AI Visibility for Consultants: Brett Farmiloe on Unleashed

SPEAKERS

Brett Farmiloe, Will Bachman

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Brett Farmiloe. Brett is the CEO of Featured, which also has revived Help a Reporter Out, known as HARO, and I’m excited to hear about that. Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett Farmiloe  00:21

Thanks for having me.

Will Bachman  00:22

So, Brett, I had not been a heavy user, but had you know been familiar with and used briefly HARO several years ago, and then it kind of went through a little bit of a period. Before we go through that history, why don’t you, for listeners that aren’t familiar with it, give people just an overview of what is help a reporter out.

Brett Farmiloe  00:41

Sure, Help a Reporter Out. Or HARO is a free email newsletter that connects journalists with sources for stories. So, it was founded in 2008. It was acquired in 2010. It was ran for 14 years until April 2024 when it was rebranded and put into a platform called Connectively. And then it was discontinued in December of 2024, and that’s when we stepped in and said, “Hey, we’d be interested in acquiring it and bringing it back.” And so, in April 2025, we brought HARO back, and since then, we’ve sent out more than 100 million emails to subscribers.

Will Bachman  01:15

Right. So you are connecting journalists who are looking for sources for a story with people who want to be quoted to kind of help raise their profile for whatever reason?

Brett Farmiloe  01:28

Yeah, exactly. So I know that a lot of your audience is probably familiar with like GLG or Alpha, you know, AlphaSights, right? Alpha sites. Yeah. So basically, HARO is that for journalists. So it’s any journalist can basically raise their hand and say, “I need this source for a story,” and then three times a day we’ll summarize all those different requests that we receive and send out the same email version. And if you could be helpful, just reply directly to the journalist.

Will Bachman  01:55

Okay, and tell us a little bit about both sides. So let’s start with the journalist side. At least what I recall is you had to be working at a website that you know the publisher side is you know meet some minimum requirements. At least that’s what I recall for the journalist side.

Brett Farmiloe  02:15

Yeah. So I mean, every request that we get, we look at and we approve and some of the different criteria that we’re looking at is the journalist actually a journalist is the publication that they’re writing for a place that our subscribers would be interested in in submitting insights to so we reject about 32% of all journalist requests that we receive because we really want to maintain the quality and trust on both sides,

Will Bachman  02:42

yeah. So, do does the publisher need to meet some minimum threshold of you know website you know prominence or number of visitors or domain reputation or anything like that?

Brett Farmiloe  02:57

Yeah, we kind of look at it all in a blender. I think that the minimum domain authority that we look at is just 20, so just as a start. But there’s exceptions, you know. Sometimes there’s a prominent podcast that might not have a domain authority of 20, but has a listenership that you know is good. So that’s why I think that’s important for us to not have like these strict you know, guidelines, and instead, media is changing so dramatically that the value of an opportunity for a source is dramatically shifting and changing, and that’s why I think the guidelines have to change with it.

Will Bachman  03:36

Okay, and tell us about on the expert side, the people who want to get quoted. How does that whole process work? Do you have to pay, or you know how does it work to get vetted or qualified or get onto your platform?

Brett Farmiloe  03:49

Yeah. So HARO is completely free. It’s supported by newsletter ads. So at the top of every HARO edition, you’re going to see some sponsored ad, and that’s the that’s where the money comes from. So the sources are able to sign up at helpreporterdotcom. Anyone can do it, and then you will start to three times a day get these emails, and you can review the emails itself and reply when you have something helpful to share for that for that journalist. So that that’s basically how it works, and it’s a free, accessible way to land earn media.

Will Bachman  04:25

So let’s say that I want to be an expert and try to get quoted, but I don’t want to get inquiries about household products or the best way to you know buy school supplies or the best you know, cosmetic or stuff like that. So I want to just get more business kind of consulting, sort of, you know, that sort of range of things. Can you opt into certain maybe categories of queries?

Brett Farmiloe  04:53

Yeah. So there’s a there’s a few different categories, and you can subscribe to those specific categories. So if you don’t want lifestyle and. Entertainment, you could just opt for the business and finance queries, so you could do that. However, it’s still not the perfect thing. The two other brands that we own and operate really help streamline and consolidate the time spent monitoring these queries. So, featured is a copilot for public relations. We have a monitor HARO workflow where you could just in a natural language prompt say, “Hey, I want to focus on these type of queries. Alert me via Slack or via email at this particular time when there’s a match.” And so you could really get granular in that regard. And that’s a free workflow that you could set up, and that’s it featured. And then Connectively is essentially HARO in a platform, so it lists any given time. There’s about 700 open journalist requests on Connectively, and you’re able to kind of scroll through that search. You’re able to set up keyword matches so that when there is an exact keyword match, you could get alerted via email. So it’s kind of just deciding which platform fits best.

Will Bachman  06:02

Okay, so I’m sorry. Walk me through again a little bit. So connectively, or maybe you want to show it to us. Maybe we can do a demo. And for those of you who are on audio listening, we will be posting the video of this on the Umbrex website. We’ll put a link in the show notes, and if you will also take some screenshots and we’ll put them on the Umbrex website, so you can, if you don’t want to watch the whole video, while Brett gets ready to share. Okay, so we’re looking right now. I’ll just narrate what I see. So I mean, I’m seeing your email, HARO queries for October 21 morning edition, and we have lifestyle entertainment. So I’m looking at the index. There’s lifestyle entertainment. There’s six requests there. There’s travel. Three requests. And there’s business and finance. Oh, let’s look at that one. Metals recycling forecast and economic outlook. Okay. And then how environmental certifications are beneficial for auto recyclers. Interesting. Then we have health and pharma. Five queries there: technology and general. So curated. Yeah.

Brett Farmiloe  07:06

So so basically, you know, every day, three times a day, this is the email that goes out. So you have queries from you know Huffington Post, Washington Examiner, Women’s Health, and more. You could scroll down here and basically say, okay, yeah, I’m one of these people who can who can submit on this. How AI is changing IT and financial services.

Will Bachman  07:29

Okay, let’s take let’s take that one as just an example. And this one is the publisher is Freshworks. I think I saw. Yeah,

Brett Farmiloe  07:35

yeah. And so in here, you could basically look at here’s the query that the that the person is requesting, so they’re looking for experts who can talk about how AI is impacting IT service delivery inside mid-sized financial services firms. So pretty specific. You could go check out the reporter. So if you wanted to go research this person, you can go check out their journalist profile, see recent HARO queries that they’ve put out there, recent articles that they’ve written, things of that nature. So they

Will Bachman  08:07

and it does have their name, does have the person’s name.

Brett Farmiloe  08:10

Yep,

Will Bachman  08:10

and tells them what what that they work for. Fresh works and gives the name, so you can see stuff. Correct.

Brett Farmiloe  08:17

Talks about the deadline of when you need to respond by gives the outlet, and then it gives this email address that you reply back to. You could see that it is a masked email address, so it’s not just bread atfeeddotcom. It is a masked email, so that you’re not spamming the journalist inbox and collecting, you know, and building a email contact list. So,

Will Bachman  08:40

so you and how does it work? You, if I click on that email address, what pops up?

Brett Farmiloe  08:46

So you basically just put this in. I think if I click on this, it’s going to open Outlook, and I’m a Gmail user, so I’m just going to copy this email. I’m going to put in my subject line. I’m going to put in my my pitch based off of what this query looks like. And oftentimes, you know, the way to be most effective on HARO is to follow this HARO acronym. So if you’re thinking about how to pitch, I use the HARO acronym to be helpful, be authentic, be relevant, and be on time. If you follow those, to essentially say, okay, how can I be helpful to this journalist and help them do their job. Well, they’re looking for an expert who could talk about how AI is impacting IT service delivery inside a mid-sized financial services firm. If I’m a enterprise-level financial services firm, I might not be the best fit. If I’m a independent, you know, consultant who services mid-sized financial services firms. Maybe I’ve got an angle. So, how can you be helpful? Authentic is don’t use AI to just reply to these. We check every single pitch for AI detection, and we find that about 21% of all pitches generated through HARO are 100% AI generated. That’s

Will Bachman  09:59

1. I’m surprised it’s not.

Brett Farmiloe  10:00

Yeah. So we and then we see about 35% of journalists opt out of AI pitches entirely. So if we flag your pitch as AI generated and the journalist has opted out, we’re going to reply back to you as soon as you hit send to say, “Hey, your pitch was flagged by AI. You really need to revise it before it can be submitted.” So it returns back to the sender gives them a chance to revise it, and then they could send. So you’ve got the authentic, relevant is essentially you know follow these instructions as best you can, and then on time is hey the deadline is October 23 at 1pm. Eastern time. That’s when the journalist has got to submit their stuff. So the sooner that you get that pitch over to them before their deadline, the better.

Will Bachman  10:42

So you’re running, you’re indicating to the journalist some kind of either pangram score equivalent for AI detection. And what do you tell the journalist? You know, sort of some kind of score between zero and 100% chance that it’s AI generated, something like that.

Brett Farmiloe  10:59

Exactly. So when it lands in the inbox, there’s not an AI generation score attached to that email. However, we do offer a journalist dashboard on HARO, so the journalist can go in, they could log into their dashboard. There’s all the AI detection scores there on a score of one to 100, and then they could just one-click reply back with templates to all these different sources, because on average, journalists is going to get about 42 pitches per query, and so to reply back to all those folks is kind of a bit of work. So the dashboard helps journalists streamline that workflow.

Will Bachman  11:35

Okay, so don’t just hook this up to some kind of agent and have it reply on your behalf because that would get you

Brett Farmiloe  11:43

banned.

Will Bachman  11:44

Get you banned. Yeah, because

Brett Farmiloe  11:46

because like I said, you know, HARO’s free, and to keep it quality and trusted, we monitor the source side extensively. So if I think we ban someone every two, oh, it’s uh, we ban someone a lot. I think that it’s like definitely once every half hour we’re banning someone from HARO from using it again.

Will Bachman  12:09

Okay, all right. So write these things up yourself, and try to be helpful, authentic, relevant, and on time. And you know the don’t just wait till one minute before the deadline. But if you can get it in a couple days before the deadline, imagine that you get a better chance as it be quoted.

Brett Farmiloe  12:29

Yep, definitely. So you’ve got this, and then the two other things that I mentioned of how can you actually monitor this stuff? Because to get three emails a day at 5:30am. Eastern, 12:30pm. Eastern, and then 5:30pm. Eastern time. It’s a lot. So you could just come in here. You could set up at featureddotcom/workflows. You could go to the Monitor HARO workflow, and for this, you could just say match me with queries about. Let’s just say public relations because that’s the spot that I’m in. You could put on filters, so your minimum domain authority if you just want high quality publications, let’s just say 60 and above, and then you could deliver it to you via email or Slack, and you could set how often this actually runs, so I’ve got a daily run, and it’s at 8am. That I’ll get an email with all matches, and then I just turn on that workflow, and so now that starts to go into my inbox or Slack, and just saves me all the time of opening three emails a day,

Will Bachman  13:36

and then it would give you one email that lists just the ones that are a fit.

Brett Farmiloe  13:40

Yep, that’s right.

Will Bachman  13:42

Um, and is featured? What’s the pricing for that? Is that one? Yeah. So,

Brett Farmiloe  13:48

so featured has a free plan, and it’s priced based off of how you pay for Claude or ChatGPT. So it’s usage based. So the more AI consumption that you use, the bigger subscription that you need. So most users, if they’re going to go set up a monitor HARO workflow, and that’s all they’re going to do, it’s a free service. And then the way that you know what featured is, it’s a copilot for public relations. So you could essentially get connected and search journalist requests. You could find podcast to pitch. You could do a GEO audit. You could go find influencers or creators across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. You’d find speaking events, apply for awards, send a press release, find Substacks to pitch. All of these different things within PR in a centralized place.

Will Bachman  14:39

Oh, okay, that’s pretty cool. So find TV stations, Substacks. So if you wanted to find Substacks on some particular topic, you could search there. Yeah.

Brett Farmiloe  14:50

Do you have a?

Will Bachman  14:53

Oh, why don’t we say consulting? Find Substacks that cover consulting.

Brett Farmiloe  14:57

Yeah. Cool. So. This is just a natural language prompt, and right now it’s searching for Substacks that cover consulting. And here we go. We’ve got 40 Substacks that cover consulting here. In these cards, they’ve got the publication match, who the news Substack newsletter is, who the person is. Richard

Will Bachman  15:17

Millington is a is a friend of mine, and and we’re actually hosting an event with Richard in in in a couple weeks. There

Brett Farmiloe  15:24

you go. So yeah, it’s got Richard’s you know social media accounts, so you could go research Richard. And basically, you know, for anyone that’s looking to to do whether that’s Substack, whether that’s pitching journalists, podcasts, whatever it is, this is a really good discovery tool to now say, okay, I’ve never heard of Richard, never heard of the Substack, but I’m gonna go subscribe. So you could go visit the publication, subscribe. You could also see that his Substack DMs are open. We see about 91% of all Substacks that are indexed and featured have open DMs, and there’s about a little over 38,000 Substacks that you could search within featured, and you saw how quick that is two seconds to get connected with 40 different you know substacks.

Will Bachman  16:08

Wow, okay, that’s pretty good. And how does that compare to just going on Substack itself and typing in the search bar for consulting? What do you get here that you’re not getting if you just searched on Substack itself?

Brett Farmiloe  16:20

Well, I think that regardless of Substack or any different mechanism, it’s about being able to just search in a in a natural language and being able to say, okay, just I’m going to type in my prompt and I’m going to get connected to the right folks. PR is just really confusing in 2026 because it’s not one thing; it is many, many different things. And so the kind of the power of featured is, you know, you could come in here and say, “I’m looking to increase my AI visibility. Please connect me with stuff that I need to get connected with, and then allow me to execute.” And now you could search across, you know, not only just Substacks, but all of these different things. You could probably find an open journalist request, if you will, to start, you know, actually executing on your PR campaigns.

Will Bachman  17:06

And so, explain to me a little bit more about how the pricing works. So, do you is it’s basically kind of by usage, by token usage to some degree? Do you plug it into your own ChatGPT or Claude subscription or or explain me how that part works.

Brett Farmiloe  17:24

Yeah, so it’s it’s all usage based. We have an MCP, so you’re able to use featured within Claude or within ChatGPT. And basically, the the if you’ve got any workflows that have been set up, for example, I’ve got like a competitor visibility workflow, a media mentions workflow. So this is always monitoring whenever our brands are being mentioned. So all of those workflows consume some sort of tokens, and so each plan has an allotment of AI tokens. And if you’re really reliant on featured, then you ultimately subscribe to one of our general other plans. Plans start at $39 a month, so you got a $39 a month Lite plan, I think a $99 a month Pro plan, and a $299 a month Pro Plus plan.

Will Bachman  18:10

Okay, so if you’re just using it to monitor HARO and maybe doing a few searches like we just did, that’s going to be free.

Brett Farmiloe  18:19

Yep.

Will Bachman  18:20

Wow. Okay, this is a pretty cool tool. So this is featured. I think got the idea there. And on the so on the the other thing, and so then featured would send you that daily email or hourly, whatever you want, for the requests that meet your criteria, so that you can you don’t have to sort through all the lifestyle or things that aren’t relevant to you.

Brett Farmiloe  18:46

Exactly. Yeah. Yep. So you got you got all that stuff, and then our third brand that we’ve got is just Connectively. It’s you’re able to come in here and search within a platform. So you kind of scroll through here if you want and take a look at some different stuff. So got one for the New York Times that’s expiring in a day Yahoo Life and basically if you’re a match for this you could just answer within the platform so you could basically say okay I’ve got something here write my answer go ahead and submit it you could see how many answers have been submitted how many have been selected? So for this one, it seems like we actually got a pretty good shot. You know, it’s two answers that have been submitted, and here’s the journalist that’s requesting. So it’s a little more robust and comprehensive outside of your standard HARO email.

Will Bachman  19:34

Okay. So with the basic HARO, do you is there a platform where you can go and sort of manage your thing on the web, or is that what Connectively is?

Brett Farmiloe  19:45

That’s what Connectively is.

Will Bachman  19:46

Okay, so if you want to do more than just replying to emails, then you have to track everything yourself, and there’s no kind of platform. If you want to have the platform to log in and see the ones that you submitted things for, and if you’re you know gotten. Reaction or which ones got published, then that Connectively is is is the answer for you.

Brett Farmiloe  20:05

Exactly. Yeah. Submit your answer. Track it from in review to when it’s been selected, all the way to published or or not selected.

Will Bachman  20:13

Okay. All right. Um, and what’s the pricing for Connectively?

Brett Farmiloe  20:19

Connectively, it’s free for three submissions a month, and then if you want more than that, our Lite plan starts at $19 a month. That comes with 10 submissions, and then our pro is $49 a month. That comes with unlimited, and then our business plan is $99 a month. That’s unlimited plus API access.

Will Bachman  20:38

Okay, and how does Connectively pair up with the featured. So if I wanted to have within Connectively, or somehow if I want to also have that, hey, just show me the ones, filter it for the ones that are relevant to my area of expertise. Can we do that? Yeah. How do they work together?

Brett Farmiloe  20:56

Absolutely. So beyond just HARO Connectively, there’s a lot of different journalist requests platforms that are out there. So you could actually set up a journalist request workflow. This is going to monitor HARO. This is going to monitor Connectively, and then platforms like X, Substack, LinkedIn, any different platform that a journalist is making a request on, and it’s the same exact thing. What’s your context? Hey, find me opportunities about consulting. Let’s set that minimum domain authority. Let’s set the notification preferences, and let’s let it rip. And so that now saves you. Basically, what we found is that PR agencies have some poor intern that’s spending like five hours a day monitoring all these different things and trying to respond back to it, and instead of having the intern work five hours a day doing monitoring, AI actually does a really good job at that. So that’s what Featured does. It does all the monitoring, so that person who’s in the seat can focus on writing a great pitch.

Will Bachman  21:55

Okay. Now, does Connectively have different queries, different reporter queries than HARO. It

Brett Farmiloe  22:02

does, yeah. So Connectively has cross postings of HARO. So since we own both HARO and Connectively, the problem with HARO is that you got to wait for this email to go out. And some sometimes a journalist might have posted this request like three hours ago, and so it goes live on Connectively as soon as we approve it, so you get early access to HARO queries on Connectively. Plus, you get all these other different. Like as a publisher, you could come in and you can request content. So we’ve got a variety of other queries that go live on Connectively that aren’t on HARO.

Will Bachman  22:38

Okay, so HARO is a subset of Connectively. So everything on HARO would be on Connectively, and then Connectively has additional queries.

Brett Farmiloe  22:47

Yeah, most things on HARO get cross-posted over to Connectively. Some of the stuff that doesn’t is like a gift bag request and you know stuff like that. But for the most part, you’re able to monitor HARO effectively on both featured and connectively.

Will Bachman  23:02

Okay, what are some of your tips for the experts who want to get quoted? You mentioned your HARO Mnemonic, but beyond that, are there tips that you’ve seen where some people are just really successful and smart about how they craft their pitch. Like, should you try to stand out and say not something that’s not obvious or something that’s contrarian or something that’s like clever or how do you stand out to get quoted?

Brett Farmiloe  23:30

Well, I think that we covered it with the HARO acronym, and I think that the larger thing that’s happening that’s interesting to your audience is the fact that customer referrals are changing. I think that you know, I ran a, I was a marketing consultant for a number of years. Ran a marketing agency for 10. Customer referrals were always our number one source to grow business. And today, that referral nature is changing over to having AI be your referring source. People trust their AI. They’re going to look to it for some sort of referral, and so really the question is like, how do you increase your visibility and get recommended by AI? And for that, I think that it requires a framework to think through. And the framework that I would have is also another helpful acronym, which is LLM: Listen, Land, and Multiply. I think that if you’re looking to increase your mentions online, it starts with listening. And so we went through the monitoring HARO workflow. Another one that we’ve got is a GEO visibility. So you could basically run a GEO visibility audit for your website, and you could now figure out what are the different websites that are actually being cited by AI, and this is important because the listening aspect is figuring out okay where do I even focus my efforts. It’s one thing to kind of spray and pray. It’s another thing to actually have a cheat code to figure out what AI is citing. So you you’ve got to listen on all of this stuff and. And then it’s about landing the coverage, and that’s really to the nature of your question of how do we actually land the coverage that matters. For that, I think that there’s a couple different things within this. There’s the drafting the pitch itself, and I think that the HARO acronym is a nice thing for that. I think it’s also going back to okay to land the thing, you got to listen to it. So you mentioned your friends. It’s not about just jumping in and blindly pitching that person. Maybe you subscribe to the Substack and figure out what he’s actually talking about, and listen to him for a while before you actually make the pitch. And then you know it’s multiplying it. I think that once you land it, it’s about PR is no longer a place where the placement is the finish line. It’s now the starting point. And so, if you’re ever on a podcast, if you ever have a media mention, it’s about putting that media mention into a press page that’s hosted on your website. It’s about putting it into a social media update that you could post on the founders’ LinkedIn, it’s about having a subsequent blog post that goes deeper into a topic and then expands on that. Because ultimately, you’ve got to take these placements, and you’ve got to be able to now make sure that AI can find it, can cite it, understand it, and have multiple perspectives.

Will Bachman  26:18

Okay.

Brett Farmiloe  26:22

So here’s we’re looking at now the GEO audit that came back for for Featureddotcom. It looks like we looked at best PR software for startups. We had three of the four AI engines out of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini actually mention Featured, And perplexity didn’t, so featured is encouraging us to encouraging us to look at perplexity, and then below here it’s basically giving us the cheat code to say, all right, if you want to go get featured in perplexity, here’s where you start. You could start with PR. Co that has a best newsroom software guide, and so if we wanted to go get featured here, we could go open this up. We could draft a pitch to this person, and then we could go send that pitch to say, “Hey, it’d be awesome if you could include featured in this newsroom software comparison guide for for 2026.”

Will Bachman  27:18

Okay, what has your research shown about the impact of getting quoted? And oh, and I, I’ll add to that question: How will someone know when they’re pitch when they’re proposing for a project when they’re pitching if they’re gonna if that publication will include a link to your website, or just mention the name of your company, or because that might have an impact as well. So talk to me a little about the impact and and about links as well.

Brett Farmiloe  27:54

Yeah, definitely. So you know, we actually met Will and I met at Ahrefs and their Evolve conference, and Ahrefs actually did a really good study about the correlation of a company being mentioned in Google AI overviews, and they studied 75,000 brands, and they found that brand mentions were the single highest correlation of appearing in a Google AI overview, and so what that means is that I don’t want to say that links don’t matter, but brand mentions definitely matter. And so that for decades we’ve been trained on, oh, does this include a link? Is that link going to be a do-follow link, a no-follow link? And now I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona. Waymo’s are driving everywhere. Google knows how to have autonomous vehicles. They know how to correlate whether a brand mention should connect to an AI overview. And so I think that you know that’s one thing to look at. And in our research, we did a featured AI citation report.

We found that about 78% of brands didn’t appear in the answer that they wanted to appear for, and 92% of websites that were from the brand didn’t get cited. And so, what that means is a couple things. Number one is if you’re thinking about this from how to get cited by AI, I put that this as almost applying for a job. When you apply for a job, you have a resume, and then you have references. And with AI citations, your resume is your website. But what really matters is the references. What is the web saying about you and your brand? And that’s going to be more reliable for an AI to cite.

So you, as a marketing person, want to focus on how do I strengthen the quantity and quality of what’s being said about me online? So I think that’s really an interesting component. Where in our research, 64% of all citations were from earned media coverage, and only 1.7% was a brand. On a company website,

Will Bachman  30:02

so that’s earned media. What about social media, Reddit, LinkedIn, other Instagram, other kinds of social media? How important is that,

Brett Farmiloe  30:14

man? I think it’s going to become way more important, way, way, way more important in the years to come. The reason being is is you know where do you get your news today? And I think that we’ve seen newspaper publications, you know, obviously like their traffic is just being decimated, their newsrooms are being decimated, and on the flip side of this, you’re seeing creators grow their audience in a significant way, and people are tuning into Substacks, to podcasts, to you know social media feeds to get their information. And increasingly, I think that if that’s where consumers are trusting to get their information, LLMs are going to to trust that as well, and it’s going to impact how these summaries and answers are generated.

So we were already seeing it, you know. I think that we saw a over-indexing and then under-indexing of of Reddit specifically this year, where overnight, you know, for the last couple years, Reddit has been the darling of AI citations, and then overnight, for whatever reason, ChatGPT basically saw an 80% decrease of Reddit citations within their within their summaries, and so we’re still finding our way. Like this is a very early stage, and social media is one of those question marks that, for like the last two decades, it’s always factored into. Well, how does social media impact search rankings. Oh well, let’s launch Google Plus, and then let’s do away with Google Plus. And so I think that just like search AI is going to find its footing with social.

Will Bachman  31:52

What’s your perspective on the relative return that someone would get on getting quoted on one of the publishers through HARO versus say you know at the conference that we went to there was several firms that will offer to basically kind of get an article placed by you and you just pay you know it’s pay to play and that you pay and they will get an article placed about your firm somewhere, either written by you or written by someone else. Whatever you do, sort of pay and they’ll get it placed. What’s the and some of them seem to be at like legit publishers. You know, there’ll be domain reputations of 70 plus where you can get an article just you know placed. What’s your perspective on the potential impact of either direction?

Brett Farmiloe  32:46

Yeah, my personal belief, having you know been in the search engine optimization space for a decade before, is the harder it is, probably the more long term reliable it is. So if you’ve discovered a hack where you could you know, drop a couple grand and have a syndicated article, and immediately overnight start to see results from that. It’s only a matter of time before that starts to become less effective. So, if it’s accessible to everyone, it won’t work long term. That’s my personal belief because it just gets exploited. Marketers ruin everything,

Will Bachman  33:22

and so eventually the AIs get smart to the fact that that someone is just paying for those articles, which maybe happened with Reddit. I’ve heard about at least one firm. There’s probably many. Well, that will you just pay them, and they’ll have this army of redditors talk about your brand on the platform. So maybe that’s what happened, where people just started paying for it, and then OpenAI said, “Oh, turn it down.”

Brett Farmiloe  33:52

I think the moral of the story, like you know, I’ve worked with over 500 small businesses and their marketing efforts, and the moral of the story is like focus on your business, focus on building a great business, and I think that where the future of marketing and PR is going is that it’s all going to become interconnected. So the future that we’re building towards is you have all of these incredible data sources and connectors that can inform your PR efforts, and what I mean by that is like we envision a future where you connect your Google Search Console.

Maybe if you’re like an e-commerce, you connect your Shopify store, you connect your database to the stuff that you’re doing on a daily basis, your GitHub repo. And so now all of a sudden you have Featured that’s looking at these different data sources and then connecting it to all the stuff that we just looked at on our screen: Substacks to pitch, podcast to be on, journalist requests, and I think that if you just focus on building a great business, the future is going to be an interconnected one that does the does the monitoring, does the drafting, gets it all the way to submission, and then it just has you there to say. Yep, looks good. Submit, and I think that that’s going to be the future. So if you focus on building a great business, I think that the PR stuff is going to start catching up, so that it becomes less complicated and more effective for you.

Will Bachman  35:13

Brett, tell us a little bit about your background prior to you know getting involved with HARO and Featured.

Brett Farmiloe  35:19

Yeah, this is my fourth business, and started out as a corporate financial auditor, and then took a couple. wasn’t sure that that was the path for me. Took a couple road trips across the country in an RV, interviewing people about their career paths. Wait,

Will Bachman  35:35

what? Wait, what?

Brett Farmiloe  35:36

Yeah, yeah. So, so all right. So, long story short.

Will Bachman  35:40

No, no, no. Long story long.

Brett Farmiloe  35:42

Long story long. I majored in accounting. wasn’t sure that that was the path for me. So I was like, you know what? Let me go talk to. I made a list of every single person that I would want to meet, talk to, learn from companies that I would want to work for, and I lined up more than 75 interviews across the U.S. Bought an RV, took a couple friends, and started to go to all of these different places around the country to just sit down with folks and talk to them for an hour and figure out where were they where were they at 22 years old? How did they get to where they are? And I documented these stories for all these college kids who were like, “Dude, I have no idea what I want to do after graduation. I need some sort of direction, and so we created this career education resource for college students to say, “How did this person get to where they are?” And did that over the course of two summers. The first road trip in 2006 was like, you know, we took this RV off of basically it’s the same RV from Breaking Bad, so it was like the broke down a lot, and then the and then I did the auditing thing, and the website started to take off. Like all of these people started to discover the interviews that we did, and so I said, you know what? Let me go back out on the road. So quit the job, got a corporate sponsor, and then did 38 states, 16,000 miles, 300 interviews, wrote a book about

Will Bachman  37:00

1. 300 interviews. What was what was the book?

Brett Farmiloe  37:02

It’s called Pursue the Passion. So Pursue

Will Bachman  37:04

the Passion. All right. Yeah. What year was this? When did you do this?

Brett Farmiloe  37:07

This was 2007. So this was uh it was awesome. Like I mean, we interviewed everyone from Michael Jordan’s footwear designer to a fainting goat farmer to CEOs to janitors. It was just freaking rad.

Will Bachman  37:22

And who who was your corporate sponsor?

Brett Farmiloe  37:24

So it was jobbingdotcom. So jobbingdotcom was a local job board, and they ultimately lost out to Indeed, but they had some resilience, some grit. They became Paradox, which is a conversational recruitment assistant, and they just got acquired by Workday last year for a life-altering sum of money.

Will Bachman  37:51

Oh, good for them! I was going to ask you. It sounded like it might be an Indeed type of company that would have sponsored this. So, so you were you were going around doing all these interviews, and had you kind of lined them up in advance, or would you meet people on the street, or

Brett Farmiloe  38:05

a little of both? So the first road trip, it was very much an advance. Second road trip, it was advance plus organic. So leaving the white space to when you show up, you call the local newsroom, and you’re like, “This is what we’re doing. Who should we talk to?” And the news the newsroom was an incredible source for us because number one you get press number two you also just like get exposed to the most interesting people that they’ve covered over the last year.

Will Bachman  38:31

Oh, so they would do a story about you sometimes, like oh the the cameraman is coming.

Brett Farmiloe  38:35

That was typically it, man. We roll the RV in, get on the local TV station, get on the 11 o’clock news or whatever, and then yeah, you’re meeting the next day with you know two three people that they recommended.

Will Bachman  38:47

In 2007 time period, were you publishing this like videos on YouTube? I guess it would have been early days or what? We had

Brett Farmiloe  38:55

some we had some really janky video. Looking back, we went to like Best Buy and got a held handheld camera and was just walking around the country with it. So in hindsight, the quality is embarrassing, but the content and the concept still is true. Like I mean, I tell this to students all the time that the most powerful hack that you have is in your wallet. It’s a little student ID card, and that student ID card gives you permission to talk with anyone on this planet because everyone remembers what it was like to not know what they wanted to do and having all those big life questions. And so that student ID card really allows you to connect with anyone. So I tell that to students all the time. Now you got LinkedIn, where you just send a DM. Like back in the day, we had to cold call people and you know guess email addresses and stuff like that.

Will Bachman  39:48

Well, that is such a compelling story. I’ve been advising you know when students reach out to me, advising them to do something much narrower version of that. Of oh, you’re interested in whatever chemical engineering is a career. Well. Why don’t you go and reach out to a bunch of alums of your school who are chemical engineers and ask about their career? And one out of 50 of them is going to probably offer you a job when you graduate. So just you know, no job search required.

Brett Farmiloe  40:12

And that 30 minutes will save you 30 months of pain and agony. Of if it’s not a not a fit, right? 30 minutes, you can walk into that environment immediately. Get a sense of do I belong in this building, and do I belong, and do I connect with this person that does the job that I want? And if usually in the blink test, you’re able to kind of sniff it out and say, well, I thought it was going to be this, but it’s really this.

Will Bachman  40:38

Okay, so that was a pretty successful summer. So you’re, I guess about 23 years old at this point. And tell us about your journey after that.

Brett Farmiloe  40:45

Yeah. So then we the sponsor acquired the site. Oh,

Will Bachman  40:50

really? Nice.

Brett Farmiloe  40:51

And so we went to go work for them for a number of years. Then I I quit to launch a mobile phone or mobile app company, which failed. This was at you know at the time where mobile apps were it, and I launched a one hit wonder, and it inspired me to then try to commoditize that. What was your one

Will Bachman  41:12

hit wonder?

Brett Farmiloe  41:12

The one hit wonder was I’m a San Francisco Giants fan, and I live in Scottsdale, and so the San Francisco Giants won the World Series for the first time in 58 years, and they announced a World Series tour, and or like a World Series trophy tour, and it wasn’t it wasn’t coming to Scottsdale, and so I I basically created an app that allowed me to augment my photo to take a picture with the World Series trophy, and also dress myself up into like all of this this gear that signified the World Series run, and so basically all these San Francisco Giants fans like downloaded this app and started reposting themselves with the World Series trophy. And this is like early, early when photo augmentation wasn’t a thing. And so, so then I was like, well, all sports teams can do this. Like all sports teams can. So I did that, and I learned a couple things.

Number one, if the market’s not big enough, the business won’t succeed. So there’s only 300 minor league baseball teams in the U.S. So you know if your conversion rate’s 10%, you get 30 customers. Your margins aren’t great because I can’t build mobile apps. I have to hire a developer, and then the monetization is not good either because it’s a one-time fee with a small monthly recurring. So close that, and then I helped the actor Hugh Jackman launch a charitable coffee company. Just like was totally lucky. A friend was like, “Hey, you know, I have this client. We need someone to do their social. Will you do it? And it turned out to be Hugh Jackman and Laughing Man Coffee and Tea. So launched that. I was it was me, Hugh, a barista and a co-owner, and took that from zero to getting acquired by Keurig, and then and then I launched my own marketing agency. Did that for 10 years. Basically, I was a independent consultant, and then I got my website to rank on page one for the term digital marketing company, and then actually started a digital marketing company. So scaled that to acquisition at the end of 2021, and then focused full time on on fFatured.

Will Bachman  43:19

And then featured, did you start that with funding, or did you come in with?

Brett Farmiloe  43:25

Yeah. So we started that. It’s venture backed, and yeah, that was in January of 2022.

Will Bachman  43:32

Oh, okay. And why did HARO get shut down? For why did the previous owner shut it down?

Brett Farmiloe  43:39

Well, it doesn’t make a lot of money. I think you know if it’s free and supported by newsletter ads, and it’s operated by a multi-billion-dollar company. Ultimately, if someone comes along and says, “What resources resources are we dedicating to this? What is it? What resources are needed to make sure that it continues to succeed?” And oh yeah, how much money does it make? And so I think those are some of the questions that that got asked, and ultimately it was like, well, this actually requires a lot of resources. Like to maintain the quality and trust for a simple email product, you got to build in a lot of guardrails and a lot of stuff behind the scenes to make sure that that authentic connection happens. So we were willing to do it. It makes sense for the size of our business, and you know I think it was one of the luckiest things that’s happened.

Will Bachman  44:26

I’m curious. This is getting into the weeds, but we’re now at you know minute 45. It’s great, and we’ll wrap up here by the top of the hour. Can you tell us anything about what you’ve learned about email deliverability? Because you’re sending out 100 million emails, and there’s all sorts of constantly changing rules, and Google and Microsoft, and putting you into spam folders, and the you know the folders off to the right that no one checks, and you know SPF and DKIM, and but what have you learned about staying on top of all? That so that you continue to get delivered.

Brett Farmiloe  45:04

I would say email still works. It’s like one of the most constant marketing channels over the last couple decades. So during my run as the marketing consultant, I was the first Mailchimp expert in their directory in the U.S., that was west of the Mississippi. So there was two people in the U.S. I was one of them that was a Mailchimp expert, and so I’ve worked with hundreds of different brands on email deliverability and marketing. And the like, the crazy thing is that we all still check email. How many ways to communicate? Email still happens. I think that the core thing is send the right message to the right person, like, and then all the other stuff you don’t really have to worry about. Yeah, there’s technical things, set up the DKIM and you know the DMARC records and whatever. But if you can segment your audience and send that audience a good message and deliver value in the inbox, then you win. And that’s why HARO works. Is that why the heck would anyone subscribe to three emails a day? Three emails a day that that also may or may not be relevant to me and my business. It’s because it has so much value in every single email, and so people don’t mark it as spam. They don’t unsubscribe. It grows exponentially because there’s value to the right segment.

Will Bachman  46:29

Okay. So, final thing for listeners: where, if listeners want to sign up as an expert, where should they go?

Brett Farmiloe  46:37

I would start at helpareporterdotcom. I would input my email address and start to get the stuff that that comes in. I would go to featureddotcom and set up a monitor HARO workflow, and I would kick the tires on connectively.us and see if that’s a platform that you enjoy more in responding to journalist requests than via email with HARO. And then you could find me on LinkedIn if you got any questions and want to give some feedback,

Will Bachman  47:04

amazing. Okay, so we will include those links in the show notes. And the first one was helpareporterdotcom. So it’s no longer helpreporter out or HARO. It’s helpareporterdotcom. I just checked, and we’ll include that link in the website as well as the featured, Brett. Thank you for joining today.

Brett Farmiloe  47:24

Yeah, thanks for having me.