LLMs vs GOOGLE: The Impact on the Future of Public Relations Searches!

Unlock the transformative power of Large Language Models (LLMs) and witness their impact on public relations like never before. Peter Woolfolk talks  with Frank Strong, the insightful founder of The Sword and The Script, to explore how these cutting-edge technologies are reshaping the PR landscape and altering our approach to information retrieval. We'll guide you through the evolution from traditional news outlets to Google searches, and now to the conversational prowess of LLMs. With practical examples, we reveal the benefits and the hurdles, providing an engaging and comprehensive look at the future of PR.

Discover the pivotal role LLMs are playing in reputation management, crisis communication, and consumer research—especially in sectors like automotive sales. Frank shares expert insights on the applications of AI in media monitoring, content brainstorming, and social media strategies. Yet, amidst this digital revolution, we underscore the irreplaceable touch of human creativity and judgment. Tune in to grasp the exciting potential of generative AI and how it's poised to redefine public relations, while always valuing the unique contributions only we humans can make.

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Transcript

Announcer 0:35

Welcome. This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others. Now here is your host, peter Woolfolk.

Peter Woolfolk 0:56

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to our listeners all across America and around the world. Apple has ranked this podcast among the top 1% of podcasts worldwide, so thank you to all of our guests and listeners for being the basis for this ranking. Now, if you enjoy the podcast, we certainly would like to have a review from you, and we'd like to ask you to share this with your friends. Now question is Google still the leading search platform for public relations practitioners?

Peter Woolfolk 1:25

Can anyone overtake Google. Well, the new platform on the block is called LLMs Large Language Models and my guest today will expand on LLMs and why they are more impactful. So joining me today from Atlanta, Georgia, is Frank Strong. Frank is the founder and president of the sword and the script, a veteran-owned business focused on public relations, content marketing and social marketing for the b2b marketplace. He has implemented programs and led teams for public relations, content marketing and social media on the in-house side of the table with corporations ranging from startups to the mid-market to global organizations. He has also endured the rigors of billable hours, having grown up on the agency side, with gigs at PR firms small, large, including the top global firm, hill Knowlton, now HK Strategies. So, Frank, welcome again to the podcast. Now give us an overview of LLMs and the major impact it is having on public relations and searching.

Frank Strong 2:31

Hi Peter, thanks for having me back. It's good to see you again. Yeah, llm stands for Large Language Model. It is the model that drives kind of generative AI interface. So if you go to a platform like ChatGPT, perplexity, google's Gemini Claude, any of those platforms, they're all being driven by an LLM. And, without getting into all the ins and outs, an easy way to think about an LLM is it's kind of like a very sophisticated word suggest. So if you go to a traditional Google search engine and you start typing in a search term, it's trying to guess what you're going to ask. You know you say red cars. You could say red cars in Kansas, red cars in Brazil. You know fast red cars. So it's going to give you all of these suggestions and so LLMs kind of work the same way.

Peter Woolfolk 3:22

Well, now that we've heard that sort of basic explanation of it, what is it actually doing? I mean, as people are using it, what are they getting? What are they seeing that is causing this rush over to LLMs?

Frank Strong 3:37

Yeah, I think it would be good. I'll just take a quick step back and explain kind of the old newspaper model and how that was displaced by Google and how that's being displaced by LLMs today, and the reason for that is, you know, it's conceivable. There are people today that didn't grow up seeing stacks of newspapers by a vendor and so a traditional newspaper you wanted to be what was called above the fold. If you hold a newspaper straight up and you fold it in half, they would stack the newspapers together. It would look like a bale of hay and that's how they shipped them around. That's how it was displayed on the newsstands, and so the above the fold front page of a newspaper was the most visible place that you could possibly be For years and years. That's how people got most of their information until Google came along.

Frank Strong 4:21

Then it got a whole lot easier. Instead of sorting through a newspaper when you're looking for information or newspapers it could be many or going to the library and sorting through microfilm of old newspapers, you could just go to Google, ask a question and it would give a list of sources, right, and you could choose which source you want to look at. You could review which ones answered your question best. Those queries that answered your question best tended to rank higher over time in the search engine. That's all being changed by llms and the reason for that is llms are able to present information as just an answer. It it's almost like you're talking to a person and they're typing up a response to your question.

Frank Strong 5:02

You ask it a question and it gives you like a primer. That comes with some benefits and drawbacks too. It should be noted, like when you think. For example, when you went and did a traditional Google search, it gave you however many results it could be 20, 30, 100. And you got to choose what information you thought best answered your question. Llms present it as a briefing and it presents it from a position of authority.

Frank Strong 5:26

Like here is the answer to your question and that can have some drawbacks, mainly because A it's providing an answer and that may or may not be the correct one or the one that works best for you. And two, we know for a fact that generative AI programs do hallucinate. That means they just simply make up the answer and they're doing that because they're trying to. It's basically like an average of words, so you have to be careful what you believe.

Peter Woolfolk 5:55

You know I have. Once I read your article, I looked into some of the other LLMs and I jumped onto a perplexity and I asked a very basically a question such as you know, how many listeners does the Public Relations Review podcast have? And while it was very, very quick with that coming back, I was shocked at how much information came back, and it came back in a format as though we were having had had a conversation about this. So I was, you know, pleased about it. It did not give me a specific number, as you said before it. Let you know, we went here and here's what we're here, here's what we got there and these other sort of places. So I was not only was I pleased, I was was just surprised at the format that it came back in, and I think this might be helpful to a lot of people who might consider using these.

Frank Strong 6:42

Yeah, I completely agree. It's incredibly amazing and I think your example brings up a good question, because you've had this podcast for a long time.

Frank Strong 6:52

So it's been indexed and these large language models have been able to be trained on all kinds of content and obviously, including your podcast. That's how it's able to return the answer, and so the question that it conjures is if LLMs are going to be the new front page, and there's some evidence suggesting that this is happening. Google's search traffic has dropped for the first time since 2015. And it was a small amount, but there is data that suggests referral traffic from LLMs Perplexity, chatgpt, claude Gemini, google Gemini that's grown, so we know that this is in transition. So the question that PR professionals should be asking themselves is how do we get into an LLM? You've gotten your podcast into an LLM and that is one approach, right. You have to have content, and I think a lot of the answers to the question of how do I pitch an LLM comes back to the fundamentals that PR people already know. It's having a strong point of view, it's being able to articulate a story so that it gets picked up, it gets a visibility and indexed. It's answering specific questions right.

Frank Strong 7:59

When people go to a traditional search engine and they type in a search query, that is, by definition, an expression of need I'm looking for information. So answering specific questions is a great way to get crawled and indexed by an LLM to provide that response great way to get crawled and indexed by an LLM to provide that response. And then, last but not least, the traditional aspects matter. So traditional media is going to be deemed highly credible by LLMs and so it's going to use that to train the data and return answers.

Frank Strong 8:29

All of the traditional things that PR people did. Press releases, for example. There seems to be some evidence suggesting that press releases are being used, and that makes a lot of sense to me, because when you think about press releases relative to the writing on the rest of the web and we can make fun of you know press releases are promotional and people do funky things with them, but the writing is probably a higher quality relative to the rest of the web, and so it's a really good data set on which to train these models, and I think that's why it's happening.

Frank Strong 9:00

If there's a caveat, it would be that at some point this happened with Google. Press releases were a good way to get into search engines. Google started deprecating the link value because they don't want you to be able to buy a press release to get into their search engine. That's kind of gets spammy. I suspect something like that will happen with LLMs at some point.

Peter Woolfolk 9:19

Where else do you see LLMs fitting in? Because you know some of the things we've talked about here and I think I may have mentioned earlier that some organizations where consumers could call into the company and ask questions about the company or company products or those kinds of things Would this be an appropriate use for LLMs?

Frank Strong 9:39

Absolutely, and I think there's two ways to look at that. One would be to ask a question. Just like you asked the question of perplexity about your podcast, you can go to any public generative AI tool and ask a question about a company and it's going to return results. And that's the kind of media relations aspects that PR people need to be worried about is how are we being presented in these LLMs? That's one use case. The other use case along those lines is companies can purchase technologies, these generative AI tools, and train them on their internal documentation. If you have a product, for example, a technical manual, that can consume the whole technical manual, probably do it better than a human, and then it's trained on the answers that customers may have about your product. So come to a chat bot on your website and they ask a specific question and that AI has been trained on your product documentation. It can return a very good answer, which is a far it sounds like a far better approach than saying here's a bunch of help desk articles.

Frank Strong 10:41

Go ahead and search through these and see if you can find your answer and then, if you can't, submit a support ticket and we'll get back to you whenever we can and we'll schedule a call and go through your issue, right. So it's just improving the experience, I think, from a customer service perspective, and that's great use case, that's that's being entered now well you know, I certainly see that as a viable function.

Peter Woolfolk 11:00

I'm sure there might be some companies using that already. As a matter of fact, I haven't see where they've got. Some companies have a on videos that can respond to consumer questions, and so I'm sure that I Other organizations are going to use this as a PR tool because, yes, we can answer your question right away. You don't have to wait for a real person to show up. You know, as soon as you call us, we can get back to you, or we can answer you right away even with someone talking to you, and in some cases, I wouldn't be surprised if they can take a real human face and animate it so that it looks like it's actually talking. In some cases, I think that is being done.

Frank Strong 11:38

Oh yeah, that's definitely happening. Some of the visuals are really compelling. I mean, they're able to make you know fully-fledged movies based on some generative AI prompts. It's actually crazy. One of the ways that you can notice, though, is that, for whatever reason, the same way that generative AI tends to hallucinate with text-based answers, it makes some wonky errors with visuals. Like, if you ask it to create a picture and you look at the hands it tends to have like seven fingers on it. It'll have like weird things like that. So these are like telltale signs and videos and images that you're able to spot some of this.

Peter Woolfolk 12:12

Well, what are some of the things, some of the other things that you see in the future for public relations with these LLMs?

Applications and Impact of Generative AI

Frank Strong 12:19

Well, I think we're in the middle of a sea change right now, like now is the moment right If you were around when the Google search engine started becoming the dominant source, the first source of place that people went to for information. We're seeing that transformation happening now. Google, the traditional search engine, is very worried about this by the way.

Frank Strong 12:39

That's why they're investing in Google Gemini, and you may see what they call AI artificial intelligence overviews in search. If you go to Google right now and you type in a search, it's going to give you an AI overview. So they're working on this and they're playing catch-up chat. Gpt cause them by surprise, but I think this is an area that is emerging rapidly. We can see that it is taking over as a primary source because it provides a very neat, clean, simple answer when people ask questions, and so we got to be up on it. It means we're going to have to monitor our reputation there.

Frank Strong 13:10

How are these LLMs presenting the organizations that we represent, whether it's an employer or a client? How do we correct things if they go awry? Right, what happens when there's crisis communication? If it's getting something wrong and it sends off a tizzy, how are we going to go about fixing that? And then, generally, how do we get into the LLMs, like we've described already in the podcast? So this is emerging and it's going to unfold over the next 12 to 18 months. We're going to see an awful lot of change.

Peter Woolfolk 13:39

And I also see it as a sales tool as well, because obviously you've got cars, tv sets or whatever else you might be selling. That probably is a lot easier for in some cases LLMs and whatever sort of visuals that they have with that can save a lot of time and answer a lot of questions quickly to consumers.

Frank Strong 14:00

Yeah, I completely agree. I think this is an extension of a trend that we've seen already and that is in the old days, you know. Let's say you had to buy a car In the old days, you didn't know much about cars. You went to the car dealership. The salesperson knew everything about the car. Then, when the internet got big, you could do all kinds of research and not from just official review companies, but you could see individual users would write reviews. You could get a whole lot more information and walk into a dealership prepared, knowing what you want, what the specs are, how it compares. I think we're going to see something like that become even more refined, more repolished and better answers from generative AI going forward. That's going to be a lot easier. Instead of spending hours and hours doing searches and trying to pull information together, it's basically presenting you with a dossier.

Frank Strong 14:49

That's an answer to whatever question that you ask, which is pretty incredible. Again the drawbacks are you've got to make sure it's accurate. So you mentioned perplexity In my observation. They were one of the first LLMs to provide source links, so it will tell you where it got the information. You can click the link and go check out the source and see.

Frank Strong 15:08

Is this credible? Do? I believe that, and all of the, as far as I can tell, all of the other LLMs have since followed suit, because you know, we know, working in public relations, having you know credible sources, citing your data, is important, and so we're starting to see the LLMs do that. There's also one other emerging property that LLMs are the companies that make them, are working on to combat the hallucination, right.

Frank Strong 15:34

So, for whatever reason they don't really understand why, but you can ask a generative AI tool a question and if it doesn't know the answers, once in a while this happens less more often than not it gets it right, but once in a while it doesn't know the answer and it just makes one up. It just gives you an answer that's completely fictional and it presents it with such confidence. You're like you know it'd be, like somebody like, well, here's the answer, I'm absolutely confident it is right. And you don't know. They don't really know why that's happening, but one of the things they're working on to develop is this new development called reasoning, and what reasoning is doing is it's showing you. It's showing you the steps of how the LLM got to the answer that it is, and I think all of these developments will make LLMs more credible, more conclusive. They're going to get better over time and deliver better answers.

Frank Strong 16:22

So it's something that the PR community really needs to pay attention to.

Peter Woolfolk 16:25

You know, I would think so and I just keep thinking of some other areas that it can be used in. I mean public relations, sales, you know, just general information. You know, at a conference of some kind, a lot of different ways that or students can call up and or interact with it to get responses to particular questions, have to do classroom materials and so forth, and it comes through and I guess they could add visuals to this thing as we move along yeah, absolutely mean there's a couple of very definitive applications in public relations that are already happening.

Frank Strong 17:00

If you're using most of the big PR vendors, if you're using MuckRack, Cision just added it. Meltwater has got a huge AI team.

Frank Strong 17:11

I mean they've got scientists they've gone out and done acquisitions just to hire scientists with PhDs to help them work on this stuff. All of the big ones have that, so they can do things like if you're using media monitoring, it can better categorize, you know placements and put tags and categories of it. Is it a story? Is it a mention? Is it a backlink? Pr? People are using it for brainstorming, right Like you just need to. You know, sometimes looking at a blank page is the biggest hurdle to getting started when you're doing a writing project.

Frank Strong 17:39

Well, get into a generative AI system. Ask it a bunch of questions.

Announcer 17:43

It's going to give you a whole bunch of ideas.

Frank Strong 17:45

Summarization Exceptional at summarization, like here's a big report. I don't have time to read this whole thing, but, you know, read it for me and give me the five key points I need to understand. Take me and give me the five key points I need to understand. Take my blog post or press release and give me 10 tweets that I can then go ahead and schedule, or Facebook posts or LinkedIn posts like a lot of use cases.

Frank Strong 18:05

There's a few vendors that are doing some interesting things where it has prompts that will help you write a pitch or help you write a press release. I'm not big into that. I really think. I think it's good for brainstorming, but I'd rather have a human write. I think humans write better than generative AI At least PR people do. But one of the interesting things that one of these tools does is it will look at the words that you are using as you're writing your pitch and then it will go out and review articles that are currently published by reporters and come back as you're writing your pitch and saying you should pitch these people because they've written these topics, and here's the link to that. That's a pretty cool application of generative AI.

Peter Woolfolk 18:43

You know, one of the things that I have done with things such as chat, gpt, for instance, that I might lay out some things that I'd like for you to write for me on this. Then, once it comes out, then I will take it and make it my own, in other words, put in the words or other things, and that makes it as if it was coming from me. But it has saved me a lot of time and you know and I'm just tweaking it so that I'm comfortable with what it says rather than just ripping and running with it that could cause some problems down the road.

Frank Strong 19:13

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I mean, I think what you said is really important, that if you're using these tools, you know, think about it as a first draft and then edit it and make it your own.

Frank Strong 19:25

The problem is is I mean, generative AI is basically a. These LLMs are giant models of words, and it understands how people tend to put those words in a certain order. Based on probability, it is probable that a sentence is going to read a certain way and have a certain structure, and so what that means is the answers that generative AI is giving you is, by definition, an average. Here is the average language that most people use, and we know in PR, we don't want to be average, we want to be different.

Frank Strong 19:55

We want to explain to people what's different about our products what's better right. So it's really important to make sure you have that human touch. But I think your application of the tool is a good one. I do that an awful lot where, if I don't like the way a sentence is written, I'll ask it. You know, rewrite this sentence, give me a better structure. Is there an easier way to write it? Or another application is? I don't really like this headline. I'm using the sub headline here. Can you give me five alternatives?

Peter Woolfolk 20:22

And it'll.

Frank Strong 20:23

it'll belt them out and I can choose to use it. I can rearrange, I can mix and match, and that's helping me to make my content better.

Peter Woolfolk 20:29

Well, you know, actually with this podcast now it, it records everything and then it cranks out not only the transcript for me, but it also suggests titles for each episode. Now I'll read those. Either I like them, or I don't like them, or I'll make alterations to them, but it gives me all of that.

Peter Woolfolk 20:47

It gives me blurbs for Facebook and other social media posts and those kind of things. I read them. If I like them, fine. If not, I change them. But these things are a great time saver is what I'm really seeing here. There's a huge amount of time being saved and helping you get the job done faster and, in some cases, maybe even more accurately, because it may come up with some information that you had overlooked, because, as you said, these things reach out to a wide range of places to pick up the information and add it to what it's giving to you.

Frank Strong 21:22

Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's almost cliche to say this at some point, but the topic comes up over and over is people are like are we going to be replaced by generative AI? And I don't think we are going to be replaced as individuals. Generative ai is very good at specific tasks, but it can't do a job. You can't say go be my pr person for me right, I can't do that, but jet pr.

Frank Strong 21:44

People need to pay attention to this stuff because, while you won't probably won't be replaced by generative ai, you could be replaced by somebody that has learned how to use it effectively and been able to be more productive. That's a real risk.

Peter Woolfolk 21:57

You know the other thing, when I look at a lot of times about public relations, public relations a lot of times is a problem-solving exercise, and if the platform doesn't know what the problems are, it can't offer you any solutions to them.

Frank Strong 22:13

So you know questions like how do we fix ABC and D? That's right, you can use it to brainstorm possible solutions. I completely identify with the problem solving because I'm obviously a consultant now, but I spent 10 years on the in-house side and anytime somebody got a question that they didn't know how to answer, they sent it to one of two places Corporate communications or the legal department. So you're constantly getting these crazy wild requests that you're like why am I getting?

Peter Woolfolk 22:39

this. I don't know what to do.

Frank Strong 22:40

But if you have an LLM system that's trained on your internal documentation, it's a great place to start. Start brainstorming, I mean, you know, here's the problem, how do I solve this right? It's just a good way to show how you can be more efficient and effective and productive using these tools.

Peter Woolfolk 22:55

Great Well, frank. You've provided us with an awful lot of information really on LLMs. Are there any closing?

Frank Strong 23:10

remarks you think that we need to cover so that our listeners can be completely not completely, but even more up to speed on these LLMs. You know, I think the key is to get out there and experiment with them. Make it a point to set some time aside and try to use some of these tools. It doesn't matter, really, which one you use. If you like ChatGPT, go for it. If you like Perplexity, which is one of the ones I really like, go for it. If you want to use Google Gemini, go for it. But take some time to experiment with brainstorming, with rewriting headlines, with having it giving you blurbs to post on social media. Give this stuff a try so that you get some experience with it and you know what the possibilities are, because the changes are going to come fast and furious. The development is happening at a pace that is just unbelievably quick, and these tools are getting better and better.

Frank Strong 23:51

I mean think about when this thing, when ChatGPT launched what two years ago?

Peter Woolfolk 23:55

When it first started.

Frank Strong 23:56

It was really a stunning event. People were like, oh my gosh, amazing. And it's come so far in such a short time, absolutely. I saw this, you know, it was kind of a meme not too long ago and it showed like a chariot from thousands of years ago and then it showed a horse con drawn carriage in like the 1800s. It's like, look, this is 2000 years, technology hasn't changed much. But then when you think about the pace of change from the right butter brothers launched an aircraft to now where we're putting robots- and helicopters on mars or landing these things on, like we just took a sample from a comet in outer space.

Frank Strong 24:34

We landed a device on a comet in outer space, took a sample and brought it back to Earth. Like the pace of change is remarkable. That is going to happen in these generative AI applications tools. So the pace of change has increased.

Peter Woolfolk 24:47

Well, frank, let me say thank you once again. You have provided us with some very, very valuable information. I've learned something, I'm sure our listeners will learn something, and I'm certainly glad that you've been a guest on the Public Relations Review for a second time, and perhaps down the road, I believe, we'll probably reach out to you again.

Frank Strong 25:05

Thank you, I'll be here. Thanks for having me on, peter.

Peter Woolfolk 25:07

Okay, and to our listeners, thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed the Public Relations Review Podcast, we'd certainly like to get a review from you and also let your friends know to listen to the next edition of the Public Relations Review Podcast.

Announcer 25:24

This podcast is produced by Communication Strategies, an award-winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you for joining us.