Is Social Media the Future of PR? With Manychat’s Mady Lanni

• PR must be social-first because news and trends now break on social before traditional media.
• Strong campaigns build social-ready soundbites and stats into the strategy from day one.
• Brands shouldn’t chase every viral moment—only trends that fit their audience and relevance.
• The future of PR is integrated with SEO, social, and influencer marketing, not siloed outreach.
• Creators and platforms like Substack are becoming core PR channels, not side tactics.

I always love interviewing people who’ve made the jump from agency to in-house because they tend to have the clearest perspective on what’s changing in PR right now.

Mady Lanni is a perfect example.

After spending the last five years on the agency side with Fractl and Journey Further, working across a wide mix of brands, she’s now in-house at Manychat — a social media automation platform.

In this conversation, we talk about how PR and social are beginning to overlap, and what it really takes to turn trends, creator moments, and even unexpected chaos into something that drives attention and results.

Here is a slightly edited transcription:

How has your agency background shaped your in-house role?

Mady Lanni

Yeah, I came from the agency side — was agency for the last five years or so, working across a lot of different brands.

I was able to get all these different insights from working on fashion brands, health, and more. I feel like I’m very varied in that.

At my last role, I really helped build the team and processes for the US offering, and I think that has helped me in this in-house role, where I’m the first person in this department at Manychat, so I’m kind of building it from the ground up.

Just having that fast pace — having to build things quickly on the agency side — has really helped me grow and build all of this again, but now focusing it down to just one brand instead of four or five at the same time.

It’s been really nice to focus down.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Manychat is, we are a social media automation platform.

If you ever see people on social media that say “comment ‘snickerdoodle’ and I’ll send you the cookie recipe,” it’s more than likely an automation powered by Manychat. That’s like the biggest use case we have — so you’ve probably seen us or even commented and gotten a link run through a Manychat automation without even realizing it. And yes, social is very much our whole thing.

Vince Nero

Quick side question — should I be doing that on all of my posts?

Mady Lanni

Honestly, it really is a great way to increase engagement.

Especially as you’re growing and getting more comments, it’s just this extra step of connection.

I’m happy to help you get that set up if you want to test it out.

Why is it so important that people utilize social in their strategies?

Mady Lanni (05:26) Well, I mean, I think everything is social now.

I know that’s been a conversation for a long time, but now more than ever, so much is happening social first and then becoming news. So if you can hop on a social trend, or if you can put your content on social and have a moment where it could go viral and then get coverage — I think trying to think more social first is really important.

I work pretty closely with our social media manager to collaborate on what we’re potentially putting out on social, and we do PR moments that we just put out on social without a news push.

I think it’s really important to keep in mind that everyone has some sort of social media account now. I’m scrolling probably more hours in a day than I should be, and that’s where I’m seeing a lot of these moments from brands.

I’m even starting to see data studies pop up more on social than in the news. Especially as we get closer to that time of year with the end-of-year wrap-ups, I’m seeing more talk around sharing those on social.

I’ve also seen brands have partnerships with different creators to promote studies and get them out on social. So I’m seeing more and more of this becoming part of a general comms strategy, and I think it’s really important for PR to continue thinking this way.

It’s influencing how writers and journalists cover stories. AI search is also top of mind for so many people right now, and it’s scraping social, getting news from there as well.

So keeping social at the forefront of your mind in ideations, and connecting outreach to social moments, is really, really important right now — probably more than I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

How can you insert yourself into an ongoing trend?

Mady Lanni (08:28) Yeah, so if you have a piece that might have some social links to it, especially if you’re doing a digital PR campaign with data, infographics, or anything like that, I think it’s really important to start thinking about what the sound bite would be for social.

What’s the standout stat that we can maybe create a carousel around, or something that our social team might be able to take and turn into a moment?

Think about that during the data analysis or design phase, before you even start doing any initial outreach. You’re already thinking about it.

But also leave space so that if something starts to trend on social that’s related to what you’re working on, you have a moment to hop on and connect it back to your piece.

A good example of how we’ve used social as a PR moment: back in September, we had our Instagram Summit by Manychat — an in-person event in LA, actually two days before Brighton SEO.

Two weeks before our event, our venue went bankrupt, and we found out through the news.

And we were like, this is great.

It didn’t make sense to necessarily go fully to the news with it, because it’s just our 500-person event — but this was gold for social.

We got the news on a Wednesday, and the venue was shutting down that Friday. So me and a couple of people from our Austin team literally hopped on a plane to LAX and went to the venue as they were closing the doors, and created this whole social series around it.

That’s how we told people our venue was changing. We played it off in this fun way — because that could have stressed a lot of people out — but instead we turned it into this fun social moment and spun a narrative that basically said, we don’t even care, this is going to happen anyway, we’ll brush it off and move on.

We made it into this three-part series where we went around trying to find new venues — Dave & Buster’s, the Wax Museum, all these random spots. It worked out because we did find a venue, and when the event happened, it was actually at a really nice hotel in West Hollywood.

When we got there, we heard from so many people who attended that they wouldn’t have known the venue changed if it weren’t for our social moments.

People kept coming up and complimenting us on it. That was really the moment where I thought, yeah, PR really does need to be social in a lot of cases — especially for things where the news makes more sense being seen on social, because that’s where the audience is.

Thinking about where your audience is, and incorporating that into your strategy — if you know your audience is chronically online, maybe Gen Z, thinking of those social moments or ways to connect to social trends is really important to keep at the front of your mind, even when you’re starting the initial strategy for a single piece of content.

Should everyone be on every social platform?

Mady Lanni

I think it’s really about going down to your audience.

If the brand is more Gen X or baby boomers, you might have more luck on Facebook.

Whereas Gen Z and millennials, you’re probably going to find them more on Instagram and TikTok — and even between those two platforms, it’s very different.

I think really knowing your audience goes beyond the basics — knowing what they’re searching for, what they’re looking for. That’s where a little bit of SEO comes in as well.

Knowing who the person you’re trying to reach is, pulling in search insights for that, and knowing the brand’s ICP — where is that intersection? Is it best on Instagram? Is it best with just traditional media?

I can walk through this for Manychat as an example.

Our core audience is content creators, and we know their first touchpoint is social media — Instagram and TikTok, for the most part.

But we also have a secondary audience of social media marketers and some brands.

Those people will be more on influencer marketing hubs, reading newsletters, getting things in their inbox.

So those are our two main touchpoints.

Being able to figure that out, I would take the Instagram Summit as an example — that one we knew was going more toward content creators who were attending, so it was a social media moment.

But if we’re doing a data piece on something like best times to post on Instagram, that could probably be a social media marketer-first tactic, where we do traditional PR outreach, try to get those backlinks, and then also do an offshoot social post around the same topic so there’s still a connection.

Those are very broad examples, but it gives a good sense of how I think through these things.

How do you know when things might be good to post versus not?

Mady Lanni

Yeah, so even back when I was agency side, I had a separate TikTok account specifically for scrolling for work-related things.

Because if not, my algorithm would be all over the place.

At my last agency, Journey Further — shout out to the Journey Further team — I worked on Adobe Acrobat and I didn’t want my personal feed to be filled with PDFs. But my separate TikTok account was able to show me trends around workplace and PDFs because I had that algorithm pretty well trained.

So one of my tips is: if you can, create a separate account solely to train the algorithm to show you trends within the relevant spaces. Because yes, the person eating 500 ice cream cones might be a viral moment — but that doesn’t mean that virality is the right fit for your brand’s relevance.

I actually have a little bit of a hot take on this — I don’t think every brand should hop on every viral moment.

When Taylor Swift got engaged, I don’t think it made sense for every brand to talk about that. Certain brands, yes, but certain viral moments on social probably just don’t make sense coming from your brand. That’s why training your algorithm to show you content that makes sense in the trending spaces is so useful.

In terms of time, as you said, it is always on. I’m chronically online, so I’m scrolling more than I should. It’s probably unhealthy. But I’m scrolling at night, and I think every PR person is always having those shower thoughts, always thinking about ideas. So I have a notes stock in my phone where if I see something trending, or something I need to keep an eye on, I’ll jot it down. That way the next morning, or maybe a week later when it does start to trend, I already have it noted down and I don’t lose that moment.

Also, saving videos helps on Instagram and TikTok. You can also create saved folders on Instagram and filter them by client. I did that before. And on my personal account, I have my recipes folder.

Vince Nero

I didn’t know that. Is there an app — like a swipe file catch-all? I’m totally blanking on the name. There was one where you could just pin things — Pocket. Is that still around?

Mady Lanni

I don’t know, I haven’t heard that one in a while. I just go through the apps individually and my brain figures it out. I haven’t tested anything else, but I know you can set up social listening in tools like Brandwatch — and Muck Rack is starting to come out with social listening as well.

You can set up tracking for that kind of thing.

But I think finding some of those more niche moments is easier just by browsing the feed.

For breaking news too — if you just start following a bunch of news accounts, you’ll see breaking news and those are great things for reactive opportunities that you can connect back to your work.

I will out myself a little bit right now — I have actually found a lot of breaking news from the Real Talking Fish account, which is the SpongeBob news fish on Instagram. It’s actually kind of embarrassing how often I’ve found trending news from that before I saw it in a headline.

Are you looking at metrics or are you going by gut?

Mady Lanni

It’s a little bit of both, and I think it’s really dependent on the angle you’re going to be outreaching.

Some I do look at the virality — how many likes does it have? Did it get a million likes in a week?

Okay, now how can I connect that trend to what I’m working on?

But then there’s the other side — the relevancy side. If you’re looking at hashtags associated with the audience your brand might be in, you can start to see trending stories or themes that people are talking about within those hashtags or topic areas. You start to pick up on it, and it also trains your For You page, so you start to see it over and over again — and that’s when you start to think, this is actually becoming a moment, maybe we should talk about this.

The same can also be said for those viral moments. I think it was last summer — the whole cucumber salad thing. I don’t know if that was on your For You page, but cucumber salads blew up. I was working with a recipe site at the time, and I saw the first video of the guy making a cucumber salad and thought, that’s kind of cute.

Then two days later I saw another person making it, then another — and I thought, okay, this is becoming something. I checked if they had a cucumber recipe, they did, turned that into a PR pitch, sent it out, and ended up getting them some coverage around cucumbers and the nutrition of cucumbers. So that’s another kind of moment — seeing something start to trend, thinking I need to look into this, and turning it into a PR moment.

Do you do outreach to influencers and content creators?

Mady Lanni

Yes, that’s not something I’ve dived too far into, but it’s been very top of mind lately. And that’s something that I think is kind of where the shift is happening — having PR integrated with social and with an influencer marketing team is really what the future of social PR is going to look like.

I think brands in general are seeing this because there’s so much more advertising happening through content creators than through more traditional means. And I think PR is following a very similar trajectory. So I do think that working with influencer teams to find content creators to talk about whatever the PR moment is, and having it all work together, is the future.

No more siloed PR teams — that might be a hot take, but I think it’s partially true.

Traditional PR has been more of that siloed channel. Digital PR gets integrated a little more with SEO teams, and sometimes influencer or brand teams.

But now I think this next phase of PR is an almost fully integrated approach between SEO, social, influencer, PR, comms, and email marketing. It all kind of plays in because PR is just how the public is perceiving you — how your brand is being seen, how you’re being mentioned.

And I think it all comes down to being part of that central PR strategy.

How do you identify the right influencers?

Mady Lanni 

Yeah, so I think this is a moment for true collaboration. I know it probably looks a little different for me than for people working on the agency side, but I’m planning to connect with our in-house influencer team and work closely with them to shape how this looks. We have a few people who work with us who are also content creators themselves.

From what I’ve heard from a few of them, reaching out in the DMs might actually be a little better in some cases — going back to the point that everyone is on their phones and on social, so that’s probably where they’d see messages.

I don’t know if that would necessarily work for just a traditional PR person, since that account might not be recognized and could get lost in the DMs as well.

So I think it’s one of those where it’s going to take some testing to figure out what works.

As you just said, traditional PR outreach won’t work here.

I think it’s going to be more about presenting it almost like a brand deal — there’s probably going to have to be some budget involved, just given how brand partnerships typically work. So if this is where the future is heading, having some budget set aside for influencer opportunities is probably worth looking at.

And since this is probably still kind of new for most people, I’m just planning to do some testing.

In terms of finding the right content creators or influencers, it goes back to the audience conversation we were having — who are the people that are actually going to get in front of the audience you want to reach? This might look different depending on the campaign or data you’re presenting and want to share.

We could have some data we want solely to reach heavy digital course creators and social media marketers — and that’s going to look a lot different than data we want to get out to general social media users or lifestyle people.

I think targeting in that sense is going to be very similar in some ways to how PR outreach works when you get very bespoke and look through different niches.

I don’t want to call them beats, because it’s not beats the way it is with a journalist, but it’s the same kind of thinking — targeting the audiences the creators already have, and then building a media list from there.

What didn’t I ask you that you wish we had talked about?

Mady Lanni I think more than a question, I’d actually just like to leave a point as a takeaway: the future of PR is changing right now. I don’t know if it’s going to be across every industry, but I think for anyone that has any sort of social media presence, it’s really important to start seriously considering that.

Especially thinking about consuming content from creators — the creator economy is supposed to boom to around 200 billion dollars by 2030, I think is the stat. Don’t quote me exactly on that. But something around there. So I think the future of all media is content creation.

Vince Nero

Yeah, Press Gazette puts out a list of the top news publications in the US, and pretty much every one of the top 20 has lost traffic year over year — except for Substack.

Mady Lanni

Yeah, Substack is crazy right now. It’s a really big part of the PR strategy for me right now too — going after Substack creators.