Gini Dietrich's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Good Thor. I am tired of the "PR is dead" rhetoric. It's never been more important than it has in the past five years. We keep hearing: ❌ “PR is dead.” ❌ “PR is news releases.” ❌ “PR is media coverage.” ❌ “PR is ‘flooding the internet with content.’” ❌ “PR is something junior people do on social.” Here’s what’s actually dead: publicity-as-a-process. The factory-line approach—release, wire, pitch, impressions, repeat—doesn’t earn attention anymore. It earns massive eye-rolls (the kind that get your eyes stuck in the back of your head). Today's PR is: ✅ Credibility that compounds. ✅ Earned belief—across stakeholders. ✅ Pproof + consistency + corroboration. ✅ Reduces risk and accelerates demand. ✅ Educates the LLMs, engages the humans, and drives revenue. ✅ The PESO Model® as your operating system. Because buyers don’t just “discover” you now, they get a summary of you—from peers, platforms, creators… and machines. So if PR is only measured by outputs (hits, impressions, share of voice), it’ll always look replaceable. However, when PR is measured by outcomes—such as pipeline, retention, and recruiting—it becomes a business function that no one sane would cut. #PR #PublicRelations #Communications #PESOModel #MarketingStrategy #AIinPR #Trust #Credibility

Happy New Year! Please take a moment to locate your coffee, your calendar, and your sense of perspective. ☕️ If you’re leading marketing or communications in 2026, you already know this: ➡️ AI didn’t take the holidays off. ➡️ Budgets didn’t stretch. ➡️ Teams didn’t magically grow. What did happen is that execution got faster—and decision-making got harder. That’s why I kicked off the year with a deep dive on how the PESO Model® has evolved. Not as a framework. Not as a channel checklist. But as an operating system for how modern marketing and comms actually work now. If your team is being asked to do more with less (hi, all of us), this is about running a system strong enough to make AI work for you—without amplifying chaos. 👇 #PESOModel #MarketingLeadership #CommunicationsStrategy #AIinMarketing #VisibilityEngineering #SpinSucks

There’s a photo out of Minnesota that should make every leader’s stomach drop: Gregory Bovino and his crew of masked agents walking through a Target store. I’m sure you’ve seen it—nearly every news outlet reporting on Minneapolis has used it. But more than making your stomach drop, it begs the question: what are the businesses headquartered there doing about it? We know what small businesses are doing. We know what minority-owned businesses are doing. We know how neighbors are helping one another. But the big guys? They signed a letter asking for “de-escalation.” That is not crisis communications. And it collapses everything into the questions your employees and customers are asking in real time: ➡️ Am I safe at work? ➡️ Am I safe while shopping? ➡️ What do I do if they show up while I’m working or shopping in your store? If your public posture is basically “we’re asking for de-escalation,” you’ve skipped the most important part of crisis comms: guidance. ➡️ It doesn’t tell a manager what to do on a shift. ➡️ It doesn’t tell employees where to go for help. ➡️ It doesn’t tell customers what to expect from you. ➡️ It doesn’t reduce uncertainty. And in a crisis, uncertainty is gasoline. I wrote a practical piece on what leaders should do instead: how to communicate in a way that’s calm, factual, and useful—internally first (plan, protocol, manager script), then externally (clarity without turning yourself into a debate stage). ⬇️ #crisiscommunications #communications #publicrelations

There’s a reason the “PR is dead” debate keeps coming back. It’s not because PR stopped working. It’s because leadership often confuses PR with publicity—and we’ve inadvertently reinforced this misunderstanding with metrics like outputs, impressions, and clip reports. Modern PR is credibility: proof, trust, and belief that compels action—across stakeholders, across channels, and now across AI discovery systems that summarize who you are before a buyer ever talks to you. This week’s Spin Sucks newsletter breaks down how we can finally (finally) move from "PR is dead" to "PR is essential to our organization's growth." #PR #PublicRelations #Communications #PESOModel #Trust #Credibility #AIinPR #MarketingStrategy

It’s my birthday, so I have a gift for you! 🎂 We rebuilt the PESO Model Certification® for 2026—not as a refresher, not as a content course, but as an operating system you can run to engineer visibility in an AI discovery world. In today’s LinkedIn newsletter, I break down: ➡️ What’s new ➡️ How the 8-week course works ➡️ What you’ll walk away with ➡️ Discounts for IABC, PRSA, university faculty/students, and teams If you’ve been waiting for the right time to get certified…consider this your sign. 👇 Link below...

Before we all disappear into cookies, cozy socks, and that weird week where no one knows what day it is…I just want to say this: ➡️ Marketing leadership can be lonely. ➡️ Running a business can be exhausting (IS exhausting...I'm exhausted). ➡️ Trying to keep up this year felt harder than usual. And yet, I’ve watched so many of you do thoughtful, steady, meaningful work in a year that asked a lot. ➡️ You showed up curious instead of reactive. ➡️ You asked better questions instead of chasing trends. ➡️ You focused on what actually works—not just what’s loud. That matters more than any algorithm change or shiny new tool. Thank you for following the PESO Model® journey this year and for caring about doing this work well. Rest. Reset. Be with your people. We’ll pick it back up in January. 💛 (For the algorithm tax, photos of my almost teenager who hates being with us.)

A couple of weeks ago, Katelyn Bourgoin 🧠wrote a fantastic post about all of these people on LinkedIn who think they're getting away with something when they use AI to write their comments. You've seen them: ➡️ “Gini, we definitely should [regurgitation of what I wrote]" ➡️ “[summary of post] with zero commentary ➡️ [copy/paste summary] + “I agree.” 🙄 🙄 🙄 We know what you've done. WE ALL KNOW! If you don't have time to write a real comment, that's totally fine. Just don't do it. Because when you use AI to write your comments, you're immediately placed on a list of people not to be trusted. I know you don't want that, so if you're going to show up in someone’s comments, make sure you take the time to show up like you. 👇

I have a different take on the Super Bowl ads. Were they (mostly) meh? Yes. Was it AI slop? Some, yes. Am I too old for some of them? Perhaps. BUT. They took a risk and used AI. Some used it for parts and pieces, and others used it for all of their script writing, creative, and production. One ad was so blatantly bad that I laughed out loud at the AI-generated images it used. You know what that means? They failed spectacularly. The best brands and agencies will take that information and use it to improve their work next year and the year after that and so on. Next year, the AI ads will be even better. The slop will be few and far between. And we will all benefit from studying their lessons. So, thank you to all of the brands that took a massively expensive risk so that we could collectively learn from it. I, for one, will be studying the lessons so we don't repeat them. That...and re-watching the halftime show over and over and over again. #ai #communications #publicrelations #marketing

My dishwasher has taught me more about the PESO Model® than I’d like to admit. In my house, there are two types of people: 1. People who load the dishwasher like it’s a precision sport—plates facing the right direction, bowls tilted so water can actually reach them, silverware separated like it’s 2020 all over again. 2. People who open the door, toss in a lasagna-crusted spoon, a mug, a pan, and a prayer… then slam it shut like “the machine will figure it out.” Spoiler: the machine does not figure it out. You don’t get clean dishes. You get the illusion of clean dishes. Which means someone (hi) ends up re-washing half of it by hand while muttering threats at an inanimate object… and/or their family. And that is exactly how most teams “do” the PESO Model. They “do” owned. They “do” social. They land a few placements. They boost a post when they’re nervous. Lots of activity. Lots of clanking. Lots of cycles running. And yet… the work comes out spotty. Inconsistent. Half-clean. Not because anyone is bad at their job. Because the system isn’t integrated. The spray isn’t reaching everything it needs to reach. So this week, we’re tackling the part where PESO either becomes an operating system that compounds… or a pile of tactics you keep re-washing forever.

Paid media is a turbocharger. Which is great… unless you’re turbocharging confusion or trying to manufacture trust. If your paid strategy is: - “we have leftover budget” or - “the quarter is ending and the pipeline is soft” …that’s not strategy. Steal this decision rule. We only put budget behind a message when: 1) It’s clear in ONE sentence. 2) It’s backed by social proof (result, method, earned media quote, two-sentence testimonial, review). 3) It has an owned destination on your website that answers the obvious questions. 4) It already showed signal in shared (saves, shares, people repeating our language). Paid should accelerate clarity—not try to create it. Coming on Friday: I'll show you how shared and paid work inside a PESO Model® operating system. This is part of making your system move and scale.

My Oura ring bullied me last week. Not “hey, maybe take a nap” bullied. More like, “Listen, sis, yur body is a crime scene.” (Translation: slight fever, HRV in the tanks, resting HR on the ceiling.) I had a head cold and—because I’m apparently committed to the “pushing through is a personality trait” lifestyle—I tried to power through anyway. The ring didn’t heal me. It didn’t fix anything. It just gave me proof… and forced me to use my judgment to make a decision. (And made me feel bad for trying to push through.) That’s exactly how marketing measurement is supposed to work, too. Not a scoreboard of activity. Not “we posted 17 times.” Not “impressions are up.” Cool. Did anything change? Measurement is storytelling with numbers. It answers one question: what changed? If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you’re not measuring. You’re reporting. I wrote up how to measure the PESO Model® without losing your mind—outcomes-first, 90-day window, decision rules, and zero “four-channel reports stapled together” energy. Check it out ⤵️

Join IABC and me on February 5 at 12:00 ET to hear all about the new PESO Model® Certification updates! #PESO #PESOModel #PESOModelCertification #SpinSucks #PR #Communicators #Communications

I conducted a poll yesterday and asked all of you what happens when a campaign ends. The results are not surprising (the majority of us just move on), but I'm curious why that is. So riddle me this... when a campaign ends, the reason we move on is because __________. I’ll go first: ...because we are constantly fighting fires.

On Tuesday, I asked what happens when a campaign ends. Yesterday, we talked about why so much work quietly disappears. Today, I’m connecting the dots. This week’s newsletter breaks down how the PESO Model® stopped being a checklist and became an operating system—and why PR pros and marketers need to run it that way now. No new acronyms were harmed in the making of this newsletter. ⬇️ #PESOModel #IntegratedCommunications #MarketingStrategy #PublicRelations #MarketingLeadership

Hey, all! If you're around on Thursday afternoon and want to talk about my new love, visibility engineering, come join Shelby Bridges and me at the Qwoted webinar. We're going to talk about how visibility engineering is the deliberate practice of building authority and trust in a way that humans AND AI systems can recognize, validate, and surface. And you'll probably recognize my good friend, the PESO Model®, in there, too! Registration info is below ⤵️ (And the times are conflicting, but my calendar invite says 1:00 ET, so that's the time I'm going with!)

It's live! If your marketing plan is: 1) Post because the calendar says so 2) Boost because the quarter is ending Congrats!! You have a very healthy activity addiction. 😅 Shared and paid aren’t meant to manufacture trust. They’re meant to move and accelerate proof you’ve already earned the right to share. Today’s newsletter shows how to run: - shared as distribution (not “more posts”) - paid as amplification (not “more spend”) - with simple decision rules so it compounds instead of spikes Shared is movement. Paid is acceleration. Check 'er out! ⬇️ #PESOModel #Marketing #SharedMedia #PaidMedia #PR #PublicRelations #Communications

You know what sounds like a ton of fun? Having lunch with Deirdre Breakenridge, Martin Waxman, MCM, APR, and me! 🥳 Save the date for next Friday, March 27.

Join Lisa Davis, Noah Greenberg, and me on March 19 at...(checking calendar) 2:00 ET!

Hot take: your audience isn’t consuming your content. They’re consuming someone else’s screenshot of it. Or a creator recap. Or an AI answer stitched from whatever looked most consistent online at the time. So “we posted 5 times this week” isn’t a strategy. It’s cardio without the health benefits. Shared media isn’t “social;” it’s distribution. Here is a three-minute fix you can create right now without new content: 1) Choose ONE social proof asset you already have (result, method, earned media quote, two-sentence testimonial, review). 2) Turn it into TWO carryable formats: a one-sentence claim (“We believe X because Y”) and a number, quote, or example. 3) Publish both of those formats on your website—preferably on a page where you need to prove the claims you make. If you do that, you'll start to build the consistency the LLMs crave. Coming on Friday: I'll show you how shared and paid work inside a PESO Model® operating system. This is the start of that. 🎉

Man, I wish I'd had ChatGPT when Bean was little and asking me questions like, "Do chickens poop?" or "What do clouds feel like?" or "Why does snow taste good?" Now I'm using it to help me not lose my cool while she works on her History Fair project, and she thinks I'm the dumbest person to ever walk this earth. Hilarious and useful ways leaders are using AI in their daily lives. Thanks, Amanda Coffee, for pulling it together!

If you’re kicking the PESO Model® Certification tires but you’re not ready to commit (time, budget, life chaos—I get it), I’m doing a short series to show you the mechanics. This week, we cover the foundation of visibility engineering: owned and earned working together. Owned is your foundation what you know, what you can prove, what you want to be known for). Earned is the credibility transfer—or the third-party creditation you can’t buy. Together, they become the authority that humans and AI systems can recognize, trust, and surface. Read more in this week's Spin Sucks newsletter ⤵️

About a year ago, Meredith Klein and I had a "get to know you" chat on Zoom and became fast friends. She's one of those people whom you feel like you've known from all your previous lives. Super smart, innovative, witty, and fun to be around. So when the opportunity arose to partner with her on her fast-growing newsletter, it didn't take any convincing. I yelled, "YES!" Here is the end product of that collaboration. Check it out...and then subscribe to her Substack because she's on the forefront of new and emerging media.

Quick gut check: what gets celebrated (and funded) where you work?

If anyone in my network knows someone starting in their career and looking for a rad SDR role, send this along. It's an entirely remote gig, and you'd get to work with my favorite niece (I mean one of my favorites, of course)!

When a campaign ends… what usually happens to the work? Not what should happen. What actually happens. No judgment. Just data. 👀