Publicist in Your Pocket

Word of mouth used to be the last word. Now it's the first click. There was a time when your reputation moved slowly enough to manage. Something came up — a complaint, a bad day, or even a great opportunity — and you had a beat. Time to breathe, check the facts, decide how to tell your side. Time was your buffer. That buffer is gone. The second someone asks AI about your business, the machine has...

A business owner in our community lost an entire weekend to one stranger in his comments. He was right on the facts — and every reply he wrote just made the fight bigger, until people who’d never heard of his business knew him as ‘the guy fighting in the comments.’ He’s in good company: from Amy’s Baking Company to a boutique hotel that tried to fine guests for bad reviews, the internet is full of...

A salon owner I know got fed up watching a former stylist rack up three times her reviews — so one weekend she texted every client and asked them all to leave one. Forty came in over the weekend. By Monday most were gone, and a few days later her profile was banned. She hadn’t done anything dishonest. She just did the right thing the wrong way. In this episode I break down how to grow your Google...

A friend of mine was spending a few thousand dollars a month on Google ads and couldn’t figure out why the phone wasn’t ringing. So I pulled out my phone and Googled him the way a customer would. His hours were wrong. His photos were three years old. And a one-star review he’d never even seen was sitting right at the top — with no response. Meanwhile, his competitor’s profile was wide awake, and t...

Someone left you a one-star review. Or a scammer just charged you $500 to “remove” it from Google. Either way — this episode is for you. In this episode, Cyndee Harrison walks through the single most important thing most business owners don’t know about negative reviews: report before you respond. She shares two real client stories — including a motorcycle dealer who waited twenty days and got eve...

You know that feeling. You pick up your phone first thing in the morning and there it is — a notification. And in the three seconds it takes you to read it, everything changes. That’s not a news cycle. That’s a notification cycle. And it doesn’t care what time it is, what day it is, or whether you have a plan. Most people think crisis means a headline. A front-page story. An executive scandal. But...

You’ve been thinking like a marketer your whole career. And marketing has gotten you this far. But in an AI-first world where trust is the currency and your digital proof trail determines whether customers choose you — marketing alone isn’t enough anymore. It’s time to think like a publicist. In this episode I break down the three core differences between a marketing mindset and a publicist mindse...

A family business owner in Kansas once called me out of nowhere and said: “I think I just killed my family’s business.” He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d just done exactly what everyone told him to do — promote, be visible, say yes to every opportunity. Nobody taught him the other half. This episode is that other half. In this first episode of Publicist in Your Pocket, I’m sharing why I built th...