In a world of rapidly evolving media landscapes, Gregory Galant is someone who has not just witnessed the transformation, but actively shaped it.
In Ep. 134 of Earned, Conor sits down with Gregory Galant, co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack & The Shorty Awards.
To start, we dive into Greg’s early adventures in podcasting before unpacking his role in reshaping the public relations landscape. Greg shares how his experience interviewing social media pioneers influenced his engagement with emerging platforms, leading to the viral success of the Shorty Awards and the inception of Muck Rack. Next, Greg explains how Muck Rack evolved from a free service for journalists into a comprehensive SaaS platform that revolutionized PR as the first-ever CRM for PR teams. We then discuss the intricacies of PR measurement, the importance of customer feedback, and the transformative potential of AI in the industry. To close the show, Greg shares what motivates him and how he finds fulfillment in creating tools that help professionals excel.
We’ve included a couple of highlights from the episode below, but be sure to check out the full video above, or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
“Nobody was building new tools for the PR industry to do the job that they've been doing for decades”: Why Gregory Galant Built Muck Rack to Bring Innovation to an Underserved Industry
Conor Begley: When I look at the history of The Shorty Awards, it’s really the celebration of social media and the new era of publishers. Meanwhile, Muck Rack actually skews a bit more traditional in terms of who the audience is, with a real focus on print, TV, radio, blogs, et cetera. I'm curious, what made you decide to stay really focused on that lane? Not that you don't have social media tools, but not go as aggressively in that direction.
Gregory Galant: We knew social media better than anyone. With The Shorties, we were there for the birth of social media. We realized that it was really interesting how journalists were using social media to write stories for what would be considered traditional media, or even articles for new media. We realized that even now, but especially at the time, the news drives social media.
When you log into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, now X, and Threads, too, you see a lot of news articles there. People write these news articles that are getting shared on social media. The news article gets created by social media because people use social signals to find journals to pitch, and journalists research using social media. They write the news article, and maybe it lives on The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but then it gets shared back out again on social media and drives the conversation. Even tweets that don't actually have links in them, they're often referencing articles they've seen in the news.
We found it fascinating that traditional news was being altered by social media, and we realized that everybody's focused on building tools for social media. They're raising tons of VC and spending like crazy against each other. But nobody was building new tools for the PR industry to do this job that they've been doing for decades: finding the right journals to reach out to and monitoring what's being written about them in the news. We saw all these new avenues for them and thought, here's a market that's really underserved. Social media is changing the whole media landscape, and no one's building software to help the PR people deal with this huge change. That's where we saw a really great opportunity and went for it.
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