Be The Signal, Not The Noise: Building Trust In An AI-Drenched Media Landscape with Joshua Altman

Welcome to Mediascape, Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world. Joshua Altman of Beltway Media. I was really interested in hearing a little bit about your backstory that you were teasing out to me before we jumped on.

So before we talk about the work that you do today, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background in communications as an adjunct professor and also coming from the world of video and content. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. So I started as a journalist.

I went to journalism school at GW. I worked for the Hill newspaper in DC, same region I am in now. And I thought I would spend my career as a journalist. I, you know, was working as a reporter while I did my master's at Georgetown in their communication, culture, and technology program.

I was a part-time student working full-time through that. And again, I thought that would take me through being a producer and reporter. I was doing, you know, video production, digital media when a little before iPhones were, you know, really common for. We, of course, had them and they did video.

It was nothing like having 4K on your phone like we did now. Doing live from an iPhone required not an iPhone. You had to do it, if you wanted to be in the field mobile, you had to have what we call there were giant backpacks. And I remember when the backpack reduced to like 25 pounds, everyone was really excited because it was now the live studio part was now just 25 pounds, plus everything else you were carrying.

So very different than it is now. I did, I taught at GW digital production class, which was a great experience. Taught me, I learned more teaching it than I, you know, did I think the students did. Because it was a whole different generation of people with a whole different experience to the technology itself.

I mean, I'm sure they've learned a lot, but I learned a lot about how people are really using, you know, devices and engaging with them. One thing that really hit me was every device now has a built-in battery. You know, I just, you know, we started our first lesson with cameras. I said, you know, put in the battery.

And they never put a thing in a battery, a battery in a device because every device is a built-in battery. Yeah. And it really surprised me personally, you know, because things had just changed so much. Well, and that's so funny that you use this example because this is not an example I would have thought of.

No, it really surprised me too. But I also am from the era before iPhones and when you did have to put batteries and things and change things out. And so that's one really small example of how technology has changed. And now we're seeing it change even more rapidly.

But uh what prompted you to transition from creating digital content, being a reporter, being a journalist, into going full-on into communications, leading communications for others? There was no moment where I sat down and said, this is what I'm going to do. It was a gradual transition. And it was sort of by accident.

Oh. I left the Hill newspaper, I thought I'd freelance as a reporter with different news organizations and eventually would go back full-time to a newsroom. That didn't happen. Then come people were like, you know, with businesses, including, you know, local news organizations, you know, said we're kind of looking for someone with a technology background and a writing background and a content background to, you know, rebuild our website and make it more user-friendly, to incorporate more photos, videos, visual elements, like I have that experience with.

And then another project came along and another project came along, and it sort of just evolved into what I'm doing now a decade later. But there wasn't a day where I sat down and like wrote a business. Maybe I should have, I probably should have. Where I sat down and like wrote the business plan out that this is what will happen in you know a year, five years.

Here's the revenues. It was very much at the beginning, especially, I thought I'd go back to a newsroom. Right. Well, we didn't know then that newsrooms would change, that there would be less journalists, right?

That there would be more, particularly now. There's so much content that I read that then at the bottom has a little disclaimer that it was partially written with AI. See, and there's nothing wrong with AI. I use AI.

AI is great. It produces the first draft in some cases. With journalism, it can, you know, help you curate pool reports, wire service reports. It can, you know, really say, you know, especially when you're getting a ton of them in, filter out that first level to kind of get you where you need to be.

The full writing of it, no. Publishing the full AI writing, it still needs a human. Yeah, absolutely. Did you ever, once this snowballed and became this other complete business that you didn't know that you were going to go into, did you ever try to go back into journalism?

It never was something that, you know, I thought I'd 100% once I decided I'm doing this, it wasn't where I was going back to. And I love it. I'm still someone who reads, you know, the AP feed daily. Oh wow.

So talk about that change into what you do now, that transition over the last decade. How has the role of communications changed for your clients? Because you talk about websites, you talk about helping put together that kind of communications. Are you still working on that side, digital?

Do you also work on the public relations? Yeah. Well, I try not to separate these things because if you actually go to what you know the Public Relations Association says, you know, their definition is quite broad of what PR is. Yeah.

It's any communication that engages a public, which is pretty much everything. So I actually like that definition because it really does include everything we do. But also that means your corporate communications, your internal, your investor relations, you really need to be thinking with that traditional PR mindset when you're doing these things that a lot of people don't think of as PR. Every conversation I have with you know clients, you know, we're always thinking about what happens if this becomes public.

What's the public-facing side of this? Do we want this public? And if you don't, that's a bigger problem. Assume anything, especially now that we all have iPhones, you know, that document that's you know secure on a screen that you can't download, someone can still just take a picture of.

Right. Interesting. Well, and particularly with the work that you do, because you are in BC. So I imagine that you work a lot in the public sector.

You probab maybe you work with politicians, you are with different organizations that are trying to move and shake. Uh less with politicians, more with government, civil service, career agency folks. Like just saying, okay. And that is, you know, very different from the political side.

So I've worked with both the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S.

Department of Commerce. And when you're working with government, things work very differently than with the private sector. Yeah, I'm sure there has to be another layer of security, privacy, yeah, security checks, privacy checks, and also you know, a lot of layers of approval that don't necessarily exist in the private sector, especially with I work with smaller growing companies, not Fortune 500s mostly. And, you know, in the private sector, you might just be dealing with a few people who approve things and we're done.

When you're dealing with government, there are a lot more layers. Everything goes through legal approvals. We have to check things because it is speaking as the US Department of Justice. So it does come with a little more than speaking as medium-sized SaaS provider.

Yeah. So you don't have one sweet spot. You have multiple. We have multiple, but what we think of is we're looking at size and kind of market position as opposed to what you do.

You know, I say, you know, we are the experts at communicating your expertise. Whatever that is, you are the expert at what you do. Right. So, you know, that's why we are the experts at communicating it.

So where some companies really find a great fit, you know, saying we target mid-size healthcare companies, we target green energy companies. We're looking less at what you do and entirely at, you know, where you fit because our our business is fractional chief communications officer. So it's people who are growing, want to grow more, and just kind of need communication support to get to that next place. Yeah.

Yeah. And Chief Communications is distinct from brand, right? Yeah. Chief of brand, chief of marketing.

So talk about all of the different things that can be encompassed in this role. So brand and marketing are two of them. That's kind of where people are familiar with. You have a chief brand officer, a VP brand, a chief marketing officer.

And sometimes those roles ultimately kind of become a chief communications officer because they're the person who's there who has the experience in the team to do the job. But where we really kind of focus on is uh with two big things. One is we shape perception, two is building and maintaining trust. And where that chief communications officer is different from a marketing department or your chief brand officer is we're taking that really integrated big picture view of how messaging impacts reputation, how it impacts growth, stakeholder confidence.

And those stakeholders are your internal, your employees, potential customers, current customers, past customers who leave Yelp reviews. You know, if you're looking at investors and you know, venture capital and you know, you're going fundraising route, they are stakeholders, potential future investors are there. And in addition to being in a big picture, it's also very hands-on. So it does take both.

So it kind of brings in, you know, like I was saying before, I started doing this because I had the content background and a hands-on technical background. So it's still kind of doing that with big picture view, but very hands-on to develop consistent storytelling across channels. Yeah. So no silos.

This is something that I try to preach to my students all the time, coming from a PR background. I love the peso model. And I introduce that to my digital media students because many of them have never heard that construct. But it just it, you do have to understand what your entire marketing and comms mix is.

Yeah. And not just where your marketing and comms are and where your brand is, but also what's your sales team? You are not a salesperson if you're in PR, but what you're doing affects sales. 100%.

Yeah. And then also what's your, you know, your company's, you know, product development timeline. Because a lot of times, you know, comms people are necessarily brought in at the beginning of that. They're brought in kind of towards the end.

We are now marketing our new widget, our, you know, version 2.0. But instead of talking early, so they could kind of start laying the groundwork for these features and getting people excited and kind of seeing where that fits in a larger ecosystem, it's coming in very late. And you know, comms are playing catch-up.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Instead of being able to build out from the beginning. What was the reason that you decided that a fractional chief communications officer was the way that you wanted to take the business?

Well, so we were doing kind of project consulting that turned into really longer-term work and really but what people use would call like account-based marketing. And once we turned longer term, we were also kind of helping these people with other things like their products. You know, where does we want to, you know, revamp our offerings? How do we communicate that?

How do we get that out there so people understand it? So it really changed from, you know, we're just communications consultants, which was what we were doing, to being, you know, say we're not project-based. We're not here to launch your widget. We're not goal-based.

We are not an email marketing firm. We are not a social media marketing. We do those things, but we don't do them in that exclusive way. We also will work with your internal staff.

So maybe you have a social media team, but you don't have someone in leadership there to help you and to help them really be in those core meetings that you know tell you, here's where our product's going, here's where sales is going, here's where our focus is. And also someone who kind of has the leadership position to say things in those meetings. Whereas your younger, less experienced, new to career social media person who's great at it, just might not be the person to speak up in those meetings yet.

Yeah. And you need to offer some strategic direction to people who are early career. Yeah. So you're able to come in and do that and also offer the perspective of all the other organizations that you've worked with.

And we do that, and especially because kind of the reasons people might call us are they're growing, they realize this is important, or they have someone who kind of is doing this now, but if they're like a smaller, growing company, it's not their job. It's an operations manager who just got tasked with it because they were kind of a catch-all. It's their CTO who was an early employee and built their website, and now because they were the website guy, is now responsible for all things marketing and communications.

And that's not their job. Like I said, you are the expert in your technology. We are the expert in communicating your expertise. So those are kind of where we get called in.

And they might be saying, Yeah, well, look, we are doing, I'm spending 10 hours a week doing this. It's not worth a 40-hour week hire to have CCO. I'll just keep doing it because I don't need a 40-hour week hire. So we feel that, okay, you're doing 10 hours a week now.

We just take those 10 hours from you. And as you grow, maybe becomes 15 and 20, and you eventually, you know, we put ourselves out of a job because you want to hire someone in-house full time. I think this is a really smart play, though, for yourselves and for businesses. The way that you've structured your organization sounds like a win-win for yourselves and for businesses.

Thinking about tariffs, the economy, this moment and time that we're in right now as we're recording. There is a lot of economic upheaval and uncertainty. And people often cut communications, marketing, even though that is the last thing that they should cut in their budgets. So this is seems like a way for people to be able to continue having somebody high-level on their team, helping shape the street direction of their organization and be able to choose the strategies and tactics that are going to be the best for them in this moment.

Because we know some of these businesses might be, they might have supply chain issues, right? We solved a lot during the pandemic, depending on what kind of company you have. Companies with the current economic shutdown. And again, we're recording this end of October, early November.

This episode will come out in December. Hopefully, we won't be in a shutdown by then. But there are people who are now going, oh, I have to wait to get paid because I am a government contractor. So I'd love to hear a little bit about the resilience that you've had to have as an organization also with these different shifts, these different high impact events that can happen and affect the businesses that you work with.

So right now, I am not contracting with a government agency. I was during the last extended shutdown. Oh, wow. So I've been there.

And it can be very hard on the contractors because they don't necessarily get guaranteed back pay. Federal employees, by law, that was corrected. There's some debate over that right now. But back pay is much more solidified for employees as opposed to contractors.

So with us, you know, of course, these strings, you know, we're aware of them. Our clients are certainly, you know, part of that ecosystem. And it also can mean good things for us. You know, we scale up, could mean that projects have to slow down as well, depending on kind of where that company is.

But also, you know, when they're looking at long-term planning, they could say this is not the time for us to hire an executive or build out a marketing team, but we still have to do it. So how can we do it a little cheaper? And one thing that, you know, I've noticed with these companies is they get those goal-based companies. They get a social media agency, they get an email agency, they get an SEO agency, they may have someone in-house kind of handling internal communications, you know, with their HR and operations teams.

But because these are all external agencies, because they look at that as you know, flexible, which it is, they also see where they don't talk to each other. So we work with those external agencies. And like I said before, we take that burden off someone that shouldn't be their job doing those 10, 15 hours a week. It becomes our job to, you know, work with your existing agencies and make sure they are all on the same page and talking to each other.

So, yes, we do those things, but if you happen to have an agency you like, we work with them just like your full-time W-2 chief communications officer would work with an existing agency. Yeah. That's a really interesting hybrid as well. That you can offer both solutions to people and really fit in with what their corporate culture has to offer at that time.

Corporate culture, also economic fit. Yeah. Sometimes it just they use agencies because that's better for them economically. We talked a little bit about AI.

We just very briefly touched on it in terms of journalism and in terms of how it can help with a first draft. It can help you with maybe some research. Now we're seeing a time when, for instance, when I'm talking to my students about different types of content and content creators and content creation, it's no longer just about professionally produced or user generated. But we have to add this third category of AI generated content.

And I'd argue there's a little bit across all three, right? You might not have more like a three-ven diagram. Yeah. Where you got three circles and all of them overlap to different degrees.

Yeah. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you've seen AI and generative AI shift the way that you are able to operate and do business. Has it helped? Has it hindered?

Has it done a little bit of both? Both mostly helped so far. Yeah, it's great for research, like you said. I had to get some research on a lot of cities where a client was operating.

And we needed information about cities. Well, that it's basically all public information. Census Bureau, State Office of Vital Statistics, City Office of Statistics. It's nothing that you couldn't get through Google searches.

But for a human to do this for two dozen cities, that's a couple days worth of work to really do that, create usable, you know, making in usable charts that we can, you know, present to people. That's not a, you know, it's easy, it's a relatively easy lift, but it is time consuming. I put it into an AI, it gave me the result. And if as long as you tell it, provide a source for everything, show me the source for everything, verify everything in at least two places, show me any discrepancies.

So maybe it could only verify something in one place. Okay, but it could show me a discrepancy. It's like, okay, so this city has 40% college-educated population. Well, another place said it was, you know, 37.

They rounded. That's kind of didn't verify, but someone rounded up a little, someone rounded down a little, probably from something like 38.7. So that's where it kind of showed mistakes, but you could a human looks at that and it took an afternoon for the human to just kind of go through that information and then make it cleaned up, verify, you know, anything that really seemed out and make it work.

It's great with helping with first drafts. If you tell it to write a post or your newsletter, it will do it. I treat it as a detailed outline. And as long as you just treat it like that detailed outline and you're filling in the blanks and you're able to say, this totally doesn't work.

This is not what we do. You can fix it and remove that part and put in new stuff. I've also trained, given a lot of very specific writing instructions over time. Yeah.

Things that, you know, you know, so I, you know, my background is journalism. I went to journalism school before Microsoft Word had the AP style plugin that automatically told you everything. I would have loved that because in advanced news writing, any style error was automatic one-letter deduction on the project. You learned AP style fast.

So my tools have been told and programmed to write an AP style. Nice. It doesn't do it perfectly, but it does better than if I hadn't trained. And I, you know, I put in a lot of the very specific things.

That, you know, all the state abbreviation, how they handle that, how they handle acronyms are all part of it. Manually input. So it knows those things for me. Yeah.

It knows how I like to structure lists. And that's even things like don't use emoji bullets. When I say structural list, I mean physically how to structure the list. Just use a hyphen.

Do not give me emoji bullets. Like even things like that, you have to tell it. And it does take time to train these things and to get them to where you need them to be, to even be at that, it's a good detailed outline. Have you found it useful in creating customer personas or messaging to specific branches of it?

If you're very, very detailed, it can help you. But if you just say, I need to market to you know millennials in the Rocky Mountain region who like the outdoors, that's not detailed enough for it. You really need to give it a lot of information because it'll do it. It'll be a halfway decent job that you can fill in the blanks.

But to get a lot more out of it, you really need to give it income. You know, likes the outdoors, do they like farming or do they like hiking in the Rockies? The AI does not know the difference. You need to tell it exactly what it means.

Do you want people with kids, without kids, planning on kids, child-free? It doesn't know that. It just looks at the generation. You have people who have kids and are done having kids, want to have kids, and are not planning on kids.

And all of those kind of fit in that millennial group. So it doesn't know what you want. Maybe you want all of them, but you have to tell it. So I have a lot of, I don't want to call them shortcuts, but save prompt outlines.

One of my favorites is confirm this information, but take no other action until I say proceed at the end of pretty much everything. Because a lot of times it just wants to go. I tell it don't. And I got this tip from another AI and expert who, you know, he said, make it verify everything before it runs.

And that's where I kind of, but I when I just said verify it, confirmed, it confirmed and then ran. I left out that second step of wait for me to say yes. Because sometimes it gets it completely wrong. Yeah.

So you were talking about demographics and how we need to overlay behavioral data psychographically, right? So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you bring that to your clients to make sure that they're really getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And even if you have a through line of you want to have a similar message, whether it's your internal or external stakeholders, right? But there might be slightly nuanced messaging.

Yeah. You probably should have the same message for your internal and external stakeholders on most things. Obviously, external stakeholders are not going to be that interested in your internal HR policies unless it's you're and I'm going to, again, we are recording this late October, early November, Amazon laying off 10,000 plus white-collar office workers. Right.

Unless you're that, your most public consumers are not that interested in an internal HR policy. But in terms of things like your product and how it works and you know, sales and pricing, it shouldn't be that different. Because you might just be giving more information internally and context and how it helps and what they need to know to execute that public message. Because remember, someone could just take a photo on their phone of your email and now it's public.

So it completely diverges. You then have to come up with a new message explaining why those two things completely diverge. Have you had any of these situations happen where it's happened to a client before you've been brought in, or they were trying to send out divergent messages and you had to caution them? Not intentionally.

I don't mean not intentionally that I walked into it. They weren't intentionally thinking, I will say this internally and that externally. It was more of we weren't thinking, you know, taking that integrated big picture view. We were just saying, okay, this is our social media, this is our Twitter X, our TikTok, our LinkedIn, this is our SharePoint.

They are not the same thing. They are not run by the same people. They might talk to each other a little bit, but they are not organizing and planning. So they weren't intentionally putting out very different information.

It just happened. And when you come into that, it's usually they aren't too far apart. It isn't saying, you know, we're going to report quarterly profits up, you know, 25%, and then internally don't tell anyone, but things aren't looking so good. It's never that we're going to say something so totally different.

It's more like here's our product roadmap that we're putting out, you know, get excited for these features, and we posted it across social media, and then internal the timelines, two months, two years in some cases, behind what they're saying. Hey, expect these early 26. Turns out they're really anticipating then mid-28 type of things. That's the kind of thing that they're doing.

It's not maliciously hiding shareholder stock information or anything, at least in my experience. That's not what I'm walking into. Well, what are some things that you do see people do wrong often when you come into businesses? I mean, we just that was a great example.

Yeah. That's probably one of the biggest ones. Yeah. Is one department doesn't know what another department's doing.

Another is relying too much, especially now, relying too much on AI. They really are in some cases using it as a published final product versus this is some ideas. This is a draft. Another is they're putting all of this on their CEO to be their communications leader.

And because they were the founder, they started it, they were the person doing it initially when they were, you know, a scrappy one, two-person company, they kind of kept the leadership role. Kind of like I talked about before, with you know, it being the CTO who built the website. They are not the experts in this. They are the experts in what their company does.

Probably another big one is posting too much, being too responsive. I always say, you know, be the signal, not the noise, and communicate strategically, not voluminously. You don't have to write something whenever someone tweets at you. Yeah.

That's exactly right. You do not have to respond to every tweet. Respond, be engaged. You can.

That's what it's there for. You know, start conversations with your customers. You do not have to write back to everyone, with a couple of notable exceptions. If you get really bad Google and Yelp reviews, respond.

And respond and be helpful because business owner responses factor into your scores. So if you get, you know, a one-star review, just even as quick, hey, here's our you know, email help at acme.com. We want to fix this for you.

Something like that that you saved and you just paste in can help keep those scores up, which can be very important for businesses. That's such a great example. I'm wondering, are you going through the role? Rolodex.

Obviously, I'm old because I'm using the word Rolodex, but in your head. I use Rolodex too. Of different types of clients that you've had in this circus. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially I would say, you know, the SaaS company is a little less important. Trustpilot for, you know, virtual services is very something that's essential.

And people do look at those. Whether or not you can respond in the same way and how it rates, I'd still say respond uh with brick and mortar Yelp reviews and Google reviews. I'd say brick and mortar, but some of these are more mobile companies, you know, home service companies, especially. You know, they might not have a store you walk into.

They have, you know, an office, but they're mostly in trucks and bands and out in the field doing their thing. Real estate agents, another one. They have an office, but they're out in the field working with people. So that's what I mean by brick and mortar, as opposed to, you know, virtual corporate type services.

Matters for everyone, it matters a lot with these types because it does make a difference. So that'll be one place where I say respond. Joshua, what do you see as some future casting for the world of communications? I'm gonna go on a limb on this one, say more AI.

I think we're gonna see a lot more good AI, a lot more bad AI. But also, I think we're going to see people who are leaning into this fractional type work because companies might be a little less certain, like you mentioned. And this is a great place with fractional to bridge that uh gap of we don't need the full time yet, but we need to do the thing. I also you know think we're going to see more platforms and the you know, platform evolution's not new.

It has been going on forever. If you go back, people always say who remembers Friendster? Me. Yeah, I do too.

I do too. But you know, when was the last time you logged into your MySpace? So these platforms they come and go and they merge and they get bought, you know, meta and Instagram, WhatsApp. So that's another one that you know we'll see is a lot more consolidation and the network effects become a lot harder.

People, a lot of companies overlook Pinterest. But if that's your where you are, you're in that space, it is crucial for you. Like it is very popular and can drive a lot of growth if you are in that space. It is not the big wide broadcast of Instagram, but you might really need it and benefit from it if you know you're doing that type of creative stuff that Pinterest really grows on.

So you might get better network effects with smaller, mid-size social networks. Another is we've already seen a lot of this, is influencers might be losing some influence, especially big influencers, where you see the hundred thousand, you know, million follower influencers are, yeah, they get clicks. And if you get them to, you pay them to, you know, use your product, it's great for you. Having your Kardashian using your thing is still gonna be good.

But you're seeing a lot more trust with micro nano influencers. And you know, that's why I say, you know, our two big things are shape perception, build and maintain trust. So usually we're not trying to get Lady Gaga to endorse your product on Instagram. Right.

We're looking for someone who uses it, who will, you know, or is writing your target demo who has maybe a thousand to five thousand followers and is much more engaged because they are in many cases doing it themselves, or maybe have a manager helping, or now the help is you know an AI manager, or it's a team, a very small one, but they have that trust with their users, they have that trust with their followers. So that's what I say, influencers might be becoming less influential, but on one side of it.

So you'll see more influencers, but they will be much, much smaller, and people will definitely, you know, trust them more because they are these people who they actually interact with virtually. Yeah, I I've seen that brands are starting to go more into, and over the next couple of years, the ad spend is going to be for them, it's gonna be more on user generated content. And I think that maps back to exactly what you're saying, having smaller influencer micro influencers that really, you know, that they share who they are every day.

They're very authentic in what they do. So if they're using a product or service, they're actually using it, unlike the macro influencers who are probably just getting a paycheck. Yeah. Sometimes they'll even say, look, I was given the product and paid to give my honest review.

You know, and they'll tell you that. And sometimes the reviews are good, sometimes they're mixed, sometimes they're not particularly great. But having that bad review can also help you. And I think people are really worried about, oh my God, this goes back to the Google and Yelp, that one bad review.

If you engage with it, you can turn that into something positive. Like if they say, look, my I'm just gonna say their SaaS feature, your log on was terrible. I had to click a screen to get on your homepage to get to another button that then took me to the log on. It was too many steps.

So, well, I liked what I had where I was there. This is not, I'm not gonna go through this many steps. Well, that's something actionable that you could hop in and fix. Right.

So you could turn that into a positive, being like, we fixed this, it was bumped up to number one on our priority list, re-releasing it right away, this new fix. So that's where you could turn something negative into a positive. And that's of course a pretty straightforward, easy example. Some things are not that straightforward and easy, but being responsive like that is always good.

A lot of people, a lot of companies I work with are worried about a bad news report, about a bad story coming out. It's gonna happen. Look at any company. Things come out that they don't want.

Right. It's what you then do with it that makes the big difference. And I think that next step, the what you do with it, is going to be much more important than it has been. It's always been important.

But with more transparency now, whether you want it or not, that next step and the follow-up to it is where it really is going to matter. Well, you've given us several things to think about as we go into the next couple of years. What piece of advice would you give to because I've seen some of my students have careers. Many of them do, because they're they're master's students.

Many some of them don't. Some of them are starting their own businesses, some of them are looking for their perfect job. And obviously, this is not the best job market to go into as with digital changing so quickly. So, what are some things that people should be doing to shore themselves up to be a great candidate?

Don't think in terms of digital. Think in terms of the content. And content, like I said, you know, the PR society, you know, has basically everything falls under PR. For me, I put everything on if it exists and you can engage with it, and we talk about four things what you read, see, hear, and experience.

If you can do one of those things with it, which is pretty much anything you're going to create in the world of communications, it falls under content. So pretty much the content umbrella. So don't think it's digital. How does digital amplify what we want to accomplish?

Sometimes what you want to accomplish might be a physical thing because your business's trade shows still happen. Conferences still happen. You need materials for that. So you can have stuff there, and your employees are on message, on brand, you have your step-in repeats and your table covers and all of it.

And an iPad or a couple of iPads that have more information digitally. You have QR codes to scan that take you to in different parts of your website. I have one that I use for some volunteer work I do that I just put on my phone and it just takes people right to our website rather than having to give them the whole website. Just here, scan.

I just show them my phone, scan the thing, and they're taking exactly where they need to. So digital is a tool. It is not the end. Another one is pivot.

I went to journalism school undergrad. I, like many of your students, was working full-time while doing my masters. I thought that would be my career in journalism. Pivot sometimes.

You don't have to think I'm pivoting today. Sometimes it just sort of happens, like it did with me. So look for it. Some people say you should find a niche and stick with it.

Really go down, down, down, narrow, narrow. And I read something once to say, you know, if this thing, if someone comes to you with a project that's tangentially yours, kind of in what you do, and you take it, you're a generalist. If not, you're a specialist. Well, I disagree with that.

First off, you could take it and learn a lot from it. You can make great connections with that company. Great opportunities can come from it. So if it's kind of what you do and it's in your wheelhouse and you're capable of it, your business is capable of it, jump on an opportunity because it's there.

But also, I look at it like healthcare. Your primary care provider, your internist, they are not a generalist by any means. They can handle about 80% of what walks in to the primary care practice. But they are specialists in long-term care of people, of conditions, of treating people with acute illnesses.

Like if you start having headaches, is your first call to the neurooncologist, or is it to your primary care doctor? Most likely you might just be getting headaches. And if it persists and the imaging shows you need something else, there's something else there. But there's a reason that most people don't need the neurooncologist.

They can get treated with their primary care doctor. So that's how I think of this niching down. You have a different fit. Like our fit is the size of the company, the problem they're facing, not we just do healthcare.

And I'll say something again that I mentioned before be the signal, not the noise, and communicate strategically, not voluminously. Boom, mic drop. Fantastic advice. Thank you, Joshua.

Of course, we will link in the show notes to your LinkedIn and to beltway.media, your organization, for people to find out more information. And I believe that you also have a lot of great resources for people looking for communications advice on your website. Yeah, we have free resources on our website.

We have startup communications guides. We're adding one for scale up for mid-sized businesses. We just added one for law firms. These are all free, just you know, on the website.

They're HTML, PDF versions, download them, mark them up. They're designed in a way that you could use them as checklists. We also have actual checklists, one for cybersecurity communications, one for startup communications. And these are, you know, they're free on the website.

Take them, use them, write on them if you download and print them out. They're there for you to use. Also, email us, call me. You know, we have that information online as well.

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me on MediaScape Insights from Digital Changemakers. You truly are one. You've done a little bit of everything in the world of comms and journalism.

And I appreciate you bringing your expertise, wisdom, and your advice to the show today. Thank you for having me. Of course. Thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it on your favorite platform.

Leave us a rating review. Let us know what kind of content you want to hear about in the future. And thanks again for joining us. We'll be back again very shortly.

To learn more about the Master of Science and Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmm.usc.edu.