Rosanna Maietta, Chief Communications Officer and Senior Counselor to the CEO at the American Clean Power Association, shares her tips on how to navigate a fast-paced news cycle and build strong relationships with reporters to combat misinformation. Rosanna also talks about the evolution of the communications role.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: Can you give us a quick top line of the work of the American Clean Power Association?

ROSANNA: We represent over 800 members in the clean energy industry, everyone from the folks who are building solar and wind turbines to offshore wind development and battery storage and everyone in between. So, it’s really helping to drive that next level of energy into the future.

DOUG: Yeah. You talk about the increasing need for speed in PR. Can you explain a little bit about that?

ROSANNA: There’s just so many channels right now for communications professionals to pay attention to, and you can often take a look at the universe of them and think that you need to dismiss them all. But the news cycle is therefore moving at a nanosecond. And so, what can seem as an, you know, unhelpful comment on somebodies feed can bubble into a major full-blown crisis. You know, 30 minutes later, how do you prepare for that? And what are the most effective tools at your disposal? And I think even though there are so many channels, there are also so many more effective tools these days that can really help communicators be laser focused. What is the audience you’re trying to reach? How do you most easily dampen a crisis and mitigate that? And so, being thoughtful and being always aware of new tools and technologies as they develop and figuring out, you know, what do you need in your own playbook? Not everybody needs to do all the channels all at once. It’s really goes back to again, who’s your audience and what’s your goal?

DOUG: You talked a bit about how you adjust to the need for speed. Can you take maybe a deeper dive in, whether it’s like a specific case, because you’re making judgments on what is important to respond to, when should you be proactive? Can you give us a little insight into how that’s handled at your organization?

ROSANNA: We’re constantly you know in the throes of anything clean energy or energy related supply chain issues, inflationary pressures. So, we are constantly drinking from a fire hose. And so it really, really helps us to think through, well, what should we respond to and, and what not. And a lot of times we’re, we’re making calculations based on okay, what outlet is asking us for comment. Who reads this outlet in our membership? Who is going to care about this? You know, this particular query, if we say no comment or ignore it or, or engage, right. And so being really clear about who our audiences are and our goals. Sometimes you have to respond because, you know, that’s, you know, your five board members are reading that outlet, even though you know, it may not be one of the more mainstream outlets. So making those judgment calls, those are happening on a daily basis. I think that, you know, that sort of day-to-day foundational PR is, is 100% important. But I think in an association setting and certainly one like ours where we’re constantly just taking all this incoming, it really is important for us to tell our own story. And so, to be proactive, to know what it is we want to want to share, have a position in a strong point of view and really take the news, that, you know, while still being credible with reporters and providing facts and resources and thoughtful analysis, it really is important to have a point of view. And so, we are constantly thinking about that. We’re thinking of that in terms of campaigns. How do we tell the clean energy story both at the national level but also locally? I mean, we’ve seen huge rise in the last several years of misinformation because of all the channels that exist, right. And the folks that are engaging there. And so how do we combat that, that and, and it is both dismissing and dispelling, um, you know, myth first fact, but also telling our story in a proactive and positive way.

DOUG: You mentioned as much in the PR industry are having challenged with misinformation or wrong facts, might be another way to call it. How do you counter and how do you pick and choose when you need to correct, and when you’re going to get a voice? Is a big part of it sort of getting out there first with the accurate information?

ROSANNA: Having a relationship with the reporters who cover your beat are so important because they are more likely to reach out to you first and say, hey, I’m about to run this story, or I heard this or this organization is claiming this, what’s your comment? So that helps you with having sort of what I like to call the early warning system. You know, something is coming and preparing everybody because that’s sort of step two in an association world is the making sure that everybody knows just as much information as you have at any given moment, so no one’s caught off guard and is surprised. But I think having those relationships helps to shape the story. If it’s negative, there’s there are times when you can’t help it. I think, you know, we, earlier this year were surprised by the level of misinformation that came out of some dead whales that were washing up ashore. And immediately the industry’s opponents seized upon that as an effort to blame the offshore wind industry. And there is absolutely no basis in fact or reality to those claims. And in fact, um, you know, multiple scientific organizations refuted all those claims, but it took a while to, to stem the tide of that misinformation. Again, a lot of commentary in social media that was then reported by legitimate news outlets. So it, you know, within a month we had stood up, um, a very targeted digital advertising campaign, um, highlighting the lies that were being promulgated rather, as well as a microsite with all of the actual facts articulating what in fact, is happening in offshore wind in the industry and the development and the environmental stewardship that the industry stands by, um, and adheres to and that, you know, you know, within a few weeks, we saw reporters reaching out to us first when they were writing stories, we saw people who were still trying to claim those facts as truth, um, that reporters were fact checking them in real time. So, we did stem the tide there. But again, it’s about knowing, knowing your reporters, finding those tools to be really targeted and specific and being quick to react. And I think for those companies and organizations that have a very bureaucratic process to launch a digital campaign that can set you back and you can see the news cycles just getting ahead of you, so that it’s important to be prepared and know how to, to get on the air with, advertising as quickly as possible. If you need to.

DOUG: One of the real intriguing things for me is that you have a dual role historically PR it’s been how do we get closer to the C-suite? How do we get closer to the C-suite? You have the dual role being in the C-suite as chief communications officer, but also as a senior counselor to leadership. How important is that to build that relationship and how others maybe go about doing that to make it more common that those roles are combined?

ROSANNA: I think it’s critical for communications executives to be at the table where the decisions are made, and to have a very close relationship with your policy and advocacy team because they go hand in hand. Right? You can’t do, uh, you know, shoe leather lobbying without a comm strategy these days, there’s just too many channels and too many ways to influence people. So the old way of doing things doesn’t work. And I think that organizations that recognize that do really well. You know, it’s funny, years ago, when I was first starting out in PR, a PR professional, with many more years of experience, had written sort of what the role of a comms person is. And it was everything from, you know, fixing your, your principals hair before a media interview on camera to getting them coffee to writing the script and the talking points and, you know, and it’s that full spectrum. And if you do your job right, you have a really close relationship with your CEO. And I think it’s really incumbent upon comes folks to leverage that. Right. You have a view of the entire organization in many cases, and you are the closest to the audience. And so, sharing back those insights and those trends and really being an early warning system for your boss and letting them know what you’re seeing and hearing from reporters, things to watch out for that will only make them smarter in their engagements and see you as a trusted, valued partner.

DOUG: I think within the decade you’re going to see CCO as a path to CEO because the communications function has become so increasingly important. Now, I know you believe in human beings. You’ve added a number to your team based on the press releases that are out there. But there’s also thought in a big issue about AI content generation. What’s your take on that?

ROSAANA: Certainly, the debate between comms professionals to use or not use, and I feel like there’s somewhere in the middle. I think like all new technologies, it’s really important to pay attention to where this is going. What are the uses, how can it improve some of what we do? And in in many ways it may. And I think depending on the organization there, there might be some, some useful applications of it. For me it’s more about learning enough about the technology to understand how it’s going to impact our industry and not just our comms shop, per se. Because that’s where I think our role is as communications professionals is to really be looking ahead five steps to all of these new technologies to figure out where’s our role here and how do we and what is the role in the organization. And maybe not just whether we’re using it to develop a press release? I do think even if you are using it for communications functions, you’re still going to need real human beings to review, to apply judgment to, to, to make sure everything is accurate and factual. I would still feel very uncomfortable sharing a ChatGPT written press release with anyone outside of my team and we currently are not using any AI to do our work.

DOUG: Yeah. One of the interesting applications for that we’ve seen in communications is you can actually search for journalists, use it as a search tool. Can you tell me who’s written articles about topic A, B or C and it will actually identify people who have written about that and the content that’s out there. So, it’s great for actually research analysts. This has really been a great discussion. Do you want to leave people maybe, who are in the association space, have so many people to answer to with some best practices and best ideas, how to balance the need of the full organization as well as the individual members.

ROSANNA: It does come back to sort of, you know, the old school way of working. It’s about relationships. And we do our job well because we have really solid relationships with reporters. And that has mattered a lot. Particularly because, you know, as I mentioned, we’re constantly reacting to news or trying to get our, our point of view out to reporters, those 1 to 1 relationships really matter, I think, to just being prepared, having a playbook. I’d like to say a crisis is only a crisis because you’re not prepared.

You can know what channels, what your playbook. Who do you go to, what’s your chain of command internally to get decisions quickly. And then finally, I would say that nowadays you, you cannot do anything effectively without advertising of some kind. Paid is the most direct approach to getting in front of your audience. And so being able to do that nimbly and to have some budget to do that, you actually don’t need a ton of money, depending on what your objectives are, to reach the right audience. So I think that has to be part of any integrated comms plan going forward.

DOUG: Thank you so much for sharing your great insights and for the important work that you’re doing.

ROSANNA: Thanks, Doug. I appreciated our conversation and I appreciate everything you do for the PR industry.

DOUG: Thank you, I appreciate that.