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CWC with Karen Swim

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I’m delighted to have with me one of my most frequent guests, a very smart individual who always has great insights for us, Karen Swim of Solo PR Pro. Welcome, Karen.

Karen Swim: Thank you, Chip. It’s always great to, to be with you and, I’m going to apologize to your audience because I do have the flu, but the flu could not keep me away from doing your podcast. That’s how much. I like you.

Chip Griffin: Well, I, I, I appreciate that very much and the, the feeling is mutual and, and, I’ll remember that, if, if I catch the flu the next time I’m on your show, I’ll power right through and not even hesitate.

So, but I, I think, you know, it, it is important to have the conversation we’re going to have today because we are both talking with a lot of, of solos and small agency owners who are concerned about the current environment. And there are all sorts of things to be worried about if you’re a business owner right now.

And, and it doesn’t even matter, you know, what your political views are, those kinds of things. There are a lot of economic issues. There are the political issues that, that certainly are getting a lot of headlines right now. There are societal issues. There’s just, there’s all sorts of stuff going on.

Karen Swim: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And so it is really a chaotic environment to be running your business in, and a lot of this is having a direct impact on public relations, communications, marketing, the specialties that we work with on a day to day basis. So I think it’ll be interesting to have a conversation about how do you cope with this chaos in the moment?

How do you, if not thrive as a business, at least survive as a business as you’re navigating your way through it? So, I’ll throw the floor open to you for thoughts that you may have.

Karen Swim: Yeah, it’s a really difficult time. And as you noted, especially for those in the communication professions, because so many of the pillars that are integral to the work that we do, we’re seeing such a chaotic landscape.

Social media platforms, there’s so much chaos. And there’s a lot of exiting from those platforms and people, you know, pushing back against them. And so if people are spreading out on more social media channels and not really being engaged anywhere, how do you use that tool now in 2025 to, to reach your, your audience, your publics?

We’re also seeing the media landscape just go through an incredible shifting. We’re seeing, you know, a lot of layoffs. We’re seeing local news go away. We’re seeing, you know, the quality of journalism change. And, you know, we are also seeing and, you know, history bears this out. This is where independent journalism rises. And they fight against what’s happening with, you know, integrity and with a mission to report the truth.

But those publications are all over the place. So how do communicators even find them? How do you find those newsletters by independent journalists? How do you pitch them? How do you use these tools with your clients? It’s, it’s a really uncertain time.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I, I think that’s a, that’s a great point. That, that even before we get to these larger environmental issues that are impacting business, we get to the issue of the places where we typically have gone to help clients communicate are, are disappearing and or changing substantially.

And so we need to learn to adapt to that as a business, right? We can’t, we can’t simply lament the fact that that there is less traditional media and so it’s harder to get stories placed. We need to come up with a solution for our clients because they don’t want to hear us say well, you know there’s just there’s so many fewer places.

It’s so hard. They’ve got fewer reporters. They don’t have time for pitches. So, you know, yeah, I know we didn’t produce anything the last three months, but you know, that’s just that’s just the way it is. You need to come up with something that you can explain to the client, this is what we’re doing and this is how it’s having a result.

So fundamentally, that means a lot of the folks that we work with who are traditional media relations folks, they need to be rethinking that pure media relations approach and thinking more about Gini Dietrich’s PESO model, for example, and how do we Integrate additional types of communication, but even then, to your point, the social media platforms are changing. And a lot of people originally started to migrate from one platform to another.

That was maybe more hospitable to their own personal views of the world. But then people just started throwing their hands up and say, well, I’m not going anywhere. So then how do you find people? How do you, you need to find your audience, your client’s audience, wherever they are.

Karen Swim: Yeah, and it’s funny because we have, how many years have we been saying, stop pushing the lever of media relationships, as your only tool in the toolbox.

We’ve been saying this forever. Public relations