PRSA Gold Coast Chapter

09/22/2026

practitioners, as Brian Hart, the founder of Flackable and AuthorPrime and the author of "Credibility Marketing: An Insider’s Playbook for PR-Powered Growth," explains here, do NOT make this mistake when you, your C-level executive or client appears on a podcast.

Hart goes on further to say:

"The people who hand your clients a platform are keeping score, and they are scoring the representative, not just the client. A client’s silence after an episode is a relationship cost, and the duty to prevent it is on the communicator from the moment they decide which show to pitch. That is credibility marketing at its most basic: third-party trust, earned and reinvested."

That's excellent guidance...and even better advice.

When a client appears on a podcast and does nothing to promote it, the deepest cost is not a missed marketing opportunity. It is a relationship cost, and it is charged to the practitioner who made the booking, not to the client.

09/21/2026

All right, pro friends and colleagues!

We're just two days away from our annual PR Pro of the Year award luncheon, honoring Julie Madsen of Visit Ventura, at 12:00 p.m. on Wed., Sept. 23 at Rumfish Y Vino! We'd love to have an awesome turnout for Julie, who is doing tremendous work for this region's leading destination organization (DMO).

The best part? If you're a member of the Gold Coast Chapter, you get to attend for FREE! Space is limited, and advance registration is required, so be sure to get your tickets TODAY! Go to https://bit.ly/4x7QbCB to reserve your seat.

See you on Wednesday!

09/08/2026

Please join the PRSA Gold Coast board, and other professionals from across The 805, for the chapter's annual PR Pro of the Year recognition luncheon on Wed., Sept. 23 at Rumfish y Vino in Ventura.

This year, we honor Julie Madsen, communications and PR manager for Visit Ventura (officially: the Ventura Visitors & Convention Bureau), as our 2026 award recipient. During the luncheon, Julie will sit down with PRSA Gold Coast Chapter board member Kelsey G. Buttitta to discuss all of her fantastic work on behalf of the organization, including helping bring the X Games to Ventura, her commitment to community building, and her ongoing mentoring of students.

Cost:
✅ PRSA Gold Coast Chapter Members: Free.
✅ Non-Members: $40.00 per person.

Register today at https://bit.ly/4x7QbCB. We look forward to seeing you on Wed., Sept. 23!

08/10/2026

What a great idea!

As all of us pros know, is where it's at now, and your brand or client needs to have a definitive strategy in place for distributing and optimizing content so that it's cited by search engines and chatbots.

We've never seen this suggestion, as it relates to , so we thought we'd share it with all of you...courtesy of PR Daily Editor-In-Chief Allison Carter.

Start with a strong foundation and branch off. Here’s how.

07/31/2026

Chapter members and pro friends, we thought we'd switch it up again in August, as we typically do every year, and get together for fun, networking and socializing over lunch!

Depending on where you're located, you have two options (or attend both!): Wed., August 12 at Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar in The Collection at RiverPark in Oxnard and hosted by Keith R. Pillow; and Thurs., August 13 at Benchmark Eatery in Santa Barbara and hosted by Kelsey Buttitta. Both luncheons start at noon!

No RSVP required! Come out, enjoy fantastic food, and interact with and learn from your fellow practitioners. We look forward to seeing you!

07/07/2026

Did you know that, as of last month, bots now make up 58% of all worldwide traffic to HTML pages, while human-generated traffic only accounts for 42%? “Bad bots,” those responsible for such negative activities as data scraping and transaction fraud, comprised 37% of all traffic more than a year ago, and obviously, the volume of these nefarious actors continues to increase rapidly.

So what should your organization of clients do to protect themselves...from both and brand reputation perspectives?

Marketing Brew's Jasmine Sheena analyzes the landscape and talks to several experts who offer some excellent suggestions.

While some brands are more proactive than others, agencies that represent brands in sensitive categories are monitoring against “bad” bots and looking to leverage more useful ones.

06/24/2026

Today, we shift to our focus to , an often-forgotten, but tremendously important, element of programs. If you manage employee communications for your organization or clients, even in conjunction with the function, then this one is definitely for you!

As Irish writer, poet, and playwright Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," so let's take a few cues from the playbook of global player PepsiCo.

Recently speaking to Ragan Communications's Paul Hiebert, Rebekah Metts-Childers, PepsiCo’s vice president of global employee communications, "shared three ways PepsiCo is breaking down complex strategy for a global employee audience:"

1. A monthly video series, "Food for Thought," spotlighting different executives sharing information about corporate strategy. Keys: very accessible and digestible.
2. Create centers of excellence to make resources available to all. Keys: Breaks down SBU/department silos by sharing best practices, templates, approaches, governance, guidance, and much more.
3. Develop and distribute an internal newsletter specifically designed for the company's top 200 executives. And it boasts a 100% open rate. Keys: Enables/empowers executives to cascade important information throughout their respective organizations.

According to Metts-Childers, these tactics:
➡️ Put a face to the strategy: A casual conversation with executives across the business can make ideas less abstract and more human.
➡️ Create consistency: Rather than everyone doing their own thing, establish frameworks and guidelines for everyone to follow.
➡️ Inform every audience: Keep leaders up to date with the latest data and tools, so they can share accurate and timely information with their teams.

The company is so big, employees struggle to understand strategy. This is how PepsiCo made it all more clear.

06/23/2026

On the heels of yesterday's guide on how to get your brand's or client's content indexed by OpenAI's ChatGPT comes this awesome list of seven rules for having that very content cited by the large-language models (LLMs) employed by the major applications.

As outlined by Vlada Lomova, co-founder and of global agency PRHub.ae in PR News, here are the rules:

1. Lead with your thesis.
2. Write in subject-action-result constructions.
3. Make every section stand alone.
4. Use headings that mirror how people ask.
5. Source what you claim.
6. Put a summary block right after the introduction.
7. Keep it current and show it with visible publication dates.

Getting your brand noticed comes down to whether your expertise stands out when AI citations pull snippets from your pages—and whether it holds up in a world where people consume content fast.

06/22/2026

All right, most of us are using OpenAI's ChatGPT frequently, along with all the major applications. So you should know the difference between “getting indexed by” and “showing up in” ChatGPT...right???

If you're not entirely sure, then this HubSpot article is for you! It not only explains this distinct diffence and how it works, but also shows you EXACTLY how to ensure your organization's or your client's website is indexed by the world's leading software.

And that's a good thing! Why? Because "the ultimate goal of getting indexed is to eventually get cited and mentioned in the LLM's answers to enhance your answer engine optimization (AEO) efforts."

Learn how to get your website indexed by ChatGPT, understand the indexing process, and implement strategies to improve your visibility in AI-generated responses.

06/10/2026

When was the last time you heard a reporter or editor actually SAY he wants to cultivate meaningful, authentic relationships with pros?

That is a breath of fresh air, as far as we're concerned. But that's exactly what TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs told professional communicators at Ragan Communications's recent PR Daily Conference. Even better? He wants to hear from us even when we don't want anything (namely, placing a story in the revered 103-year-old publication). Amazing!

Jacobs also offered some fantastic advice, for pros at all levels, that we've certainly heard before, but bears repeating:

✅ Pitch your stories thoughtfully, and make them highly personal and customized. Mass emails are noticed quickly: Personalization has become even more critical as newsrooms and coverage continue to shrink, Jacobs said.

✅ Trust matters most when coverage is complicated: Trust is also built through repeated interactions, Jacobs said. Therefore, always be open, honest, transparent, accurate, communicative and responsive.

✅ AI makes relationships more critical. The rise of AI adds more pressure to good relationships: Jacobs said audiences are turning to AI tools for information over traditional search. "Brands need stronger trust with the journalists and experts who help explain what’s true and why it matters."

For more from Jacobs, please click on the link below.

3 ways to make media outreach more human. As AI changes how people find information, one of the country’s oldest media brands is putting renewed focus on relationships. During Ragan’s PR Daily Conference, Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs said that AI is reshaping media distribution, but human con...