I’ve been in PR and communications a long time. Long enough to remember when landing a client in a major publication was the win. One placement could change the trajectory of a business, and honestly, of the publicist’s year too.
That still matters. Very much so.
But media has changed enormously over the past few years, and so has the way people communicate and become known.
There are now so many ways to get noticed. You can talk up a storm on ten podcasts, post your best advice on LinkedIn, get quoted in industry articles and mainstream news, write an op-ed, publish a thought leadership piece, send out a press release, and watch your name turn up all over Google.
And you can do every bit of that and still have a visibility problem, because being seen isn’t the same as being remembered, and neither one is the same as being known.
The desire to count everything
PR has always been hard to quantify. For years the industry tried to prove its value with impressions, shares, likes and advertising value equivalency. If a publication had ten million monthly visitors and your client was featured there, that was supposed to mean ten million people read the article intently.
They didn’t. Maybe a small percentage did. Maybe a meaningful percentage did. There was never any real science to it.
Now there’s even more to count. Media mentions, interviews, podcast appearances, LinkedIn impressions, Substack subscribers, search rankings, engagement, share of voice, domain authority. And the newest one, whether ChatGPT knows you exist.
We do need to count. Clients need to see results and know whether the work is doing anything, and no sound strategy survives without numbers behind it. But it’s possible to get so busy counting that you lose sight of what the counting was for. Multiple media mentions are wonderful. So is a bylined article in a major publication, a large following, ten podcast appearances, a first page Google result.
Then someone sees your name for the fourth time and still can’t say what you do.
The more useful question isn’t how many hits we secured this month. It’s what people are starting to know you for.
You can be everywhere and known for nothing
I see this more often than you’d think.
A company wants publicity, so they start doing PR. The founder talks about leadership on one podcast. Innovation on another. AI in a contributed article. Work life balance on LinkedIn. Sustainability in a media interview. There’s a press release about a new product in there too.
Technically they’re doing everything right. They’re visible. Six months later, ask someone outside the company what that founder is known for and you’ll get a blank look.
That usually isn’t a PR failure. It’s a positioning failure. The problem was never that nobody saw the content. It’s that nothing stuck.
Good PR is repetitive
This is one of the less exciting truths about becoming known. You have to repeat yourself.
Not word for word. Please don’t do that.
But the core ideas need to show up again and again. If you want to be known as the person who understands why small businesses struggle with client retention, you can’t weigh in once and consider it handled. That conversation is happening constantly, across formats and outlets, and your name should keep appearing wherever it’s happening.
You don’t need to suddenly have opinions about workplace culture because someone told you that personal branding requires content diversification. You’re allowed to have a lane.
Lanes are powerful. The people we think of as highly visible usually aren’t known for fifty-seven things. They’re associated with a handful of ideas, sometimes only one. That isn’t a limitation, it’s the whole mechanism.
The media still matters
Every so often someone announces that traditional media is dead. It’s been remarkably energetic for something that’s been dead for about twenty years.
A credible placement still does something a self-published post can’t. It’s earned. A third party is vouching for you, which means you aren’t the one doing the promoting, and that carries a kind of trust you can’t manufacture on your own.
What doesn’t work as well anymore is treating media relations as the whole plan.
A strong interview leads to a podcast invitation. The podcast sends people to your website. Your website leads them to something you wrote. That article gets them to subscribe to your Substack. Months later they see you quoted somewhere else, and this time they recognize the name and know roughly what you’re about.
That recognition is the thing worth building.
And now there’s AI
As if we needed more acronyms. We’re talking about AEO, GEO and whether brands turn up in AI generated answers.
It matters, and I think it will matter more. But the underlying principle hasn’t changed as much as people believe. If you want search engines, journalists, AI systems and actual humans to understand who you are, there has to be enough credible, consistent information out there about you.
What do you know? What do you talk about? Where have you been quoted? What have you written? Who else treats you as credible?
Reputation is becoming searchable in a much broader sense than reviews.
Getting known is cumulative
This is the part companies underestimate. There usually isn’t one magical piece of coverage that changes everything, though occasionally there is, and you should enjoy it when it happens.
Most of the time reputation builds slowly and then compounds. An article. Another one. A podcast. A journalist who remembers you from last time. A LinkedIn post that lands. An introduction. A speaking invitation. Someone searches your name and finds enough credible material to conclude that you know what you’re talking about.
Eventually you stop introducing yourself from scratch every time. That’s the point where visibility turns into reputation.
So what do you want to be known for?
Before worrying about how many pitches went out this month or whether your last LinkedIn post got 847 impressions, I’d start here. Not where do we want to appear, but what do we want people to think when our name appears.
Once that’s settled, the rest of the strategy gets much easier. Media coverage matters. Podcasts matter. Thought leadership matters. LinkedIn matters. Your own content matters. None of them, on their own, make someone known. They’re the pieces. Built well and pointed in the same direction, they become a reputation.