqued the way that polished images of people, unattainable beauty, were used to sell products. And they decided they wouldn't do that. They also Worked to kind of evaluate what beauty meant, beauty on the inside as well as the outside. And by doing that, they became not just a seller of a product, but they became a really important, almost like a campaigner or an organization that people could see as credible and caring about them. The flip side of that though is that again, once you cast yourself in this role of having this wider view. So, there is a kind of, there is a flip side that you need to then, you have standards that you have to adhere to. And this isn't relevant to dub necessarily, but again, with the media wanting tragedy all the time, they'll be looking out for any slips. When you're talking about your point of view, you must make it run through your organization because there is a danger that you paint yourself into as this almost perfect company. And then if there's a supply chain issue, you then, the tragedy kicks in and everyone wants to throw mud at you.
Al ElliottAnd so using the 7 foundations before, this would be quest, wouldn't it? Because they're asking, they're on a quest for making it.
Ellie GlasonYeah, they are. And they're asking, so they're on a quest to make, to basically make beauty more authentic or make the beauty industry behave in a more authentic way and make people, consumers, feel less crap about how they look and how they come across. But they're also asking people to go on that quest with them. And that's really important. The brands that say, join us, that have a call to action, that's where you really get the double whammy of engaging people and making them feel involved. By using real women in their adverts, people could connect and feel that they were on that journey as well.
Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number 1 management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number 1 marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?
Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
Al ElliottAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking. And you're not gonna say which. Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in threes—
Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Al ElliottSeamless, seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. Uh, we've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.
Leanne ElliottIt is. It's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Al ElliottIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
Al ElliottI am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
Al ElliottYeah, come back. Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this.
Leanne ElliottSo come back.
Al ElliottI'll cut that out. Keep that in. I love this. I love this. It all comes back to those 7 basic plots, which is, which is great. So let's just talk a little bit, if we can, about how someone who is not looking for PR, but actually looking for buy-in, perhaps internally. So perhaps they're in HR, perhaps they're a manager or something. These 7 basic plots you've talked about there, it sounds like they could formulate the story based on those as well, even if it's not being placed in the media. Is that right?
Ellie GlasonAbsolutely. So, these are stories that people connect with. So, if you have a team, storytelling is really important, whether you're communicating internally or externally. And this is as true to your kind of family and friends as it is to your colleagues. But if you were an HR leader who wanted to convey something really important to your team, rather than doing the kind of data dump that we've talked about, where people kind of switch off, tune out, rather than maybe talking about what people should and shouldn't be doing, paint a picture. So, the return to office mandate, rather than, we need you to be here, it's important that you're at your desks, which feels like you're being told and then you feel like a child. There probably is, probably Christopher Booker would have something to say about the ways of telling stories and making you feel like you're part of the story. I think if you were to use the quest, if you were to use the quest story to talk about the fact that as a business, you had obstacles that you needed to overcome, Yeah. And you laid that out and you talked about one of the obstacles is that sometimes the team seems quite fragmented and sometimes people can feel quite lonely and cut off. And so it was really important that people joined you on this quest to bring people together. But what did they think that should happen? Bring them into that quest. Did they have ideas? And they can join you on that quest by coming together every Wednesday.
Al ElliottYeah.
Ellie GlasonAnd being in the office together. And then you could keep that story going by talking about, regularly talking about all the great things that were happening while people were coming together. So keep that quest ongoing. You could also maybe talk about some of the challenges, keep talking about the challenges to make sure people kept on coming in, if you wanted to manipulate. But that would be better than just demanding that everyone come back in.
Al ElliottI honestly could talk about that, those 7 ideas. Just, we need to get, we need to move on to something a bit more practical. So how would I tell if my idea actually is interesting to other people?
Ellie GlasonDoes it have emotion? Does it have tension? Does it have nostalgia? Does it have relief? Does it have transformation? Basically, is it interesting? And I know that's maybe not the best answer. Is your story interesting? You know, how do you make your story good? It's gotta be interesting, but it really does. So you need to step outside of that story. There's also the pub test. So I worked, in my years of working in data-driven PR, one of the things we'd do as an agency was we would run polls, surveys for brands, essentially for coverage. So if you read, you know, kind of, you know, it's official, 8 out of 10 cat owners, it's official, new research proves that cat owners are more funny and interesting than dog owners. According to Purina cat food. I'm making this up, obviously. That type of content, it's fun, it's lighthearted, it's not kind of serious, but it's a good way for brands to get into, and organizations and founders to get into news pages. But we would be often given briefs that were really dry. So you'd have a company that made solar panels and they wanted to do some research to show that Brits were desperate for solar panels. And it's like, Would people talk about this down the pub? This is what we would always say when we were brainstorming. Is this something that literally you could imagine someone texting someone else about and saying, oh, did you see this? This is interesting. That's as true for kind of research-based stories as it is for your founder story, your business, your new business deal, your new product that you've launched, the fact that you've hired someone into your senior team. There are ways of making that interesting. And often that is by making it again, not really about the product or the actual thing that's happening, but what that means for the industry. So, an example of this could be you've got a story where you've bolstered your senior team, and you are a company that makes experiential events. And you could talk about, that could be a straight announcement, but you could look at data to show that this marketing spend for experiential events is, this is quite a specific example, but is absolutely booming as people are kind of so sick and tired of digital that people actually want to go out and feel and do stuff in real life. So then your story becomes, and the fact is you're bolstering your senior team to meet this demand, to be more organized, to be able to structure and restructure and meet this demand. Suddenly it's a much more interesting story and you get case studies in.
Al ElliottLet's say I'm Mark Zuckerberg. I've got a town hall tomorrow and I've got a serious I need, I want to talk about. Old Mark, and probably new Mark, but old Mark would just get a PowerPoint and put some charts on it and start talking. What you're saying there is I need to think about what's the story behind either this change or this data. Is that what you're saying?
Ellie GlasonSo thinking about purpose again, and which is so important, and sustainability. If you were an organization and you had switched to a new supplier of something that meant that your whole team was going to have to retrain, oh, you've changed IT systems. Okay. Digital transformation. Your organization, you've committed to a new digital system. You've got completely new databases, accountancy system, everything's going to be different. And you're getting everybody together to tell them about this and talk about this transformation. And basically everyone's going to have to train and it's going to take everyone double the time to do everything for about a month. And it's going to be really annoying. So Is it a quest? No, we're banishing the monster. We fought the monster. So, the monster is this old system that basically meant we could only do kind of half of what we could potentially do. We all knew it. We were familiar with it, but it would hold us back in a particular way in this theoretical example. So, we talk about that. And then we talk about what those monsters are. It's holding us back from taking on new clients. It's holding us back from moving into new sectors. It's holding us back compared to our competition. It means that we can't start to incorporate AI into what we're doing because it's so antiquated. So literally, we've got the threat of the company folding. We've got the threat of people having to be made redundant, but we've also got the opportunities, the quest of new exciting places we could go with the company. If you talk about that first, that's going to feel a lot more You know, people are going to engage with that. They're going to feel connected. They're going to feel that they're talked to as adults as well. And we make them part of that quest with your might, with your swords and your, you know, mice, your computer mice, you can get on board and you can help us, you know, by doing this training. We can go to new places and we can get AI to help us and everything's going to be quicker in 6 months' time.
Al ElliottSo, we had a recent guest who talked about during the pandemic, their company was in trouble and they didn't know what to do. One of the ideas was to reduce people's salaries, but of course they knew that wouldn't go down very well. So they actually put it to the organization and said, what are some of the ideas you can come up with? And funnily enough, the ones which got voted, the one which got the most votes was reducing everyone's salary. But they did that the right way, didn't they? Because they must have used one of your 7 hooks.
Ellie GlasonThey did. They did it exactly the right way because they, well, they They revealed the monster of the fact that they were in trouble. And they talked about the quest that, and they brought people into that quest. How can we go and how can we overcome these obstacles? They talked, I mean, and separately and psychologically, they talked to them as grownups. They made them feel part of something and people could see what was at stake. You know, how different is that from being told because of financial circumstances, you're all gonna have to have 20% less, be paid less, and people would be up in arms and suddenly the boss would be the monster, but they kind of united. So even that bringing people together, but then they created like an incredible rebirth story. So they were in hard times, people voted, They reduced their pay, and then the company blossomed and bloomed, you know, and then, and, you know, to great success. So from a PR perspective, from an internal comms perspective, amazing work. From a PR perspective, what a great story to sell to the media of rebirth.
Al ElliottThere are some people in the world who journalists just want to go to and talk to, want to go and get comment from every single time. Why is it that those people are so attractive to the media, to the journalists?
Ellie GlasonThese, I guess we would call thought leaders. So a lot of people come to me, founders come to me more and more these days because founder visibility is really, really important. And we can talk about that in the kind of world of AI search and how that's changed. And something that we talk about is thought leadership. I mean, that's been around You know, for as long as, you know, forever. But thought leadership is important. People want to be thought leaders. They want to be seen as go-to experts. And there are different ways to do this. You can go out and you can get an enormous LinkedIn following. You could be doing kind of incredible things with your voice and your actions and partnerships and events and building incredible businesses with huge numbers behind them and have a wonderful one of these 7 storylines and the media will want to come to you to talk to you. That's not everyone is in that position, especially when you're trying to run a business and you're focused entirely on your business and your clients. Who has time to do those things to build themselves up? If you come to a PR person who can help you with thought leadership, It's, I call it, well, we call it a credibility ladder. So you don't go straight to thought leader just because you're working with a PR, you become an emerging voice. And that means we're working to make you seen as a trusted media source. So it's almost like a, it's not a cheat, but it's a bit of a hack that means you don't have to spend hours and hours on LinkedIn and speak at loads of panels. So one of the ways that if I was to do this with a founder, is they start to work with me. We work on their positioning, which is really important. We then work on the topics, thought leadership lanes that they can speak on and speak about. And then I will introduce these people to my media contacts. So I will say, I'm working with this person. They're great, and they can talk about this, this, and this if it comes up. I will also monitor the news agenda. So if there is a story, something happening with that experiential idea, if there was something that happened in that field, that sector, that a comment was needed quickly, then I'm there, or the PR is there, making sure that that person would get comment quickly and sending out to journalists. The other thing, the key thing, so that journalists, if you're doing this yourself, you can introduce yourself to the media. You can pitch your comment out as when the news agenda happens. So, it's not you talking about yourself, it's you talking as an expert on things that are happening. So, it's having that That confidence to not have to sell yourself, but just be an expert. But the key thing, the biggest thing you can do so that the media rely on you is to help them and be useful. So there are so many in PR, you have journalists, well, actually not in PR, in the media, journalists have groups, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, where they absolutely rip apart PRs and founders and people who are who are trying to sell their stories to them for doing things like saying, oh, would you like to interview me? This has happened. And then the journalist says, yes, I'd like to interview you, and then ghosting them. That literally happens. Or there'll be an interview that's set up and they'll cancel at the last minute. Or they'll ask— this is all the mistakes you can make. If you have an interview set up with a journalist and you demand to see questions in advance, And won't do the interview until they have, that will get you blacklisted. If you're with a journalist, you get interviewed, you give comment, it goes live, it's published, and then you go back and you say, look, you've used, can you put my, my, the link to my website in please? They're probably not going to, probably not going to talk to you again. Or they've got a link to your website, but you go back and you say, could you use this link to my website? Because this means I can track it.
Leanne ElliottNo.
Ellie GlasonThey will literally blacklist you, and journalists literally will. So it's become a cautionary tale, this, but you basically need to treat journalists as if they're important because they are, because they are the ones who are getting your story out there, and you have to respect them and their deadlines. Saying that, journalists can also ghost, are famous for ghosting people and not getting back. So it's a It's a kind of two-way street, but this is how you become a thought leader. Once you are a huge thought leader, you can counsel on journalists constantly, and they'll be begging for you. But it's a, as I say, credibility ladder, and it's building yourself as someone who can be relied on and isn't trying to sell themselves as well. I remember working with an MD of a huge tea company, And working with them to get them onto BBC Breakfast for a piece about the UK tea consumption, because I think there'd been new stats that were out about tea dropping slightly. People were drinking more coffee. So, to get him out there was a huge opportunity. I mean, he was working for a company that was owned by a bigger subsidiary, but he was the MD. So, what was really important to get him onto that slot was that he didn't talk about his tea company. Counterintuitively, he was there to talk about the British tea industry and consumption habits. If he'd gone there and he talked about our company's doing this or our company's doing that, they probably wouldn't have invited him back.
Al ElliottI wanna talk about AI in a second 'cause we can't not talk about AI. So we'll talk about that in a second. But I have a feeling that a lot of people who see thought leaders or people who are in the press or appearance on media and stuff, They think of them as being very outgoing and very like, you know, sort of the opposite of an introvert. Is that true? Or can people who are more introverted still be the face of something?
Ellie GlasonThis is actually a really interesting question. I have worked with clients sometimes that have said, my clients all tend to be founder-run businesses now. And often you'll have the founder who is a spokesperson who is much more comfortable doing podcasts and panel talks and live interviews. And you have a spokesperson who says, I'm happy to be interviewed in print or online. I suppose it's coming back to the whole journalist idea. You could have the most vocal— sorry, this is me riffing— have the most vocal kind of columnists. Think about Julie Burchill back in the day, who would just write these incredibly strong and opinionated and kind of controversial columns. But then if you saw her talking, she had a tiny little voice and she was really shy. So, I don't think— I think candours can be loud, And confident in writing. So one of the things I've mentioned earlier is that people can be so focused on their business that it's very difficult for them to think about how they can market themselves as a thought leader, which is why they often work with people like me to help them. It's a bit like, and they can often say, a lot of my clients work in the comms industry. So I work with kind of communication and creative agency founders. And they can be people who are creating the biggest, boldest campaigns for their clients that are incredibly punchy and engaging. But they literally, when it comes to shining the light on themselves, they can really, they can sort of panic. I think we all have that to some extent. It's very easy to shine a light on someone else. It's harder to shine a light on yourself. And some people can do it, but a lot of brilliant business people can't. And that's where they work with someone else who can help them and coach them. So for example, I find that a lot of people I work with will want questions before interviews. They'll want that. And I can absolutely understand that because although journalists would hate it and say, well, no, I wouldn't do that. Similarly, being able to read an interview before it's published. It doesn't work for journalists, but I can absolutely understand why you'd want that. You're worried about, even if you know something through and through, like, will a question throw me? Will I not be able to answer something? Will they talk about something in the press release that perhaps my head wasn't all over? But also, it's wanting to know how to deal with questions that they don't want to answer. So, if you're doing that alone, if you're going, I mean, there's lots of There's lots of really good advice online, as you can imagine. But if you work with someone like me, we practice, we go through interviews, we have questions that we ask, we think about tactics, how you don't answer a question. I personally, the idea of doing a panel talk to 1,000 people would, I would rather, I don't know, have my little finger cut off. That sounds awful. Some people naturally want to do that. If they don't, you don't force them to do that. But in the modern world, there's lots of ways of getting your voice and your point of view across. Podcasts are one of the key things that I, and we'll talk about AI and PR soon, but podcasts are fantastic for founders. They are one of my main media platforms. They are incredibly important because you have a highly engaged audience. People don't tend to accidentally listen to a podcast. It's not like listening to the radio where you tune in and out. People tend to listen to the end. And in terms of AI search, They're great for proving that you are a trustworthy, incredible person. And also podcasts are a very good way of practicing talking to camera and getting your ideas out there.
Al ElliottThis is interesting because I wanted to come on to AI and I was thinking more of a, can AI help me create this story? But what you've just said there was searchability. Is that what you're saying? Tell me more.
Ellie GlasonSo PR has always been something that's people know is important. Was it Steve Jobs who said if he had a dollar left, he would spend it on PR? Which I always, I quite like that. But it's always been about kind of coverage. It's been about reputation and kind of coverage. More and more over the last couple of years, people have been coming to me to talk about visibility and visibility in terms of AI search. There's coverage, but there's also about creating the kind of infrastructure so that the internet can understand what you do, which is where I, for when, because AI search is kind of ubiquitous. And the way, the reason that AI, the reason that PR is important in a kind of AI age is that when AI is trawling kind of in microseconds information about you, they are not just looking at what you say on your website.
Al ElliottYeah.
Ellie GlasonSo kind of like the days of SEO being all important are gone. It is looking, it is putting higher emphasis on third-party trusted sites. So that is media titles, that is podcasts, that are reviews. You know, it's looking for other people to say that you're great. So that was the point. PR has always been earned media. It's called earned because it's really hard to earn, but also it's better for you as a business owner. For someone, if you have an advert or if you have a social post and you say, my sustainable shampoo is amazing. Okay, that's interesting, but you are saying it. If you have a journalist who said, I tried 10 sustainable bottles of sustainable shampoo and this was the best, that is more powerful. If you then have a journalist say, I talked to this amazing founder of this sustainable shampoo company with her really dry hair and her Worries about the environment, that's even better. So, when AI is doing its search, it will see what you've said, but it will see that these other trusted sites have said things, and you will come up in that search term for best sustainable shampoos. So, we are seeing more people are coming to me for AI search purposes, and that's great for me. It's great for PRs. In the past, there'd be a real focus on kind of what people call tier 1 media. So, your kind of Economist, your Financial Times, your broadsheets, your—
Al ElliottYeah.
Ellie GlasonForbes, your Fast Company, which are incredible titles, they're also quite difficult to get into because there's a lot of competition and you've got to have a really compelling story to tell. So, with AI search, niche is nice. If you are in trade outlets, if you are on kind of much more obscure, I don't mean to be obscure, but Startups Magazine, for example, if you have an opinion piece, a full opinion piece in there about your company and something that, well, not about your company, but a view that you're a startup and it affects other startups. You have your key messaging in there because you've worked on positioning. That piece is really valuable. Now, obviously, if you have a one-liner in the Times, that's also really valuable, but you want to create this kind of trusted ecosystem, this ecosystem of mentions. So people come to me now and they actually want trade. Trade was always seen as really easy, but they're like, no, that's really important because we're in the places that our customers will be reading and AI search loves that. So it's an exciting new age for PR, but I wouldn't ask AI to write my press release.
Al ElliottI feel like we need a part 2 on how to actually write a press release because I know that you've got so many different frameworks for it, triangles, all kinds of stuff we haven't got time for. Ellie, I just absolutely love this. It's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much. If people want to find out a bit more, perhaps they're a founder who wants a new PR agency, where would they go?
Ellie GlasonIf you're an agency founder and you'd like to get in touch, find out more about working with me and what that could look like, you can find me at ellieglasonpr.com, my website. Saying that, I love founders in general. I like people who started businesses, people who started interesting businesses. I just like to talk to people. I like to connect and make connections. So if you just want to chat and say hello, find me on LinkedIn.
Leanne ElliottThat was Ellie Glason, and she's just given you the keys to getting people to listen to you at work. Let's get practical and look at 3 things to take from this conversation. Number 1, data is the skeleton, story is the flesh. Don't lead with the stats, lead with the human shape of what happened, then let the data back it up.
Al ElliottAnd lesson 2, before you send anything, run the pub test. Would someone actually repeat this to a friend? If your announcement or your update or your big pitch fails that test, it's not ready to go out yet.
Leanne ElliottAnd number 3, pick your story on purpose. Overcoming the monster, rebirth, the quest, whatever you're announcing, one of these 7 shapes already fits it. Use it deliberately instead of defaulting to a bullet point list and hoping people care.
Al ElliottAnd for God's sake, don't use PowerPoint. If you want to work with Ellie, find her at ellieglason.com. Or on LinkedIn, search for Ellie Glason. Glason is spelled G-L-A-S-O-N.
Leanne ElliottThis is Truth, Lies and Work. We will see you next week.