Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.152)
If you're business owner struggling to be visible and trusted in the new world where AI decides your brand's reputation, then our guest Brett Farmelow is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Brett is the founder and CEO of Featured.com and owner and operator of Help a Reporter Out, otherwise known as Harrow, platforms that connect journalists with expert sources for stories. Brett, so excited to have you here. Really looking forward to this one.
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (00:30.777)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Adam O'Leary (00:32.44)
So Brett, I've heard you discuss how AI is changing the game for business visibility. Why is it so critical for entrepreneurs to focus on getting cited by AI platforms right now?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (00:42.767)
Yeah, I think that no one really knows how these LLMs are working, but from the reports that are out there and the studies that have been done, citations matter in terms of what LLMs are able to reference when there's a user query. So for business owners looking to raise their visibility from what we've heard from customers who use Featured is they want to be featured in LLMs. And they've come to us as a way to increase the number of citations or mentions in articles so that when LLMs consume
all this information and organize that information, those business owners and other experts are mentioned in the same vein as whatever query a user's input. So, for example, if you're running a credit repair business and you want to get featured in a bunch of credit repair articles, if you're being mentioned and your brand and yourself is being mentioned in all these different articles, LLMs will essentially categorize you as a credit repair type of expert.
Adam O'Leary (01:41.74)
And is that more for recommendations, like for example, recommending saying, you should go seek Brett. Like what type of search terms are people typically typing in when those AI mentions will appear?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (01:52.549)
Yeah, I think that it's a variety of terms and I think that it's gotten even more longer tail from the traditional search engines over to LLMs where now it's a whole conversation. And so where something might start where it's like I have bad credit, how do I improve it? And there's different steps. And then ultimately, maybe those steps don't jive with the user and they're like, well, who can help me with this? And then maybe you get to a recommendation of different companies and then you're like, well, I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona. I actually want to go to someone's office.
and then it could narrow all the way down to that localized recommendation. So I think it's a variety of different trails and that's why LLMs are so kind of mysterious to a lot of folks because there's not a lot of visibility in terms of what people are actually typing in, but what we do know is that there's conversations that are being had and recommendations that are being made.
Adam O'Leary (02:43.19)
Absolutely, and I know one thing that you talked about was the concept of doing an audit to see what your competitors are doing. Can you walk us through how a business owner can conduct an audit to identify key opportunities for themselves?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (02:55.181)
Yeah, I think that there's a few emerging tools that are out there that are starting to do LLM visibility audits. And so there's certain tools that are starting to emerge where it's, if you look at it from like a traditional SEO or search for optimization lens, there's companies like Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush that will offer you an audit.
And we're seeing an emergence of new tools that do LLM audits. So you're able to type in a competitor name, essentially see what they have visibility for, what your visibility score is on top of that. And then it just helps you essentially establish a strategy of, my business needs better visibility for these certain keywords. And then making conscious efforts to improve that visibility, whether that's getting featured in the media, producing your own content, things like that. So I think that the...
the recommendation is go check out some tools, do some free trials, things of that nature. But also, you could just go to one of these LLMs and type in some of your own terms. What credit repair companies would you recommend and why? And then see if your brand starts to be visible. One of my favorite exercises as well, a simple one would be just type in what Chachipete thinks of your business and how would they categorize and describe it to just objectively and then that can help you.
better craft descriptions so that LLMs better understand what you do.
Adam O'Leary (04:23.947)
I love that and so once you do that audit for example how would you act on that audit? for example when it comes to like authoritarian authoritative publications how do we use this to kind of have a plan and say okay this is the steps I need to take in order to start ranking for this.
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (04:43.992)
Yeah, I think the two most common recommendations that you're seeing from these AI visibility platforms is to create content and to get featured in the media. And so you're essentially looking to have your brand and your services mentioned in content. And whether that content comes from your own website or external websites, that's essentially the goal to increase your citations or mentions so that you're being mentioned more often. And so from a creating content perspective,
You could certainly go off and create your own blog posts and things like that. From a getting featured in the media perspective, that's where platforms like feature.com and help a reporter out are pretty helpful.
Adam O'Leary (05:21.473)
I love that. No, I like how you're saying that. So it's create content on your own platform or get featured on other people's content are the two primary ways, correct?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (05:29.826)
Yeah, and just to clarify, your own platform, as in the blog on your website, but also owned channels that you have other distribution for. So whether that's LinkedIn or Medium or Substack or some of these other platforms that just allow for open publication, those potentially are worth testing out as well.
Adam O'Leary (05:50.508)
Okay, well that makes a lot of sense. And so after acting on these opportunities that we found, how can business owners create their own opportunities to kind of boost this AI visibility? So let's say if we're going out, we are creating content ourselves, we're going to Harrow, we're going to featured.com, we're doing this, is there anything that they can do to really kind of improve the chances of them getting pulled by these LLMs?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (06:13.922)
Yeah, I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the space is human in the loop PR. And what I mean by that is that the challenges that exist is time, essentially. Business owners are super busy. How do you identify media opportunities and how do you craft a response that's going to get you featured in the media? And human in loop PR essentially allows you to create a knowledge base for yourself. So.
upload all the blog posts that you ever written about credit repair, upload different answers, Q &A's that you have on your website, things of that nature. The stuff that you would normally want to pitch to the media. Use that as a knowledge base to now identify relevant media opportunities so that those media opportunities come to you rather than you searching for them. And then have a suggested draft that's largely written by AI, allow you to edit the human in the loop, and then ultimately submit to a journalist. So the thing that we...
have aimed to solve it featured is really that time challenge. And the thing that business owners have an abundance of is knowledge about their business. If they're able to centralize that knowledge and have it work for them, now they essentially have hired a APR agent to work on their behalf.
Adam O'Leary (07:28.619)
I like that, but let's dig into that a little bit more because I'm a little confused. So when we say human in the loop PR, I'm not like a PR expert. Okay. So what does this mean? Like how, so if we have all of this information, how do we actually put it all together in a way that would be helpful for the LLMs or for featured, for example.
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (07:47.365)
Yeah, I'll just talk about Featured. We have a product called Featured AI and step one is you sign up for a free account on Featured. Step two is upload a bunch of content into your knowledge base and your knowledge base is essentially your personalized model, if you will. And so these are articles, they're answers, they're anything that potentially you could use to identify media opportunities. And so what Featured's doing is we're taking a look at this knowledge base, say that you wrote a book
Adam O'Leary (07:51.874)
Yep.
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (08:16.932)
about life insurance and you upload your manuscript. Now what we're gonna do is look at that manuscript when there's any kind of queries that were remotely related to that type of content. And then we're going to say, hey, Brett's a really good fit for this because he wrote a book about life insurance, here's the angle. And then we're gonna email Brett with that media opportunity with a suggested draft on how to respond. And so that's what I mean in terms of human in the loop is that it's not full automation.
but it's essentially putting you on third base, ready to take it across the finish line.
Adam O'Leary (08:50.157)
love that. I love that so much. I love that you've actually used AI to be able to help people find these opportunities. How did you actually come up with that idea? That's genius.
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (08:59.542)
It's just listening to customers and their problems. The main thing that we hear from customers is I have the best of intentions. You signed up for the gym membership and you're going to go to the gym and you've got all the intentions and then month two comes around and you're just like, man, I don't have time and I've kind of lost interest. So that's always what we see with users who want to get featured in the media. And so how do you stay consistent in terms of your knowledge sharing? How do you...
really not miss a media opportunity because you're busy running your company, you don't have time to go to feature.com and hit refresh and see which opportunity just came through. And so really it's setting your customers up for success by saying, how do we solve the time challenge? How do we solve the identifying media opportunity challenge and what do business owners have an abundance of? And they have an abundance of knowledge about their business. So how do we put that to good use so that they could achieve their end objective?
Adam O'Leary (09:56.781)
Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. That's fantastic. And so this has me now thinking, so let's say if I go to featured, for example, and I get a bunch of media citations, okay, from Forbes and all these other places, is there anything that I can do with those other than just being a pairing on Forbes, whether it be for a citation or whatever? Like, what's the next step?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (10:19.105)
Yeah, next stuff that we typically see is they'll, a user who's been featured in an article will share on social. So they'll go to LinkedIn and they'll share the article saying, hey, my insights have been featured in Forbes about, you know, X, Y, Z. And they'll put that out there. They'll also maybe feature it on their press page. They'll maybe put it on their blog posts and say, you know, that, hey, an executive from our company was recently featured in Forbes. Check it out.
They also use it as sales collateral. So you'll often see the as seen in or as seen on type of logos and email signatures that link over to different articles that you've been featured on. And then sales teams are definitely using this to essentially establish themselves and their companies as thought leaders in the space so that it's a great way to follow up with prospects.
Adam O'Leary (11:08.416)
leads me to a good question I think. So is it really just the founder that should be doing this or is it should the sales representatives as well be doing this as well?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (11:16.629)
I would say that if I had it my way and every single employee at your company should be in a thought leadership space. A founder and CEO is our most common job title on featured. And so most companies feel very comfortable putting themselves, their founders, their CEOs out there as spokespeople. But the fact of the matter is that journalists and publishers want to hear from real experts. They want to hear from the
the chief human resources officer at a company. They want to hear from the claims adjuster that has real world experience in doing, you know, insurance claims. Because journalists are working on some really niche stories and they come to platforms like Help a Reporter Out and Featured when they need a hard-defined source. And oftentimes those are people with true expertise that they want to hear from. And so I think the companies that are having the most success in terms of establishing themselves and their companies as thought leaders,
are fully utilizing their workforces in order to enhance the overall company perception online.
Adam O'Leary (12:21.484)
So bringing this all together, what would be a one single actionable step that our listeners could use to improve their chances of getting taken by one of these reporters?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (12:33.015)
Yeah, I think that it's responding to questions that really speak to your expertise. And to go one level deeper on that, what I would just purely recommend is sign up for feature.com, go to the featured AI, upload your knowledge base, and then you're going to get pinged when there's a relevant media opportunity. And so that's the biggest thing. We've...
develop the cheat code for any person to go in and really leverage their knowledge base on this so that it's not hard because getting featured in the media has always been a very difficult, mysterious task. You have to have relationships with the right people. And now what we've done is we've essentially democratized the playing field so that anyone with expertise can share that knowledge in a useful way and be helpful to a reporter and have them consider it for publication. So those are the steps that I would recommend is
is just sign up for Featured, establish your knowledge base, and then monitor the different media opportunities that will start to send your way.
Adam O'Leary (13:35.392)
What sort of results have you seen from companies doing this and where should people go to learn more about you?
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (13:40.993)
Yeah, mean, look, the results, I think, really speak to the metrics behind Featured. We've got more than 200,000 experts that have come to us and signed up and are actively sharing knowledge. There's been more than 2 million answers that have been submitted on our platform. And then the retention around those users has been relatively high on this. So people are getting featured in the media. They're measuring success in terms of
their online presence. So traditionally it's been around search engine optimization, how much organic traffic am I getting, what increase am I seeing in domain rating, things like that. And then how does that translate to leads and sales. So we've seen some really good strong case studies on that. And then in terms of anyone who wants to learn more, I would just say connect with me on LinkedIn at Brett Farmelo and then featured.com.
Adam O'Leary (14:37.151)
this. Brett, thank you so much for jumping on with me today. Awesome. Well guys, thank you so much for listening and I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
Brett Farmiloe (Featured.com) (14:39.841)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
