Episode 187: How can you shape your AI brand footprint?

Summary

Episode 187: How Can You Shape Your AI Brand Footprint?

Podcast: The Smart Communications Podcast
Host: Farah, Co-Director at Big Duck
Guest: George Weiner, Founder of Whole Whale
Release Date: May 29, 2025

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1. Introduction to AI Brand Footprint

In this enlightening episode, Farah welcomes George Weiner, a seasoned nonprofit tech evangelist and founder of Whole Whale, to discuss the emerging concept of the "AI brand footprint." George, known for his expertise in data-driven strategies for nonprofits, brings valuable insights into how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping brand visibility and communications for nonprofit organizations.

2. Defining the AI Brand Footprint

George introduces the term "AI brand footprint," a concept coined by the Big Duck team to encapsulate how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT interpret and represent a brand based on its online presence.

George Weiner [01:30]: "We made up the concept because we needed some white space to put words behind what we're seeing in the data and in practice for how these LLMs... are pulling information from our sites and then representing them as facts and information."

This footprint comprises not just the organization's direct content but also the broader ecosystem of related topics and expertise areas, highlighting the complexity of managing brand representation in AI-driven environments.

3. Impact of AI on Brand Visibility

George emphasizes the transformative impact AI has on how brands are perceived and discovered. Traditional methods of brand cultivation relied heavily on polished materials and strategic online placements. However, AI now aggregates and interprets this information, creating a more dynamic and sometimes unpredictable representation of the brand.

George Weiner [02:41]: "Your AI brand footprint isn't just about Whole Whale or Big Duck. It's about the concepts and areas where you are expert, where you talk about."

This shift necessitates a more intentional and strategic approach to brand management, ensuring that AI accurately reflects the organization's values and mission.

4. Search Engine Optimization in the Age of AI

Discussing the evolving landscape of search engine optimization (SEO), George highlights the diminishing returns of traditional SEO strategies due to AI's ability to directly answer queries, reducing organic traffic from search engines like Google.

George Weiner [06:27]: "The decrease is very real and it's continuing to happen as AI answers the questions that people were asking... is now getting the ax from Google."

He introduces the concept of "LLM optimization," an emerging strategy focused on optimizing content specifically for large language models. This includes creating content that AI cannot easily replicate, thereby maintaining relevance and authority.

5. Measuring AI Brand Footprint

One of the critical challenges discussed is the difficulty in measuring AI-generated impressions and mentions, as traditional analytics tools do not capture this data effectively.

George Weiner [07:47]: "Analytics tools often aren't capturing AI generated impressions or mentions because you don't get a dashboard showing your brand has been mentioned in AI answers."

To address this, George recommends tracking referral traffic from AI sources and using reverse engineering techniques to estimate the AI's influence on brand visibility.

George Weiner [08:00]: "You can look at AI based sources of referral traffic and bundle those together... What is my AI brand footprint?"

This approach allows organizations to gain a more accurate understanding of their presence within AI-driven platforms.

6. Protecting Intellectual Property in AI

A significant concern raised is the unauthorized use of organizations' intellectual property by AI tools, often without proper attribution.

George Weiner [12:10]: "Your content is being stolen. I've actually proved it. I've done things that I have screenshotted and... AI has, once it does its snapshot, ingested it and not credited us."

George advises organizations to develop robust intellectual property pages and clearly articulate ownership to mitigate unauthorized use. However, he acknowledges the limitations for smaller nonprofits lacking extensive legal resources.

George Weiner [14:05]: "If you don't have an army of lawyers... look at your intellectual property that is already publicly available because it's already been ingested."

7. Proactive Strategies for Nonprofits

George offers practical strategies for nonprofits to proactively shape their AI brand footprint:

• Focus on First-Party Information: Shift towards creating unique, authoritative content that AI cannot easily replicate.

  George Weiner [09:49]: "Move to first party information. What are the things that Farah has to say? What is the quotable thing that AI can't make up?"

• Leverage Unique Data: Utilize proprietary data and insights to enhance content credibility and authority.

  George Weiner [10:20]: "What data have you surveyed, collected, or found in your backyard that you can package and graph and put out there as here's what we saw."

• Develop an AI Policy: Establish internal guidelines for AI usage to foster a culture of responsible exploration rather than fear.

  George Weiner [17:09]: "Have an AI policy that unpacks internally and externally how you're approaching these tools."

8. Resources and Tools Available

George highlights the suite of free AI tools available at Causewriter AI, designed to assist nonprofits in navigating the AI landscape effectively:

• Donor Persona Builder: Creates detailed donor personas for targeted communications.
• 990 Analyzers: Extracts key information from tax documents to inform strategies.
• Prompt Builder: Assists in crafting effective prompts for AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

George Weiner [15:49]: "We want more good words in the world at Causewriter. Those are free to use... helping you create prompts that you can then use on tools like Claude or ChatGPT."

These resources empower nonprofits to harness AI capabilities while maintaining control over their brand narratives.

9. Conclusion and Parting Advice

As the episode draws to a close, George offers a profound piece of advice:

George Weiner [17:09]: "Fear or love... Encourage a culture of love and exploration rather than fear."

He advocates for embracing AI as a tool for growth and innovation, urging organizations to develop comprehensive AI policies and foster positive internal cultures to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by AI.

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Connect with George Weiner and Access Resources:

For more insights and to utilize the free tools discussed, visit wholewhale.com or contact George directly at wholewhale.com.

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This episode of The Smart Communications Podcast offers invaluable guidance for nonprofit leaders seeking to adapt their communication strategies in an AI-driven world. By understanding and proactively managing their AI brand footprint, organizations can ensure their missions are effectively advanced in the digital age.

Transcript

[Farah]

This is the Smart Communications.

[George Weiner]

Smart Communications Smart Communications Podcast.

[Farah]

Developing the voices Developing the voices of determined nonprofits brought to you by Big Duck.

[George Weiner]

Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Farah, trumpeter co director and worker owner at Big Duck. In today's episode, we're going to ask the question, how can you shape your AI brand footprint? And if you're not sure what that term means, don't worry, you're going to learn all about it in just a few minutes. I am delighted to be joined by George Weiner. George uses he him and has actually been on the podcast before. You may remember him talking with Sarah, our founder, on what data really matters back in 2019. And if you don't remember, we'll be sure to link to it and you can listen to it all over again. But George is one of the most enthusiastic nonprofits tech evangelists I know and I'm excited for today. George runs Whole Whale, a leading marketing and analytics agency specializing in data driven strategies for nonprofits and social impact organizations. Before Hal Whale, he was The CTO of DoSomething.org and co founded Powerpoetry.org at Whole Whale. He has developed products like Causewriter AI that help nonprofits safely create AI content in their voice, which is quite apropos of today's conversation. George, welcome to the show.

Longtime listener, one time guest, and excited to be a caller today.

There you go. Back on it. Back on it. Well, a few months ago you published a blog that caught my attention. It was called Measuring your AI brand the Hidden Visibility Challenge. Of course, that phrase AI brand footprint intrigued me immediately. And I know, and I believe actually that your team made that up. So did you make that up, in fact? And what does it mean?

We, yes, did make up the concept because we needed some white space to put words behind what we're seeing in the data and in practice for how these LLMs, large language models, these AI chats, are pulling information and to put it nicely, pulling information from our sites and then representing them as, you know, as facts and information for people that are writing. I'm curious for you though, because on the brand side, y' all are always paying attention to that client narrative. Like what alarm bells went off when you saw that?

Well, I think the question is like, what does an AI brand mean? Right? Do we have to have a separate brand for AI? How do we manage how our brand shows up in AI? So that was what was intriguing me to want to learn more about.

Yeah, and it's tricky because in the sort of, you know, pre Pre AI periods of time, we could cultivate our brand a lot more, more easily. Right. We have our polished materials, we have our about of our site. We have the, you know, three tent poles of Internet placement where we talk about ourselves. Now what we're dealing with is this blend of interpretation that is being done by the AI that curates, pulls in, and then summarizes all of it and all of what it finds about your brand, how it's talked about and where it's talked about. And this requires a bit more cultivation and intentional work around it. What's more, your AI brand footprint isn't just about Whole Whale, isn't just about Big Duck. It's about the concepts and areas where you are expert, where you talk about. And that kind of leads us back to, like, why carve out some clear space for AI brand footprint to talk about it? Well, as it develops as a term, we hope that our fingerprint is on there, our way of thinking is in there. And that kind of extends the concept of an AI brand footprint because it is an entire ecosystem inside of this large language model that it's pulling from. And then that gets also augmented by Internet search results. But it's this giant soup that we're now trying to play with away from somebody may not even ever meant, like, end up on our website. Right. And still find us.

Yeah. In fact, I think I was telling you before we recorded this show that a few weeks ago, I got a call from somebody and we always try to find out, how'd you find Big Doc? And usually it's, oh, a friend of mine worked with you, all had a great thing to say, or I stumbled on a blog you wrote, or I listened to a great podcast with George. You know, I'm sure we'll be hearing that in the future. But this person said, I actually did a search on ChatGPT and about leading nonprofit communications firms, and I found Big Doc. And I was like, okay, guess we're showing up in the right places. So that was exciting to hear. It's the first time I've heard it. I'm sure it's not the last.

The implications of that are very, very powerful and are not to be overlooked. We had a similar case where folks reached out to us, and it was a we found you on ChatGPT and decided to reach out. As we went through that process, we are in a weird, very great moment in some respects, to have had both of us, Big Dog and Whole Whale, some brand reputation, over a decade of work, the links, the types of online reputation that now get baked into that. It's going to be so much harder I think for new entrants to suddenly get into that flow that the the building of your See previous comment AI brand and AI brand footprint is really going to have a tremendous amount of value. I don't know how this will change over time, but right now we're paying very close attention to where we show up, where we can show up with our competitors. And there's a whole bunch of analysis that you can do on that. And by the way, it depends on the AI model that you are using and in what context. So it is not like there's like one central like eye in the sky database. You're playing this game on many fronts.

Well, let's talk about the front of Google for a minute, which I believe is still the most popular search engine. And I know I have seen that AI search results are often the first thing that someone sees when they enter a search on Google. What does that mean for traditional approaches to search engine optimization? What should organizations do to leverage this shift where AI and the large learning models are sort of coming into our search results?

We've been doing something with our clients called a large language model audit, an LLM audit for the content. And what we're seeing very, very real is the decrease in organic traffic, that traffic that people used to type in to Google, which commands roughly 89% of the US search market. And that decrease is very real and it's continuing to happen as AI answers the questions that people were asking those how to's those facts about that article that probably did pretty well before that was maybe, you know, adjacent to your mission, but did very well is now getting the ax from from Google and also because of other things like ChatGPT as a search or Perplexity as a search. So I think doing more of what you used to do is a losing strategy. And that's where we are moving into how you know the AI brand footprint, but also into LLM optimization. It also goes by many other names as people love inventing things like geo, which is Generative Engine optimization, and then a rebranding of SEO which is Search Everywhere Optimization. It is all the same flavor of ice cream though. You need to rethink and measure what we're creating and how we're creating it.

Well, let's talk more about that measure piece you flagged in your blog post, how analytics tools are often not capturing AI generated impressions or mentions. Why is that happening and what should people do about it?

It's not happening because we're not being given those data for a number of reasons. So put another way, when Big Duck showed up in that ChatGPT search, you didn't get some sort of dashboard. Your brand has been mentioned this many times. You're not even getting that in the AI overview, which is what Google calls the AI answer. That happens for some X percent of searches. X is going to increase, by the way, every single month. You're not getting that yet. There are ways though, however, of looking at referral traffic. We talked about organic traffic, but referral traffic is another channel of inbound people that click on stuff and end up on your site that you can find in Google Analytics. You can look at AI based sources of referral traffic and then bundle those together, kind of like putting them in a shopping bag and branding that as a whole separate channel. And so we are doing that with all of our clients. Now you can ask some interesting questions. What pages of our site are people coming to? And also we can reverse engineer. We can just say, hey, I think if one person clicked from the source ChatGPT, there was probably 10 others that did not click. What is my AI brand footprint? What? And how much is my brand being mentioned, given the fact that I only get 10%, 5% of those as clicks to my site? And then you can begin to play a more accurate game.

Well, this is great. I want to pivot up and away for just a moment because I know there's so much you have to share when it comes to AI. Can you offer any ideas, tips, tricks about what nonprofit staff can do to proactively shape their brand footprint in AI tools?

Yeah, I don't want it to be the doom and gloom like your traffic is going to go down. What's going to happen is your traffic is going to become more relevant and the tactics that used to work for SEO traditionally, which is the you know, write this how to article, write this tentpole explainer on everything you need to know about hunger, everything you need to know about animal adoption, like, is not going to work because AI can answer it. Put another way, if your article can be answered as good as, not even better, just as good as AI, don't write it. If you're using AI to generate the entire article, you're wasting your time. So if your classic style of writing is being commoditized, being done as good as or better by AI, where do you have to move? Well, you have to move to first party information. What are the things that Farah has to say? What Is the quotable thing that AI can't make up or if it does, it is actually, you know, illegal. It is now guard railed against. So according to whom? I like asking that question of my team, of our clients for whatever article we're talking about. According to whom Is this true and what insight does that human who's quotable and you should quote and put that in there because then again you're building into the brand footprint. What is there? The other thing that you have access to is first party data. What data have you surveyed, collected or found in your backyard that you can package and graph and put out there as here's what we saw. It is a small snapshot. Now mind you, yeah, you didn't do the double blind longitudinal study for a decade but like calm down, here's the information we found and here's what we learned from it. AI can't fake that and actually AI will reference that. So I think you take the energy that used to be around, let me build the, you know, ultimate guide to adopting Mittens the kitten and you come back and say, hey, here are stats about the five reasons why people bring back dogs. And now here are our data. And now we have authority according to our head of department. So hopefully that gets you thinking about where to put that energy. But I am growing increasingly concerned about classic SEO strategies and putting content writers to work on a plane they're going to lose on.

Yeah, well, this sounds like a good evolution of content strategy and I want to go back to your comments around the sort of idea of authority and quotables. I know that some people are worried that AI will start taking their organization's intellectual property. Is that a well founded concern? What can people do if they feel like they are being stolen from reactively? And what can they do now more proactively?

The answer is yes, your content is being stolen. I've actually proved it. I've done things that I have screenshotted and here's the truth. I've written concepts, I've created them and AI has, once it does its snapshot, ingested it and not credited us. So I, I'm really beginning to work on how do I make sure that in the, you know, everything down to the semantic markup of how I'm writing about content, I speak in a language that is clear that as it is ingested, it is credited back to us. And that is something that is at a bit of an evolving field, but it is very real. The things that you put on your website are and have been snapshotted and ingested and maybe not properly attributed to you. That is different than saying the AI overview. The AI overviews. Right. This is the addition of links and search results into the AI. Answering a question is more likely to attribute in its footnotes links to you. Like that absolutely is happening. But there's a lot of different flavors of this and many folks are using chat GPT cold without search, which means you're dealing with that snapshot of information that pulled in your data and is then sort of summarizing and you know, attributing at whimsical.

So if you find out that's happened, are you saying this is our new reality and just be aware of it and as much as possible write content, you know, according to you, and sort of adding all of that in or is there something people can do if they find out their content is being stolen?

Yeah, so it depends on the size of organization. And let's be clear, if you don't have an army of lawyers at your beck and call, you have a problem. Here's what I'd recommend for the majority probably of organizations that are like, yeah, we're not the New York Times and we can't afford a multi year lawsuit. I have been working on a page of intellectual property that is owned by whole whale has been used at this date in this way I would recommend you look at your intellectual property that is already publicly available because it's already been ingested. There's no sort of toothpasting it back in to the tube. So I would say what does your intellectual property page look like? How are you linking to it? And you know, that might be one place to start because it is beyond me to say that like a nonprofit operating at under $1 million, which 75% of nonprofits do, can, can fight that battle. Surely you can submit these things into claims and comments like I challenge you to get somebody on the phone at ChatGPT. Seriously, challenge, like go do it.

Hard to get anybody on the phone anyway these days, but that's another story.

Kids today don't know how to use the phones today.

What are these rotary phones you used to use? Well, let's, let's leave on a high note and talk about more of what people can do. So you've got a great suite of tools on all different things folks can do with artificial intelligence that you created for free for nonprofits at causewriter AI Resources. Can you share a little bit? We hope people will go there. You can go. There'll be links to the blog post George mentioned and a few other [e-mail] insights but George, let's go back to those resources that you've published. What are some examples of the tools there and how people can use them?

Yeah, again, those are free tools because we want more good words in the world at coswriter. And so those are free to use things like donor Persona builder. Right. You can go in, put in your organization, and it's going to build out donor Personas that you could then chat with. There are other things like 990 analyzers. You put in a 990, it comes back with key information from it. There's also things in there like a prompt builder, because a lot of what we need to do is build a prompt, right. The instructions we give the AI so it does what we hope it to do. There is a prompt builder that uses our approach that will help you create like, oh, I want grant proposals for my animal welfare organization. Here are some details. It will then create a prompt that you can then use on tools like Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or other places that you are using tools. So we are constantly playing with and exploring and we want you to think about what is possible with AI tools that have been a bit better tuned than the generalists you are handed out of the box at ChatGPT.

Well, I love that you provide that. And if you're out there and you'd like to learn more about George's work or access the amazing resources his team continues to share and provide, go to wholewhale.com George, you've given us so much to think about, but any other parting words of advice you'd like to share with our listeners?

Fear or love? When you look at your team, I think you're being met with both of those as motivators. You deal with either differently. I'd encourage you to have, if you don't already, an AI policy that unpacks internally and externally how you're approaching these tools and then internally, this sort of culture, hopefully of love and exploration rather than fear. This is going to take my job and I'm going to find reasons not to use it.

Well, let's let love overcome all. Thank you, George. Have a great day.

[Farah]

Are you a fan of this podcast or Big Duck's other resources on nonprofit communications? If you are, we'd love to hear from you. Please drop us us a line by writing to helloigduck.com to tell us what you're working on and what topics you need help with. We also welcome getting your feedback via reviews. You can review this podcast wherever you listen. We'd love to hear from you.

[George Weiner]

This is the Smart Communications Podcast, Developing the Voices of Determined Nonprofits brought to you by Big Duck.

[Farah]

Big Duck is an agency that puts smart communications in the hands of nonprofits. We help our nonprofit clients develop strong brands, strong campaigns, and strong teams that advance their missions and achieve their goals.

[George Weiner]

Connect with [e-mail].