Transcript: Episode 203: Director In Sheep’s Clothing

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 203. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/203. 

[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.

[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show, Shanté Micah is a communications powerhouse who began her career in international sports broadcasting before pivoting to public relations and digital marketing. With a master's from The Newhouse School at Syracuse University in two decades of experience, she's worked across media, brand, marketing, and social, including stints in Israel and with major clients like Disney and ESPN. Now Shanté is the founder of Good News, a PR consultancy that combines traditional credibility with modern tools and a human-first ethos. Today we are going to talk about why hospitality PR needs a major update, how brands can build visibility that actually matters, and the power of personalized pitching in the age of AI. But before we get started, we need to answer the call button. 

Call button rings 

The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals, and probably in this case tired adults who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at (850) 404-9630. Today's question was actually submitted by Randy. I love this question. Randy asks, how important is AP style in a press release? What do you think?

[00:02:07] Shanté Micah: I think it's becoming less and less important as so much of like social media has changed how we talk online. So if you stick to it, then you're appeasing journalists, which is important if you're gonna be working in the PR space. But I would say even AP style is changing a lot, just like new words are being inserted into the dictionary, we're seeing the same with AP style.

[00:02:32] Susan Barry: Excellent. I agree with you.

[00:02:34] Shanté Micah: I'm not concerned about AP style. I'm more concerned with removing jargon and saying something in a way that's genuinely much more interesting.

[00:02:44] Susan Barry: Makes sense. Well, I think we're gonna get all the way into that, but first you started on the broadcast side. What made you cross over into PR? 

[00:02:54] Shanté Micah: As I was starting to pursue broadcast is when the Olympics were coming to the state in which I was going to school. So it was just this like natural progression. And a really cool opportunity, I got to be part of the production team for the opening closing ceremonies. Medals Plaza. So it was this like crash course in broadcast journalism for one of the biggest events you can think of in the world every four years, right? From that I realized that broadcast you have to have a love that is way more intrinsic than, than maybe what I had because you can get burned out really, really fast.

[00:03:34] Susan Barry: Is that burnout because it's like long hours and round the clock or long hours, no money or something else? 

[00:03:42] Shanté Micah: The money does not match the amount of time that you have to put into it. So that is definitely for sure. The other things had to do with the way — and you have to consider this as 20 years ago — where there was still a lot of ageism, a lot of misogyny and stuff like that, where I think that if you were very much like, this is my thing, those are hills that you're willing to die on. To me, it wasn't. I didn't know that I was serious about pivoting until I was upstate New York, just happenstance, and I was on campus at Syracuse and the Syracuse University. I knew that it had the number one communications school in the country. I'd known that for a long time, but I was like, I'm not gonna get a Master's in broadcast. But I had a very distinct moment where it was, you're gonna go here and it just happened that that was the final day to submit applications for their master's program.

[00:04:44] Susan Barry: Oh, wow. Like the day you decided you were interested?

[00:04:46] Shanté Micah: The day of, yes. So at the literal 11th hour, I submitted an application and it was like a Hail Mary because they only accept, at the time they were only accepting like 15 students per year per program. But I had some good, good things in my back pocket, definitely recommendations from Olympic producers helped. So it was a Hail Mary. Yep - I got accepted. Started, it's a nine month program and I'm so happy. Like it was, it was exactly what I was hoping it was the storytelling, but then it was more of this business perspective that my mind just naturally gravitates towards.

[00:05:28] Susan Barry: Interesting. So it went: broadcast journalism school, and then sort of PR marketing type work? That's a really interesting path. Well, that path took you to Israel among other places. What was your experience like working internationally? Did it change your view of communications at all or? What happened?

[00:05:52] Shanté Micah: I was the only person in my graduating class that didn't go to a PR agency, and I knew specifically I didn't wanna do agency side because I wanted — I just knew in my mind, I'm like, I wanna go corporate. There was something about owning that type of team and working for one singular brand. And I didn't have a lot of information, but I knew enough about myself to know that that was for me. So the next, I got one really amazing gig that, which led to the next gig, and they asked me to move to Israel shortly after. What it taught me was two things: urgency and nuance.

So the urgency is that you have to be aware that there are high stakes almost all the time when it comes to telling stories. There are interested parties and if you don't match their perceived value of something, then you're not doing the thing. So you have to be hyper aware of the room. Of the proverbial room, whatever you're in. The other is nuance, because what I learned was when I was in Israel, they pride themselves on speaking English. However, there's nuances of language and understandings that come from speaking it and colloquialisms and all sorts of things. So even though we were speaking the same language, the intent in meeting, I had to really dig in and everything was just — it was understanding that when people say certain words, they don't necessarily mean what you're interpreting, so you have to dive into that. So the nuance, I think is what made me a better communicator is, well, what did you mean by that? And really digging in.

[00:07:35] Susan Barry: You've worked with some really big brands, and aside from the Olympics, what did you learn from those campaigns that maybe you've brought now to your own firm? 

[00:07:46] Shanté Micah: I would say the biggest thing is that volume does not necessarily equal value. 

[00:07:52] Susan Barry: I wish that you could just get that on a tattoo for everyone to wear, like, or put a billboard outside of every corporate office in the United States. Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right. Volume does not equal value, people!

[00:08:04] Shanté Micah: Yeah, it has to be specific. So going into something you could say, well, I am gonna an influencer, let's say, and they're gonna be part of this campaign. And it could be an influencer that doesn't necessarily match. It's just the one that you had access to and you think, well, they have a big following, therefore, volume, value, et cetera. But I would see big companies spend millions upon millions for one moment. For example, one was Fashion Week and it was some behind the scenes, and what it generated, they said was like a million media impressions in a single minute. But, that was it. They didn't do anything with it. It didn't go anywhere. It didn't turn into engagement. There wasn't the nuance there. So I would say that you can spend millions of dollars for awareness and still lack authority. And what you need is that visibility with the strategy in place, which is what lends itself to why I created Good News. 

[00:09:10] Susan Barry: So in that example, in that Fashion Week example, what, what should have been the next step? Like, okay, a million impressions in one minute. Now what? 

[00:09:20] Shanté Micah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, This was not my campaign, so I could have all the hot takes. Right?

[00:09:27] Susan Barry: Right. Easier said than done.

[00:09:29] Shanté Micah: Yeah. So going into it, as I critiqued it afterwards, they were not ruthlessly clear on what they were trying to accomplish with that, and so the output of that was, there was no strategy to amplify it or atomize it, so to turn it into things that had legs. It's like when we talk about evergreen content, it's the thing that you produce once and it really can live on forever. You reshare it, you repurpose, you snippet it, you turn it into different pieces of content. A podcast can be 20 different types of content, a hundred different snippets. They had no plan for that. So what dropped off was this moment in time that was a big moment.

[00:10:15] Susan Barry: And an expensive moment it sounds like.

[00:10:18] Shanté Micah: A very expensive moment, yes. And it wasn't worth it, which is wild.

[00:10:23] Susan Barry: Speaking of things sort of not working the way that they were planned to, what do you think is broken right now about the way that many hospitality companies approach public relations? 

[00:10:39] Shanté Micah: I would say overly focusing on the press release game where they push out announcements that are exciting to them, but no perspective as to why it would be exciting to a stranger. So you have to connect those dots even in a press release. And it's the same for winning awards. You think, well, I won the award. I make an announcement about award. That award goes into a trophy case. Done. But an award is an opportunity to be part of relevant cultural conversations. You know, there's stories behind it. So I would say the one and done, which is the press release strategy with no connection to anything else. No conversation starters, same with awards, and just thinking, well, I'm doing PR. If I'm doing press releases and awards, I'm doing PR.

[00:11:26] Susan Barry: It's almost like getting the pickup is the goal versus the actual business goal, which is to like, I don't know, get more customers or increase revenue or more deals or whatever the thing is.

[00:11:40] Shanté Micah: Right, right. Yeah. It is the outcome of how does this foster more conversations about our brand, how does this improve sales velocity? So how are these credibility markers that are very easy credibility markers? It's the same way, I can say I wrote a book. No one ever has to read the book, but they assume. Something about me. It could be a terrible book, but they were like, Shanté wrote a book. She must know what she's talking about. It's things like that. There's credibility markers that you can infuse into so many other things, and that bottom line value is where I think even PR professionals miss the mark turning earned media into money.

[00:12:20] Susan Barry: Interesting. So I guess the flip side of that question then is how would you define good PR today, especially for B2B hospitality companies? 

[00:12:32] Shanté Micah: Good PR for them is understanding visibility with an immense amount of credibility and then creating a visibility system for that. And these are how we work at Good News is we build brand engines. So we are constantly understanding who to talk to in the space, and by who to talk to we understand their beat, their body of work and their audiences, and from that we're able to extract stories, stories that are beyond the product or service. So beyond the service of of hospitality, what is it that you're doing Well, you are probably participating in a lot of cultural moments. You're building a company that is infused with creating experiences for people. You also have employees that you're trying to support in the best way possible. So you can be part of a mental health awareness conversation. You can have benefits that you then talk about and explore into everything else. You say, oh, these are the reasons why our brand is something that a stranger should care about. And it's usually more than what you think about when it comes to like rewards and they have really great rooms. Obviously those things are really standard, right? But then beyond that, what is this next generation of buyers looking for? They're looking for brands that they resonate with. 

[00:13:57] Susan Barry: Well, and on the B2B side it's almost like an inside baseball conversation because rather than trying to attract new guests to stay at an individual hotel, hospitality companies are trying to attract each other for whatever various deals or use my software or all of the different things. Any thoughts about a B2B perspective in terms of media outreach? 

[00:14:26] Shanté Micah: A lot of it is thought leadership, which is B2B, always. You're standing, you have a point of view on the industry, on the space, on how it operates as a business and how it integrates with its various social parts. So having that thought leadership is having media visibility where you're able to share those. So like I was saying with HR, you're part of SHRM. You're part of that space and you're actively communicating, this is how we view talent and retaining top talent. Oh, there's so many topics, but it, it would boil down to thought leadership and a very strong point of view on a number of things.

[00:15:13] Susan Barry: Yeah, I think that's so difficult, especially in this industry because people there's a lot of sort of opportunistic deal making, so people want don't wanna block themselves from doing something. And so what ends up happening is that these companies try to be all things to all people all the time, meaning that they have nothing to say because they wanna say everything. 

[00:15:38] Shanté Micah: Yeah. And what's interesting is when you do have a hot take you have a way that you're saying this cannot persist. You know, this industry needs to evolve. This is what we're doing about it. That is thought leadership. That is a reason to follow you, from the brand to the executive team to whomever else is seeing that through.

[00:16:02] Susan Barry: Yeah, and it sets your company apart. I mean a night stay is a night stay at a certain point, right? Something that you have said before that I think is so smart is that brands treat media coverage as trophies instead of tools. Can you explain what you mean by that and talk about it a little bit more? 

[00:16:24] Shanté Micah: Yeah, so in the, the most condensed way is they don't use it as a way to create momentum. They just, they literally put the trophy on the wall and they're like, we did it. We got all the things, but if you're considering it as a full system, a full funnel system, then once you get a feature, a byline, a quote, whatever, it should go into a process of creating more content and then also leveraging for more opportunities within the media. So one podcast can be turned into, I mean, infinite amount of content really. Podcast is a gold mine for just sheer volume of content. A feature in a hotel publication, it could show up in your sales decks, your email nurture sequences, your LinkedIn strategy. It's if you're not amplifying it, then you really just wasted the win. 

[00:17:18] Susan Barry: Right? Well, and you're just like shouting into a cave, like, what's the point? Nobody can hear you. 

[00:17:24] Shanté Micah: Right. And what we've noticed is that you can reshare things for years to come every four to six weeks. And still a majority of your audience, four years down the line would be like, this is brand new to me. So you assume you shared it three times and you're like, oh, I've saturated, no. No. 

[00:17:41] Susan Barry: I'm so glad you said that. That is so funny to me because I was having a conversation with someone this morning about that topic, and I was giving the type of advice that I don't take myself, which is you should don't be afraid to repost, repost, repost, reshare, reshare, reshare. I still don't want to do that. Like I'm still so reticent to do it, but it's good to hear that you're seeing the same thing that I am, which is, — I mean, LinkedIn for example, which is a big channel for a lot of the folks we work with. They throttle your audience. They only about 2% of anyone sees anything at any time. So you are not gonna hit the same 2% every single time. 

[00:18:24] Shanté Micah: No, LinkedIn's terrible right now, but it is a great platform. Like it is probably the the singular platform that I would tell anyone B2B to just be on if you're gonna spend your decades spend it there. But yeah, reshare, repurpose. But if you have a pipeline of media features. Even if it's producing it at a steady but slow pace, you're still doing more than I would say 99% of other hospitality businesses out there. So you might as well further amplify that and really repurpose that into what we call engineered omnipresence. And what it is, is the perceived omnipresence, because omnipresence is somewhat impossible. But it's the perception of, oh my gosh, you guys are everywhere. That's all it is. 

[00:19:12] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every episode of Top Floor with a couple of practical, tangible tips to try either in their businesses or in their day-to-day lives. What do you think is one small shift hospitality marketers can make today to be more effective in their PR efforts?

[00:19:34] Shanté Micah: The smallest shift is that stop asking, “What do we wanna say?” when you're thinking about what announcement or a pitch that you're trying to push out there and start asking, “What does the audience of the journalists, the podcast host, the editor, the producer, what does their audience need to hear right now?” And it can be based on what's happening in the world, what's happening in business, your niche industries, those things that are happening just outside that — what are they already talking about? So that shift would be, what do I wanna say? No, what does the audience, what are they talking about? Or what do they wanna hear right now?

[00:20:17] Susan Barry: How can a hotel company build an ecosystem of credibility and visibility that you refer to? 

[00:20:25] Shanté Micah: So I wrote a book about it, and that is my framework of 20 years to make it as accessible as possible. But it boils down to three things. The first thing is that you have what we call a connecting index. A lot of people refer to it as the media list. Ours is just a bit more robust and it connects a lot more of that data, like the beat the body of work, the audience, understanding. But having places where whether it's local trade, podcasts, digital, of key media types and contacts. And then the next part of that system is having what we call a storytelling index. And these are ideas of stories that you can tell that are tailored to each of those — publications, podcasts, anything like that. And then the last part of that system is what most people they spend the least amount of time in, and this is where your open rates will either be zero or they'll be 20 to 30% better than the industry average and that is your pitch. So turning those into really powerful, really pithy, like under 200 word pitches that are custom to that journalist, to their publication, to their audience. And in that pitch, you're demonstrating, here's an idea, here's what I know your audience wants to hear about, and you demonstrate that you've done the research on it, and that's the system. If you can do those three things in a pipeline where it's just consistently working, then you have a visibility and credibility system in place. 

[00:22:06] Susan Barry: It's so interesting because you pitched me exactly the way that you just described, so I know that you put your money where your mouth is, as it were. Just because I am insatiably nosy, what sort of research did you do about Top Floor and about our show before you put the pitch together? Because it obviously worked. It was a good one. 

[00:22:30] Shanté Micah: Yeah! And we do, we get really positive responses and we know this, our clients get the same where it's like OMG, this is the best pitch. It stood out from a thousand cookie cutter pitches. We hear that all the time. And what went into it, it makes me really happy because journalists receive sometimes hundreds of pitches per day. Podcast shows…

[00:22:57] Susan Barry: I'm not even a journalist and I receive hundreds of pitches a day.

[00:23:00] Shanté Micah: Right. And you would probably say they're mostly just bad, you know, disconnected from reality. I've heard where it's like, it's just the bio. Like here's my bio, can I be on your show? So no connecting of dots. The research we put into Top Floor was, we understood not only what your show was about, but, and this is where the system we built, we're able to scale all of this. So the research, I don't have to do it just in and of myself anymore. But we went in and we basically transcribed and data connected the last, I think it was 30 episodes that you had done. And from that, we're able to tell, and we're doing this at scale, so we're doing this for a number of podcasts, but what we're able to tell is, okay, they talk about topics that we would have, something that we could resonate with. Like there's something that I, I could say I know about your audience in that. Other things would be, I know that you have guests.

[00:24:10] Susan Barry: Right. Instead of just doing solo shows.

[00:24:12] Shanté Micah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, imagine if 30% of your effort always hit the people that are like, we don't have guests. Like, what did you even listen to it? So a part of that research was actually filtering for do they accept guests? Are they actively publishing? There's, I mean, 50,000 podcasts for any one category. Just a category. But once you filter it down from those that are defunct, those who accept guests, those that are topically on point, those that are within the categories if they're overly political, maybe that's not something you wanna be part of — or maybe it is? We have a number of overlays. So with Top Floor, you surfaced as on topic, also something that we would have a mutual audience. So the rest of the research is what is that audience, what are they talking about? And then in the pitch to you, I said, I know that your audience specifically, and I named them care about, whatever. We came up with the pitch in that. I think they would be interested in, what ours was more like timely, relevant. I think I had my hot take of, I'm pretty sure the PR model as far as agency and even methodology is broken. It's operating in like 1999 and here's what I would love to propose as an idea. And yeah, it was, it was a fit. So, and it was all two wanted words. 

[00:25:47] Susan Barry: The thing that continues to come up over and over and over again in, I don't wanna get too like in the weeds for people, but the move from optimizing content for search engine optimization to optimizing content for AI-client optimization. That's not a word, but you know what I mean. So that when you're asking chat GPT for an answer to a question, how do you get your business or your content, or your thought leadership, or whatever the case may be included in those results. And the thing that I hear over and over and over again is that it's earned media. That this PR effort now needs to sort of redouble because the AI platforms are crawling earned media sources for their information. Does that ring true to you? 

[00:26:44] Shanté Micah: It does, and there's a lot of different theories as to why. Earned media sites have historically had high domain authorities, right? For the amount of content and the value of that content and the amount of traffic they're getting. So that authoritative third party content, it does rank well within the search engine results pages, regardless. Now, with AI search, it's becoming even more true where they're prioritizing pulling from those as far as search queries and pulling in earned media. So what I predict we'll see is more digital marketing agencies saying, well, we'll just do PR for you and then they'll do it in this really transactional way that doesn't fit what journalists still need and journalists want. So that outreach is gonna be the similar to link building strategies, and it's not the same. Ultimately, you might get a link, I mean, a lot of earned media, you could get a follow link or a no follow link. It's, it's sixes. You give up editorial control when it comes to earned media. But the value of that content that's produced, not only do you not have to create it yourself. Someone else creates it, you borrow their audience. But yes, AI search is prioritizing that right now. And with attribution and dark social, I would say that SEO, I mean, we're seeing organic searches like I saw a stat, which I can't, I can't really validate these things, but they're like, yeah, my, our search is down 98%. I'm like, oh!  

[00:28:20] Susan Barry: I mean, think about it. Just from your own personal search experience, do you feel like you're getting, when you search on a browser that rhymes with Boogle, do you feel like you're getting the re the quality of results that you got even five years ago? I don't. It's a mess.

[00:28:40] Shanté Micah: It is a little bit of a mess. And with AI it really is interesting 'cause it's the great equalizer when it comes to content marketing. 'cause now brands, small brands can create an immense amount of content and unfortunately with AI it's garbage in, garbage out. So we're not, we don't have this like quality assurance. I think that's — and I, I'm not a professional at this, I couldn't validate, but I do think it's one reason why they're prioritizing vetted sources, which earned media pretty vetted. We've seen major media publications doing mass layoffs. I mean, specifically in the last three years. So you have fewer journalists. Most of them are freelancers, so they're working for multiple publications at a time. Many of them have ventured into privatized media, and I do think that is the direction earned media is gonna going. So when we do all of our research, we look at podcasts, we look at local, we look at digital, we look at industry and trade, we look at Top National, but we're starting to look at things like Substack and newsletters and blogs and mediums and beehives because those news influencers that are reporting on the media, that's how earned media I is working so. I mean, I think it's true.

[00:29:58] Susan Barry: Yeah. And there's something to the idea too, of being able to tie content to a specific personality because then you know that it wasn't created by AI. Like it's sort of like this virtuous circle of who is the source and do — I guess my point is leaning into personality is now is the time to do it, if you haven't already. Point of view, personality and sort of a clear perspective for what you're thinking about. Apparently I have climbed up onto a soapbox and need to go ahead and shut up and let you talk. So let us go now to the fortune telling portion of our show. You have to predict the future and then we will come back and see if you got it right. So what is a prediction that you have about the future of public relations in the hospitality industry? 

[00:30:55] Shanté Micah: Well, to pull on what we just talked about, I do think media is, media trust is moving to people, not just companies, and it's doing it rapidly. So I would say for hospitality PR, it will become more democratized. I don't think that you have to wait for an agency or have a big retainer. You'll probably need a media system that you can operate with inside the business of your business in order to to be part of timely conversations. You won't want that disconnect. So I would say that if hospitality brands, they're investing in building in those internal capabilities, then they're ensuring their, they're future proofing their own brand. 

[00:31:42] Susan Barry: Sort of like the idea of the chief content officer or a media company within your company. That makes a lot of sense. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how companies approach storytelling, what would it be?

[00:31:58] Shanté Micah: Jargon. Remove all the jargon.

[00:32:00] Susan Barry: Can you say more about that? Because I do think that there is something about using jargon and like, I use jargon on this show all the time, and I don't always explain it because I know the audience that I'm talking to and I know that they know what RevPAR is.

[00:32:16] Shanté Micah: Right, right. So when you're talking from a brand perspective, a portion of your media pitch is going to be to trade and industry. So obviously having an understanding and authoritative point of view is that you're gonna use some of that jargon, but for the most part, you have to consider that you're speaking to the, what we call the mainstream, quote unquote. So if you are removing jargon, then you have to say things in a way that are less generic. And when you do that, it's like an exercise that your story will end up being less flat. So you're able to put it in the perspective of, the entire point of a pitch and really a story should be to make a stranger care. So that's why we have things like hooks. That's why we have deeply embedded like genuine stories, embedded into that. 

[00:33:05] Susan Barry: So I, I think what you're saying is that instead of using the shortcut of saying RevPAR, you're not telling me to say revenue per available room. You're telling me to describe revenue per available room in a different way. Is that, did I get it right? 

[00:33:21] Shanté Micah: Yeah, yeah. Meaning, intent. So people absorb it and in a way that they're, I mean, you'd be surprised at how lazy people are when it comes to listening 'cause there's just so much out there. Like it used to be that we had the attention span of like 20 seconds. Now it's of a goldfish, which is like two seconds. So you have to say things that Yes it is take saying it from a point of view that they would be like, ah, they get me.

[00:33:47] Susan Barry: Oh yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Okay folks, before we tell Shanté goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”

[00:34:04] Susan Barry: Shanté, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock?

[00:34:09] Shanté Micah: So there's a lot of stories in PR. There's so many stories in pr, especially if you've crossed over into crisis management. And the funny thing is, most of them you can never share. Because your job was to actually draft the NDA and —

[00:34:24] Susan Barry: Hide the story?

[00:34:26] Shanté Micah: Yeah. Yeah. But I will tell you that there was one particular moment I was working with a brand and I'd only been working with them, I think at that, that time it was like less than a month. I had had quite a bit of history with a couple of their executives, so they knew me. They knew a bit about my track record, but being there, they got this exciting call from someone from a production house. They said, Hey, we're doing this project, and it's going to be commissioned by Netflix, so we're doing this, this whole story, we want it to be about you. They described the story, they were just, they were like, yep, it's gonna be so great, blah, blah, blah. They were saying all the right things. And it was one of those moments where the team that had been there for a long time, they brought it to me just as like, yeah, we're gonna go tell the executive team. And I'm like, whoa, wait, wait, wait. Everything they were saying, I'm like, it sounds good. But the, the, the spidey senses were tingling.

[00:35:39 ] Susan Barry: I mean, too good to be true. Right?

[00:35:45] Shanté Micah: I mean, I'd certainly heard like things that happened like this before when you're working with big companies, but something in the way that they were telling it. So I said, let's do another follow up call. And in that we were able to ask a few more questions. Things like, well, tell me about the director that you have positioned and a number of other things, but it was like, okay, well we'll get back to you. In that research and deep, deep dives, I mean, we were going into the subreddits on these, we found out some information about this particular director where people in droves had said, hey, this particular director said that they were gonna do this story. I mean, and came in with a very, it was a much more controversial take, and it was like done deal when they came into it. So ultimately I called it, I said, no, like we're hard pass on this. By this time, the team on the ground, they had already gone to the executive team, so I had to go tell the executive team like, we're not gonna do this. And they were pretty mad. They were like, what is this person doing here? What is this Shanté doing? Who is she to? You know, there's a massive opportunity.

And what's interesting is that production like that, it takes sometimes years in the making. So a full calendar year later, this documentary hits and what would've been a full expose ended up down to a mention. And it was a full year of them thinking I had just done something really naughty, but then really had, have saved them. So do that deep work. I mean, you have to under, you have to ask very specific questions because the story that they tell you they're gonna tell might actually be somewhat accurate, but what they're not telling you is that they have any right that they could turn it into something controversial and really this director was known for that. But had we not asked about the director, had I not had enough experiences to be like, well, tell me about the team. Not just the production team, but the actual director, writers and stuff like that. But any of those services that say, Hey, we'll get you featured in top tier publications for $300. It's not a feature. Technically they could say it was a feature, but it's not. They're basically reprinting the equivalent of a press release in like these microsites that fall somewhat under top digital publications, but it's not actually doing anything for you. 

[00:38:12] Susan Barry: Exactly. Shanté Micah, thank you so much for being here. I know that our listeners got really good tips and ideas and I appreciate you riding up to the top floor.

Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/203. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like. 

[00:39:02] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 8504049630 to be featured in a future episode.