Build Your Brand with Molly St. Louis

In This Episode

• [03:27] – Molly St. Louis recounts her journey through the entertainment industry and how it shaped her unique perspective on brand journalism and public relations.
• [08:18] – Molly illustrates a case study involving a startup that created a platform for marketers to attribute top-of-funnel activities to actual sales, introducing the term “revenue science” to describe their data-centric approach to building customer relationships.
• [12:02] – Stephan and Molly explore how newsjacking and emotional storytelling can transform technical topics into relatable, engaging content, especially within niche industries.
• [15:19] – Molly delves into her concept of building a brand’s “Marvel universe” to amplify publicity and create a cohesive PR narrative.
• [17:22] – Stephan and Molly examine the value of being truly remarkable and why having a bold, clear opinion is essential for content creators.
• [25:23] – The conversation shifts to AI’s influence on modern marketing and why embracing these tools is critical for staying competitive.
• [34:55] – Molly offers actionable strategies for effective newsjacking and crafting content that aligns with current trends and audience interests.
• [39:00] – Molly opens up about her mother’s influence and the difficulties of navigating the business world as a soft-spoken woman.
• [42:25] – Molly wraps up by sharing how listeners can get in touch and how she can support their PR and publicity goals.

Jump to Links and Resources

Molly, it’s so great to have you on the show. 

Stephan, it is so great to see you. 

It’s been a long time. 

We’ve known each other for over a decade. I think.

I was just thinking when we met, which I think was maybe 12 years ago, branded content was just becoming new, and you were the first person to tell me about it, that brands would be engaging in brand journalism. That’s what we called it then; now it is my full-time job. So thank you very much, Stephan, for putting that into my universe.

Oh, well, I don’t take credit for it. It’s just God. It’s all God. But I’m glad it ran true for you and stuck, and you did something amazing with it. So yeah, congratulations. 

Thank you. 

So what kind of work is this brand journalism thing that you do, what makes you the only one in comparison to all the PR and publicity firms out there?

We’re humans, and our communications aren’t very different; we like to think we’re special, but we have more in common with others than we know.

Yeah, so I’ve started in entertainment. I used to be an actor, and I’m always around actors. My husband’s a television actor, and I really did not study marketing first. I studied entertainment first. I always think about things in terms of television formats, in terms of emotion, and what kind of emotion you want to evoke from your audience. And then I went into marketing and PR, and just from being around God, asked to be a writer for Inc. Magazine and Huffington Post and all of these really just by using that entertainment background and that emotional drive, I guess you could call it. 

From there, I was asked to develop programs for unicorn tech companies that were in very, very niche industries, things that were not so relatable, maybe they have a platform for Chief Revenue Officers that you really need an MBA to decode, and so I sort of built a business around being able to decode them and put them into entertaining formats and help the companies win awards for their content, where I think some folks struggle around you know, how do we make this interesting? How do we make this relatable? When is it so technical? It’s something that I’m always trying to crack the code on, because we get more and more technical by the day, but really, it’s bringing that emotional connection to businesses.

I mean, if you’re regularly inserting words into your sentences like tech stack or middleware or proxy or whatever keywords that it’s not going to make you relatable, it’s going to make you, I don’t know, kind of obtuse and nerdy, and not help you get the sale or get a persuasion event that you wanted to have happen. So, how do you make people more relatable in these companies doing all this technical stuff they like to jargonize all their marketing materials?

First and foremost, it’s connecting it to an emotional story. All of us in marketing can get used to the canned responses that our brand dictates that we give. This is what the product does, and we say it very technically. But what does it do for your life? How does it create you? How does it help you have a better big-picture view of your life? Do you get to spend more time with your kids? Do you get to spend more time with your spouse? Are you a digital nomad? What is the heart of what you do, and why are you passionate about it?

I had the amazing opportunity to work with Clari, a unicorn tech company. It is centered around sales software, and this is where I was able to build up many of those methodologies because they gave me the room to be creative. It was during the pandemic, so we all had to be creative anyway. I built a studio in my basement because I had to.

But what I learned from being there, because I did not know much about sales or sales methodologies at the time, is how creative truly great salespeople are, and how very much like actors they are in their process. Drawing on those comparisons of traditional and business creative was pretty easy because the process was similar. We’re humans, and our communications aren’t that much different. We like to think we’re special, but we have more in common with others than we know.

Yeah, you know the expression human to human, instead of business to business or business consumer, people buy from people, from faceless corporate entities. So if we can make ourselves personally relatable using things like the Unity principle and so forth from the book Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, then we can help move them down the buyer journey.

Absolutely. Cialdini is one of my favorite authors of all time. Yeah.

He was a guest on the show. It was a great episode. 

Was he? Oh my gosh. I studied him in my master’s program because of his persuasive communication, but I really loved how human he was. 

Yeah, yeah. He was a great guy. So give us a case study example of how you make a crazy, geeky, techie person or company into something relatable in an entertaining way. Do you have a viral video you helped produce or some sort of campaign that crushed it beyond your client’s expectations?

Yeah, so this is about a year and a half ago. This is one of my favorites. This was a new startup that had created a platform for marketers to be able to attribute all of their top-of-funnel activities. So, at the top of funnel activities, like brand awareness, where you can’t say, “Okay, maybe that person saw my commercial,” but did they actually buy from the company? Well, this platform helps you connect those things to actual sales.

So as a marketer, it’s extremely powerful, because you can say, “Hey, I actually drove revenue, not just eyeballs.” Still, a lot of their product was based on data science, and that’s something that a lot of marketers, specifically content marketers like me, don’t have a data science background for. So they coined this term, revenue science, and that was to say that it’s not just about spray and pray tactics anymore. 

This is the science of building customer relationships and driving them down the funnel. So we created a science show about revenue science and taught marketers how to use these data science techniques, like Markov chain, which are a series of probabilities and how probabilities impact outcomes. Still, we’re making it very relatable with cartoons. That one involved a cat and the probability of it ruining your Friday night plants, but it was all based on data science, and the cool thing about that one was that we wanted it.

The more niche you get, the less it will go viral, but what's more important is that the right audience is seeing it. Share on X

The Telly Awards next to Bloomberg and National Geographic was the other one. And this was on a very low budget, and the crew was very minimal. It took us one afternoon, but we got a sort of impact from the awards by how they were produced through storytelling. 

Oh, that’s so cool. That reminds me a little bit of the story that I heard from George Wright, the marketing director at Blendtec. He was walking past the test room one day, seeing the founder jamming two-by-fours into the blender to see if it could break it. And of course, there was sawdust everywhere and everything. And he’s thinking, why don’t we video that? That would make for some really interesting video, and that’s how Will It Blend started.

Tom Dixon, the founder, is famous for wearing his white lab coat, putting iPhones and all sorts of crazy things into his blenders, and seeing Will It Blend. And it all started because George walked past the test room one day and thought we should video that.

I love that because I would also just watch it specifically to see what it does. Are you going to get the opportunity to see what happens to an iPhone when you put it in a blender, if you’re putting that on social media, you will get eyeballs, and that’s the thing that we’re always I’m working with an really incredible creative director right now with one of my clients.

Both of us are always looking at what kind of image we can put out that people are not used to seeing on LinkedIn. We know that faces perform very, very well. Specifically, people with big eyes perform very well. So you never want to put a wide shot of a bunch of people when you could do a close-up of somebody’s face. There are a lot of these things, like exactly what you’re talking about and where it will stop the scroll if you have the right image there. Yeah.

So let’s talk about how PR and publicity have changed already. It’s a very different world from the one it was just a few years ago. AI is hijacking the news hype cycle, but it’s also massively changing every industry, disrupting all life, business, society, and everything. So what’s your view of where things are going and how they have changed?

When you try to please people and everybody, especially when you’re mediocre, you’re invisible.

Oh, yeah. So Stephan, this was 12 to 14 years ago when I met you again. I worked at a PR firm that was very, very good at getting people in the news, specifically morning shows, Good Morning America, for example, the Today Show, and we, back then, could rely very much on our storytelling abilities. We could get press for people that didn’t have any kind of following before, like they didn’t have any kind of following on social media or any kind of huge business to speak of, because a lot of them were startups, but by telling an interesting story, we could pull some pretty good press.

And now I feel like things have gotten a little bit more complicated. You can’t just rely on really great writing anymore to get press. A lot of people have publicists. A lot of people have amazing publicists. And really, before we could, I don’t want to say, make news, but we could make an interesting story, and then it would get into the news. Now you really have to be doing something innovative to get a reporter to listen to you, or you have to back it up with data, or you have to have, and I think this is the most important part is an infrastructure of your own media.

And you might hear the business media say things like every company is going to become a media company, and they’re right. You see it already with Salesforce, plus they have their streaming channel, and the content is wonderful. It is not necessarily about using Salesforce. It’s about sellers, business, and everything in the Salesforce universe. Chick-fil-A is doing the same thing. They’re launching a streaming network. Sundance now has a sanctioned event called Brand Storytelling, which is for brand-funded films. These are brands that are doing documentaries or even sometimes scripted content around the ethos of their brand. It’s not necessarily about their products but about engaging customers and what they care about. 

So I would say that even in a smaller way, with the B2B world, people have their entire content universe. This supports their PR, and when they can crack that code and find those stories that are really important to their audience, they will do better on the publicity side of PR. So it’s about, I would say, creating the Marvel universe of your brand, and the publicity will follow.

Even if you have 500 views, it’s better than going viral if they’re the right views.

I love creating the Marvel universe of your brand. Did you come up with that?

Just right now? I had a good collaboration. You know what I mean? 

That’s awesome. So how are you doing it? Like you’ve got to eat your dog food, right? So, how are you creating the Marvel universe of your brand, Molly?

I just launched Mosaic Group Media a few months ago. We already have incredible international clients. I think I’ve been working more on making sure that theirs is up to speed, but having been a writer for Inc. and Adweek and all of these a long time ago, people still remember it. So it really helped to build that up, but you’re right. I have to be doing that too, so hopefully, this podcast will be the first step in that. But I’m a big advocate for this becoming the media because I think that micro communities will become even more important, and I’m sure you know way more about that than I do. Having an SEO background, I know audiences are becoming smaller and more niche based on their interests. 

And I’ve had a lot of CEOs ask me, How do we make this article go viral? How do I make this go viral? And it really depends on what it is. And having had articles that went viral, I will say they’re usually about a very broad topic, such as leadership, culture, chocolate chip cookies, and things that everybody likes and everybody can relate to. However, the more niche you get, the less it will go viral. However, the more important thing is that the right audience sees it. So even if you have 500 views, it’s better than going viral if they’re the right views. 

Yeah, it gets you a business result

Absolutely. Also, when you’re an expert in whatever you do and you are marketing to other experts, virality might not be the best move because you wouldn’t be talking to an audience of deep experts in your area of expertise. 

Yeah. So maybe it’s not about virality. It’s about being remarkable. Seth Godin defines remarkable as worthy of remark. If you’re remarkable for your niche audience, even if you got 500 views, you’ve occupied some space in their brain, and hopefully, then they’ve taken an action to move down the buyer journey, down the funnel.

It bears repeating. I know all of us usually know this, but we can’t be everything to everybody. One of the things when I’m working with a CEO on their thought leadership, the fear is that they’re going to say something that makes somebody else mad, or that somebody else goes,

We can’t be everything to everybody.

No, you don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not how it goes. But I always have to push people to be fearlessly true to themselves, because the more you are, the more you resonate with the right people. Trying to please everybody is going to get mediocre results. 

Yeah, when you try to please people and everybody, especially when you’re mediocre, you’re invisible. You’re just not taking a stand. You’re not standing in your power. So what would be something that a listener would be able to apply in this regard, in terms of maybe standing out more, being more remarkable with their constituents, that micro community or audience that they’re trying to get the attention and authority positioning with.

I will say, have an opinion, a definite opinion. Of course, you want to make sure that it is sound, logically sound. Your opinion, I’ll say, just to give you a story I started writing for the media when I was maybe 27 years old. I have no problem saying that I knew nothing back then, but I was very good at being black and white about my opinion, which was why certain things went viral.

And luckily, I didn’t say anything that was too horrible. But looking back, I think, okay, this was the folly of youth, as they say, where you see things black and white. The idea, though, that I did learn was that you do have to be vivid. You want to be able to say something impactful and round it out with other perspectives.

I always have to push people to be fearlessly true to themselves, because the more you are, the more you resonate with the right people.

But I’ve learned as an older person, that you have to strike a balance between those two things, of making an impact, grabbing people’s attention. Tension is making them think about something differently, but letting them know, too, that you’re also taking into account everybody else’s perspectives. This is how you see it, so it helps you make not so many enemies that way, just making sure that you have seen things from all sides. 

But my takeaway is that if something’s working for you and your business or working for you as a person, play it up. Use that perspective. If you are a CEO who used to work as a day laborer, never forget who you are. It’s part of who you are. Use those things.

Sometimes people can be afraid that who they used to be doesn’t fit with who they want to be. Instead of saying, No, I’m going to use that as a superpower. I didn’t come from the Harvard business world. I came from wherever you came from, and what did you learn along the way? Those are the things that are going to empower other people, and they’re going to get very emotionally invested in you.

Yeah, they will relate to you and know and trust you more. Absolutely. I love that I have a definite opinion. Don’t be afraid to polarize; that is another way to put it. And this idea of being vivid and impactful reminds me of something that I don’t know if you’ve heard of before, but it’s been around for a while: this conspiracy theory, basically called the Dead Internet.

The reason why I’m bringing this up is because if this theory is true, that the majority of what is online is bots and AI and not even human, and talking about the vast majority, then all this trolling and controversy and hate that’s being spewed that we’re afraid of getting caught in the crossfire of is actually fake.

I wish I had heard about that when I wrote my first article for The Huffington Post; I got death threats for the first one that I ever wrote. It was funny because I thought I had a lot of people who were supportive and wonderful. Just for context, I wrote one about Miley Cyrus‘s butt. It was about how people made fun of her during the VMA performance. And essentially, this was before people started talking about body shaming, and there was a meme going around her butt.

And again, I was in my late 20s at the time, and I was talking about how people are taking shots at a celebrity, and that celebrity might not care. She’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s extremely talented. Why does she care what you think about her? Her fans are 14 years old, and you’re basically telling them how to think about themselves. 

So that was the crux of the article. It did go viral, and there were a lot of people who supported my stance. However, Cialdini would have said that I probably used too much guilt in the way that I wrote this piece, over-guilting people, and they turned, but I did get some people saying, I’m going to go and find where you live, and I’m going to kill you.

When you try to be everything to everyone, you become nothing to anyone. Bold brands don’t chase approval—they create impact. Share on X

That scared me because I was just a person with an opinion that happened to get on a major platform. I thought,” Oh, gosh, maybe I should just write for business, because they’re going to be nicer.” You really do risk watering yourself down when you have a good perspective. And now, you know, body shaming has become a very hot topic, especially in women’s magazines and stuff like that. It was just before that time, and I will say that one of my biggest regrets was the time period in which I watered myself down after that, because I was afraid of those trolls. They won’t come and find you. Chances are they’re not going to come to provide you.

Wow. So how many years did you water yourself down and hide after that?

I had one more piece after that, and I got something similar; it was about a personal thing that had happened in my life. You get ready for what people are going to say, I think it was after that one that I was like, “You know what, I’m just going to write about marketing and maybe people, not about, like, human things, but a couple of years, and I think it was just I didn’t want to deal with it. And sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had just kept going on that thread, grown up a little bit, matured in my writing, and continued talking about issues that mattered.

Humans are creative, and we’re a lot bigger than these artistic mediums we’ve come to cling to; we need to create what’s next.

Maybe be a famous memoir writer right now. 

Maybe instead of writing about B2B marketing, I could use those emotions, and I think I’d be able to channel that better way. And I have, since, you know, gone back to school, got a master’s degree, understood, okay, here’s a better way to talk to people where it’s not just blasting your opinion, it’s just being more considerate of what, how it might hit people. Then you get to be more effective. But yeah, that’s what I will say. People are afraid of trolls, and maybe they’re not, maybe they’re not humans, maybe they are butts.

A lot of them are. 

Yeah.

It’s crazy, if you think about how public opinion can be swayed because of many comments and posts on social media platforms. And did you ever see the documentary on Netflix about The Social Dilemmas?

 Oh yes, absolutely. 

Yeah, there’s a lot of corruption happening. There’s a lot of stuff behind the curtain that you’d be flabbergasted to hear about and see. But we’re being manipulated and we’re being used. We’re the product, we’re not the customer, and it’s getting a lot worse. AI is getting much more sophisticated, so now scammers are doing a much more sophisticated job of scamming with their very realistic-sounding emails and even voice calls that sound like the loved one who is suddenly in trouble and needs some money wired. It’s a crazy world we’re heading into right now.

I’m sure you’re seeing much of that in your work.

Well, with AI, it’s certainly changing. It’s generally shaking the foundations of SEO, content marketing, and online marketing. But I’d say it’s more of an overarching way in which all business is being upended. It’s massively disrupted. And I think it was Peter Diamandis or Vishen Lakhiani who said that this is the last normal year, a seemingly normal year. 

This is it, the year of 2025, is that it’s gonna get crazy weird with AI and advances and stuff that’s coming. It’s such a fast clip now, and it’s continuing to accelerate. You know, the Law of Accelerating Returns, Metcalfe’s law and Moore’s Law and all that. So we just can’t even fathom.

We can’t wrap our heads around where things will be heading, because we think linearly, like, five years in the future might be like five years in the past, or, at worst, maybe it’s 10 years. Ten years ago, we were still surfing the web and playing online games, which were just not as sophisticated as they are today. No, we’re talking about light years different in five years.

Good lord, I worked with Ray Bradbury before he passed away. I was one of his actors. Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer, was incredible at predicting what would happen in the future. And oftentimes with this, I wonder how he would feel about now. I don’t even think somebody as brilliant as he was could fathom what the next five years would look like. Everything’s just moving faster than it ever has. 

As a youngster, I read Fahrenheit 451, and that was kind of terrifying, but the idea of this, just generally speaking, of a dystopian future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you believe it to be true, this idea of being in a simulation, Elon Musk talks about that being real. It’s not that. It’s how Elon describes it, like super advanced humans trying to understand their origin and being simulated characters in their video game. No, this is an illusion, what some cultures refer to, or religions, such as samsara or Maya, or just the illusion. This is not real. And so if you know, we’re getting very metaphysical here, so I’ll bring it back to marketing in a minute.

No, I love this. Actually, my sister is a kindergarten teacher, and she is often blissfully unaware of what is going on in the tech world. And I was having a very large alcoholic drink one day, and she said, “What’s going on with you?” And I said, “I drink because of the metaverse.” And she goes,” I don’t even know what that is, and I don’t like the sound of it” And when she looked it up, she said, “I’m having a drink too. I don’t like the idea that we’re all going to be living in this thing and trading in cryptocurrency or, you know, whatever, whatever people say about the metaverse.”

This was, like, a couple of years ago, but it was crazy, because I started bringing up ChatGPT to her right when it was starting to happen, and she said, “I don’t know or care about ChatGPT. I don’t need to know about it. That’s not my world.” Until it started making its way into schools, and now. He has to learn how to use it. It’s impacted absolutely every single person. Yeah.

We need to think bigger about our creativity. You’re more than the medium you trained in. You're the sum of your parts. Share on X

Peter Diamandis says that the only types of businesses that will exist at the end of the decade are two types one, but businesses that use AI at their core and businesses that are out of business, you have to be in this world of AI, even if you’re a plumber or you’ve got a dry cleaning business, you have to use AI because you will not be competitive. But this larger idea of being dystopian in your outlook creates that future because you’re programming your holographic matrix to say, “Okay, Mad Max or Fahrenheit 451, bring it on.”

We attract what we fear, and it’s so much fear when you just turn on Netflix and you watch these horrible dystopian movies and TV series and you binge them, you’re programming that into your consciousness, and then your consciousness and the universe is responding to that, saying, “Okay, order up. Here we go.”

Goodness, I never thought about it that way. What I would love to know is what you think about it in terms of your creative work. I know I hear a lot of marketers say that AI is going to free us up to be more creative. It’s going to take away the mundane tasks so that we can be more creative. But I don’t think that a lot of people know what that actually looks like in their universe. How do you balance that? 

I like to reverse engineer, tinker, and figure things out, like poke and prod at the black box. So I want to be at the leading edge, trying to figure out things. So if ChatGPT has a new feature out, I want to be playing with it. I want to pay the extra fee to have early access to it. We all need to adopt an early adopter mentality and learn how to use this stuff to avoid being left behind. Because I forgot who said this, we’re not going to have our jobs taken away by AI, but by somebody who’s using AI. So you want to be the person using AI, not who’s left behind and getting out of work or out of business.

I think another thing is that we have to think bigger about ourselves, in that I come from the world of traditional creatives, people who went to school to learn how to write, act, how to design things, and I think that AI has instilled this fear. And a lot of people, I’ve heard them say, “You know, I went to school for this, I invested in this thing. I am an artist, and now it is being taken away from me,” and I think what we have to do is think bigger about our creativity. And think bigger about creativity in general is that, if you are a writer or designer, how will you apply all of those neuro pathways you created in your brain from learning an art? How will you apply it to being creative about what’s next? It’s not going to look the same as it did before.

Maybe it’s not even applicable. You know the concept of Sunk Cost? Yes, right? So we tend to hold on to stuff that is a bad investment because we’ve already invested so much in that, whether it’s an education or a business investment, buying a company, building a technology or whatever. We’re just throwing good money after bad, so if you instead, just say you know what? That was a learning experience. That was a chapter in my life. 

Now I’m ready for the next chapter. I’m reinventing myself. I’m innovating myself. I’m disrupting myself. I recently had the author of Disrupt You. You know why? Oh, you too like to disrupt yourself on the podcast, and it’s really important that you look for ways to disrupt your job and business. You know Jay Samit explained it well in that episode, because otherwise, you’ll get disrupted by your competitors and you’ll be blindsided.

Oh, I love Jay Samit. I listened to that episode, and it made me kind of take you out of the grind to say, “Let me not think about the tactics I have to do today, but the big picture of what I have to do.” And sometimes we sum up who we are with what we do, with what we physically do, that day, month, year, whatever it is, instead of looking at us as the sum of our parts. I think human beings are creative, and we’re a lot bigger than these artistic mediums that we’ve come to cling to; we need to create what’s next.

So if it doesn’t serve you, jettison it. You know, even. If you invested an entire degree and hundreds of 1000s of dollars in that education, if it’s not serving you now, you just jettison it. 

Be aware of what time of year it is, because news cycles also have to follow those holidays and current events.

So I know we’re getting close to time here. We’ve got less than 10 minutes left. I want to get back into the marketing side of this and maybe some more how-to stuff for our listeners. And specifically, I want to talk about the news-jacking you did that really well when you talked about Miley Cyrus in that Huffington Post article, because it was of the moment. And you jumped on that, and you had a strong opinion. So, how does our listener, who might have a boring tech company or whatever widget they’re selling, news-jack on current events and trending topics and whatever is viral to create something that has an opinion and has value and isn’t just fluff?

Oh yeah. Well, first you can set yourself up for success by creating a content calendar that puts reoccurring events at the top of your mind this month is Women’s History Month, an International Women’s Day is on the eighth I know people are going to be talking about this state of women in the workplace, and that’s the thing that you can if that’s what you’re working towards in February, you start thinking about it. 

What do I want to say? How are things different for women now than they ever were? What new problems are people facing? There’s a lot in this because, you know, diversity and inclusion have been rolled back. Many things make a story about International Women’s Day timely because of the time of year, but also what is happening in the news right now, and how people will see that. 

And I would say, first, write your opinion like nobody else is going to look at it, be brutal about it. Just say what you need to say on the page first, and then maybe tailor it with a layer on some of those current events. A thing with some news jacking is you do have to be so fast, so sometimes you will immediately have an opinion for it, because it’s what you do all day, every day, and so if you’re working with a publicist, maybe keep a Slack channel open and jot down your feelings about it to that person, because that will also help them learn how to pitch you to the media.

The more you can stack up your relevancy with your news jacking, the better you’ll do.

But I would say yes, definitely, low-hanging fruit. Be aware of what time of year it is, because news cycles also have to follow those holidays and current events, and then, obviously, news happens every day. It’s a little bit of a numbers game. You have to make it part of your day to pitch those opinions as they come up, because the important part of them is timing.

All right, so what’s coming up in the news? What jacking cycle are you going to leverage for your clients? Maybe in the next, I don’t know, a month or two. 

Specifically, Europe is rolling out the Accessibility Act for digital experiences, helping people be compliant and inclusive of those with other abilities. So, you know, making sure that your website can be accessed by people who are potentially blind, hard of hearing, etc. And so a lot of that is going to be getting my experts to weigh in on how that’s actually done at scale. 

Do you encourage your client to be more controversial or counterintuitive, in their opinion, to get more news coverage, or do you just want them to have something to say? 

I would say, for something like this, not controversial, because it’s a sensitive topic, but on other things, like leadership, being able to think differently than everybody else. I think you mentioned Jay Samit, who does that beautifully. About that disruption, we’re constantly disrupting ideas. 

But the other thing you can do is get emotional about it. Tell a story. I’m working on a piece about my mother right now. And I think often when you’re a woman in business, people say, you know, be fearlessly authentic. Be authentic, be yourself. But I have learned that my personality does not fit the mold of an acceptable female executive, because I’m not aggressive. I’m not what some people call a ball buster. They always say it’s like you gotta be that way to take an. Seriously, but be yourself. 

My mom ran a homeless shelter when I was growing up, and she taught me more about communications than any master’s degree ever did.

And my mom ran a homeless shelter when I was growing up, and she’s very soft spoken. She spent a lot of time getting to know the public and her community. She knew every community member; you’d never find her raising her voice. She was in scary situations, sometimes because she was dealing with people who were mentally ill and in some cases, she was never afraid. She was a fearless leader. She just wasn’t allowed one, and she taught me more about communications than any master’s degree ever did. 

But put her in Silicon Valley, if she were given the opportunity, she would have crushed it, but would her personality have been accepted and seen by leadership? I don’t think so. And so if you want to take a controversial spin like that, that you’re all telling us we need to be authentic, but do we even get to be authentic? Do we have the privilege of being authentic when your perception of what a woman has to be in business is aggressive? What if we’re not naturally that way? What if our heart is quiet, but we’re just good at our job? That’s a perspective that is, I guess you could say, is controversial, but it started with just a personal story. 

Well, you should totally find an event, or some sort of time to release a story about your mom, or multiple stories about your mom, like, if you look at the foster care system, for example, and how many kids this end up on the street, they age out of the system, is the term. Then they end up in a homeless shelter. May is National Foster Care Month. I was a foster child when I was growing up for three or four years, yeah, during most of my high school. And a lot of people don’t know that about me. So that is an angle that you could take with your storytelling in the month of May, or in the run-up towards May, maybe get some TV appearances. Maybe you and your mom will get on TV.

I think you would make an amazing publicist. Yeah, no, I thought about that too, because also May is Mother’s Day. So all those things just to give everybody listening some ideas, the more you can stack up your relevancy with your news jacking, the better you’ll do. 

Amazing. Well, I know we’re out of time, so how does our listener or viewer get in touch with you? Maybe hire you and your company, your firm, to help them with PR where do we send them?

Oh, absolutely. And this has been so much fun. You could find me at mosaicgroupmedia.com, or, of course, on LinkedIn. 

Awesome. Thank you, Molly and listener, we’ll catch you on the next episode. Make it a fantastic week. I’m your host. Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Create the Marvel universe of my brand. I develop content that supports our brand’s entire ecosystem, not just product features. I tell stories around our ethos and values to engage customers emotionally.

Practice fearless authenticity in thought leadership. I share definite opinions that reflect my expertise, even if they might be controversial. I balance this by acknowledging other perspectives while standing firm in my viewpoint.

Transform technical content into emotional stories. I connect every technical explanation to human outcomes – does it save time, improve relationships, or enhance quality of life? I focus on the emotional impact rather than features.

Build my own media infrastructure. I treat my company as a media company, creating content that serves my micro-community rather than chasing viral moments.

Use newsjacking strategically with timely opinions. I maintain a content calendar with recurring events like Women’s History Month or International Women’s Day. I prepare opinions early and layer in current events when timing aligns.

Leverage my background as a marketing superpower. I use my past experiences to bring fresh perspectives to my content. I think like a storyteller creating emotional connections rather than a marketer pushing features.

Write fearlessly first, then refine. I first write my raw opinion as if no one will see it, being brutally honest. Then I layer on context and tailor the message for my audience.

Stop the scroll with strategic visuals. I select images people aren’t used to seeing in professional contexts to grab attention.

Convert criticism into creative fuel. I channel negative feedback into motivation for innovation rather than letting it water down my voice. I mature my approach while maintaining my authentic perspective.

Connect with Molly St. Louis through Mosaic Group Media at mosaicgroupmedia.com and actively engage on LinkedIn, especially if I need help transforming technical content into compelling stories.

About Molly St. Louis

Molly St. Louis is the co-founder of Mosaic Group Media, which specializes in public relations strategies for late-stage startups. With 20 years of multimedia experience, Molly has won numerous awards for her thought leadership projects and was a communications leader for two unicorn tech companies. She was also a marketing trends writer and contributor for Inc. Magazine, The Huffington Post, Yahoo, and Adweek.