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Pressing Matters, from Big Valley Marketing, features conversations with the top influencers in B2B Technology. From Fortt Knox to Audible, the (mostly) journalists we interview on this podcast have been there for all of it – and they have thoughts on where things are going. Whether you're interested in humans, chips, cybercrime, or long-necked lutes ... welcome to Pressing Matters, presented by Big Valley Marketing.

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Pressing Matters

Michael Krigsman, Host and Publisher, CXOTalk

December 16, 2024 • Big Valley Marketing • Season 3 • Episode 3

Michael Krigsman doesn't call himself a journalist. Yes, he has produced 800 podcasts and videos in the past 11 years as the founder and host of CXOTalk, but he doesn't have a journalism degree or any editorial training, and his pieces are a mix of editorial and sponsored. That said, Michael does have an innate sense of story. He's not afraid to challenge a paying client to let him produce a video that's got a newsy feel to it as opposed to an advertising one. In fact, at a time when more and more companies are trying to figure out how to utilize paid media or even what to call it, advertising, demand gen, sponsored journalism…Krigsman has a pretty clear sense of what does and doesn't work. No surprise, perhaps, that he tells us that the videos with the most journalistic feel are the ones that perform the best.

Krigsman joined us recently to discuss his advice for brands looking to tell smart sponsored stories (not to mention good old fashioned PR), how he managed to spend nine years on the board of the Americas Cup Hall of Fame (even though he really doesn't like sailing), and AI ethics (another of his specialties) for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Michael. Here's our chat with Michael. Enjoy.

Dave Reddy (00:00):

Michael Krigsman (01:49):

It's great to be here and excited to chat with you Dave.

Dave Reddy (01:51):

So let's get started with the basics and then I want to really dig into your show and advice you might have for folks looking to do paid marketing and otherwise. So you grew up in New York, white Plains, is that correct?

Michael Krigsman (02:07):

I grew up in White Plains, New York, just north of New York City.

Dave Reddy (02:12):

And what did mom and dad do?

Michael Krigsman (02:15):

My father was an industrial psychologist. He worked for many years for Union Carbide big company, and my mother was a school psychologist. She got her PhD when she was, I don't know, 40 or 45 years old.

Dave Reddy (02:29):

No kidding. Dr. Mom.

Michael Krigsman (02:31):

Dr. Mom.

Dave Reddy (02:32):

What does an industrial psychologist do? Did they talk to the machines? I'm a dumb joke. Just curious.

Michael Krigsman (02:39):

I think at that time the idea was to, as part of HR, figure out how to make employees happy, how to get them to be more productive and how to test people for competencies, assessments, things like

Dave Reddy (02:59):

Got it. It early Myers-Briggs kind of stuff. Okay, I got you. And you stayed close to home, went to Bard, which is in New York City, correct?

Michael Krigsman (03:09):

It's in the Hudson Valley, so just north of New York.

Dave Reddy (03:12):

Okay. And what did you study there?

Michael Krigsman (03:15):

It's a liberal arts school, so my major was sociology, but it was a good, very solid, well-rounded, excellent, well-rounded education,

Dave Reddy (03:26):

Sociology. So did you think briefly, maybe I'll go into what mom and dad do, or at least kind of like what mom and dad do?

Michael Krigsman (03:32):

Honestly, I had no idea what I wanted to do.

Dave Reddy (03:36):

God bless you. I thought I did. I was wrong. Close. So you get out of school and one of the first things you do is entrepreneur that you are, you start a company that, as I understand it, is still somewhat together called Cambridge Publications. What was that all about? Because when you and I talked about it off the air, I completely missed what it was.

Michael Krigsman (03:55):

So I got an MBA and eventually we started Cambridge Publications. It's funny, I had an odd start. I was a desktop publishing consultant, and this was in the mid-eighties, and we got lots of fonts and we created a font book and we became an alternative to type setters, literally. And we would go to printers who were using Typesetters and we used this new technology to undercut them, undercut their price, and eventually Cambridge publications evolved to writing software documentation and training materials for very large companies and venture funded startups. And so it is a great business. I mean, we ended up employing about 25 people. It was it very profitable and we had over a hundred customers in the end. And Cambridge publications actually still exist today. It is the legal owner of CXOTalk.

Dave Reddy (05:09):

Okay, so you evolved because I was going to say you'd have to evolve because while that stuff was hot, hot, hot in the eighties and nineties, this little thing called the internet came along and kind of blew all of that important work out of the water.

Michael Krigsman (05:21):

Oh yeah. I mean, if you're not going to evolve and adapt, you're going to die if you're in business.

Dave Reddy (05:26):

Yeah, adapt or die. Indeed. And one thing I noticed in addition to adapting, you also like to do more than one thing at a time and you've had all sorts of little side gigs, but the one that jumped out at me for nine years, sir, you were on the board of the America's Cup Hall of Fame, and if you didn't grow up in New England or you don't know Larry Ellison, you probably don't know what the America's Cup is. So for those listening, it is an incredibly 150, 160 year old yacht race that has gone from tall ships to these days, giant catamarans. So what's that all about? Are you a sailor?

Michael Krigsman (06:07):

I wish I could say that I was a sailor. I wish I could say that I really love the water, but I don't like to be on the water to be, that was one of those stitches in time kind of thing. I knew somebody who was involved with the America's Cup Hall of Fame and they had a sister museum called the Herreshoff Marine Museum, and the Harris SHS were the great America's Cup builders at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century building these huge, beautiful wooden boats. So I knew people that were involved and I was running Cambridge publications at that time, and it was a successful business. I was very involved with technology and I thought what they were doing, and I thought the boats were just beautiful. And so one thing came to another and they ended up inviting me to be on their board and it lasted a long time.

Dave Reddy (07:13):

That is fascinating. Now, did you actually tell anyone you didn't really like sailing or being on the water? Did you keep that to yourself the entire time?

Michael Krigsman (07:18):

I did not tell anybody that smart move, although I will say my biggest regret from that time is I was in contact all the time very often with some of the top sailors in the world and I should have. And I regret not having spent time and really learned how to sail and learned to be comfortable with it. And that was a mistake on my part at the time, but it was a great experience and I met all kinds of really interesting people, that's for sure.

Dave Reddy (07:56):

Well, I guess the segue here would be that the technology behind those ships has gotten more and more and more incredible. And of course you have devoted a good portion of your life to talking about technology. So you started CXOTalk in around 2013, you'd freelance for IDC, you were six years into what turned out to be a 10 year columnist gig at ZDNet. So you'd done a lot of different kinds of influencing, as they say in my business, for lack of a better word. What did you want CXOTalk to be? What was the mission when you opened that up in 2013?

Michael Krigsman (08:30):

I have done a lot of different things in my career, but at the time in 2013, I was doing advisory consulting to large enterprise software companies. And I had customers like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and lots of other software companies, and I was part of the influencer program. I was either invited to be part of or was part of the influencer programs for just about everybody. I mean honestly at that time. And I thought it would just be interesting to learn and do podcast and video. And at that time, really, nobody was doing a live enterprise software video podcast. And I thought to myself, this sounds like fun. I'll meet some interesting people. And it was truly a labor of love at that time. And honestly, I had a vague sense of what I wanted it to be. I wasn't earning a living through it, but I thought it would be a great adjunct to doing the consulting that I was doing, and I knew I could get people to be guests because they were my clients and I knew them

Dave Reddy (09:51):

Well, that comes back to adapt or die. That was 2013. It's almost 2025. How has the business, the show, the various products that you put out, how have those changed in the last dozen years?

Michael Krigsman (10:05):

The core idea has not changed at all. In 2013, I had this idea, let's do a live show. And as I said, I don't think there was anybody doing it in enterprise software at that time. It's still a live show. I think the primary differences now are with all of this time and history that's gone by, we've done over 800 episodes.

Dave Reddy (10:31):

Wow, congratulations.

Michael Krigsman (10:32):

Now people trust us. We have a brand that is respected and it's trusted. When I started, it was really hard to get people to do a live show and the folks I was getting were the top executives from very large companies. And again, this was very early, so it was hard to get people on board and to trust. It took a lot of convincing. Now I'm pitched endlessly constantly all the time, and we turn down a lot of people and we work really hard to maintain the brand trust and credibility that we've built up over all of this time.

Dave Reddy (11:14):

So let's talk about that because I had the great opportunity to sit down with you for coffee at a cafe just over the Boston border, and I believe we were in Brookline about a year ago. And I asked you this question and I loved your answer, so I'm going to ask it for the whole world. You do both paid and earned media. How do you separate the two? And by the way, I think your answer, I just put a little pressure on you. What I found fascinating about your answer is as a trained journalist, I was snobby enough to think that you wouldn't know, but you may know better than I do. So how do you make sure that you separate the two?

Michael Krigsman (11:53):

It's a really, really good question, and I get asked that a lot. And because we have both paid and earned, most people, of course, they want the earned. They don't want to pay for it. Why should they pay? Right? Earn. So that's just human nature. So I have a very clear delineation. So first off, the quality of what I produce, whether it's paid or earned is the same. I don't have two speeds best and okay, I try to do the very best that I can do every single time with everything that I do. So the real distinction is, or distinctions are the earned show is live. We choose the guest, we choose the topic, we focus on what I think will be interesting for the audience, and we take live questions from the audience during the show. This means the focus is not going to be on presenting the PR message that the guest wants to talk about.

(13:10):

Now they can, of course they're going to talk about what they're doing and so forth, but I'm allergic to folks who want to use this as an opportunity to just get out their PR message. And I got pitched that way. I got pitched from interesting people and I turned them down and I will say to them, Hey, that's why we have paid so that you can get your PR message out there. Now with the paid, it's quite different. Of course, we're being paid the show, the discussion is not live, it's prerecorded, which means we can edit that video. And in fact, we do to really focus on what matters to that paying customer, to that client. There's no questions during the live show. So the conversation will not get deflected in one way or another. It's going to stay true to the plan. But still in both cases, whether it's paid or earned, it's very important that we remain educational. Now, of course, there's going to be much more of a nod towards the PR aspect in the paid ones, but I have enough experience at this to know that if you sell on a podcast, a video or an interview, what will happen is the audience will click away, they won't watch. And I have lots of data to support this.

Dave Reddy (14:40):

So the point is, using my own terms, you actually try as best you can. And obviously at the end of the day, if it's paid, the client has the final say, but you try as best you can to make those journalistic style stories. I got to be more what we call here at Big Valley outside in, don't talk about yourself, talk about the industry, talk about what's going on in the world and so forth. I know you do run into issues with that probably on more videos than not, correct?

Michael Krigsman (15:08):

Well, I have worked with a lot of software companies and technology companies, like literally hundreds over my career. And technology companies in general have a really hard time not talking about themselves.

(15:29):

And so for example, if you see customer stories from the typical enterprise technology company, the stories end up being about them and the greatness of their product as opposed to here's the problem that the customer was trying to solve, and here's how they solved it and here's how it affected their business. And of course, here's the relationship between that customer and the solution and the software company that's selling the product. So it's a matter of emphasis. And because technology companies often measure their marketing results in terms of leads and mentions, they have this incentive to devolve from the branding, which is really where I'm focused into demand gen. And so you end up serving two masters, but not serving either master. Well, you don't do the branding side well, you don't do the demand gen well, it's really best to decide upfront with clarity. What are you trying to accomplish?

Dave Reddy (16:40):

Right?

Michael Krigsman (16:41):

Then you stay true to that.

Dave Reddy (16:43):

Yeah, like anything, if you try to do two things at once, it ain't walking and chewing gum. It's a lot more complicated than that. Well, you're diluting both, right? Right. You mentioned that you've worked with hundreds of software companies. We've worked together a few times in general, beyond obviously trying to be as outside in or journalistic or brand focused as you would suggest. What other advice do you have when it comes to influencer relations for companies in the software space, particularly B2B, the folks who are working with us?

Michael Krigsman (17:17):

I think the key is to understand three things. Number one, what are your goals? What are you actually trying to achieve? Number two, the particular influencer that you're speaking with, or analyst, whoever it might be, what do they do? Where do they focus? Where is their strong suit? And then number three is the intersection of those two. This is very abstract. So let's say that you're trying to reach financial services, you sell a product, and financial services companies are your customers. You're going to reach out to influencers who talk to financial services. But what do they talk about? How do they express what they do? Is it writing? Is it video? How do they craft the message? Some people, honestly, some influencers are strictly shills, right? They'll say whatever you want, you pay them and they will say it and they'll say the same thing about your competitor tomorrow. That's fine, but just be clear that's what you're getting. Others take a more neutral or objective or clinical tone. So you need to understand who you're actually dealing with, what the influencer is like and their style, and be comfortable with that. If you're not comfortable with it, hire somebody else.

Dave Reddy (18:49):

Let's talk about podcast and video. Everybody's got a podcast these days. They even gave one to me. So you've been doing both of these things probably longer than most, and we do totally understandably get a lot of requests for them. There's a cajillion of 'em out there, some good, some not so good. What's your advice for folks in B2B tech when it comes to picking the right podcast, doing the right videos, et cetera?

Michael Krigsman (19:15):

It's a really good question, and it's very similar to what I was just describing. Different podcasts have different angles, different goals, different audiences. So you need to choose the right one. Now the question comes up, how do you pitch? Pitch your company to a podcast? And I get so many pitches and I'm honored to do it. I'm honored to get these pitches, but most of them are fairly generic. I would say most of them fall into one of two categories. They're either just generic sort of spray and pre. And if you are a PR firm and that's what you're doing, or if you're an enterprise software company, a marketer, and that's what your PR firm is doing, I would fire them, honestly, because it

Dave Reddy (20:07):

Doesn't, we do not do that here. So thank you for that little unintentional plug. Thank you.

Michael Krigsman (20:11):

No, I know you don't. No, I know you guys are great, but Big Valley, I love working with you guys and that's why I was thrilled to do this podcast with you, Dave. Thank you. But there are a lot of PR firms that just send out these generic pitches, and I sure hope their clients aren't paying for it because they're worth, you know what? They're worth less than zero because they turn the recipient like me off say, these people are just wasting time wasting. And it's a bad reflection on the PR firm. And by the way, when I get the pitches due to this thing called Google, I don't delete the pitches. I keep them. And when I get another pitch from the same person or the same firm, you know what? Google shows me the conversation so I can look back on the history, the next kind of pitch.

(21:01):

And you don't want to do that obviously as we discussed, the second kind of pitch that I get is a little bit better, but doesn't work. And that is the pitch that says, my client is doing the most exciting thing in the world and she or he is available to tell you about it. And that also doesn't work because I tend to respond to those by saying, well, this is perfect for our paid because CXOTalk is not an outlet for them to basically spew out their PR messaging unless you pay for it. But the earned media absolutely not. And I get this from really large companies and large PR firms. I mean, I'm really surprised sometimes. So that's not interesting to the recipient. What is interesting to the recipient, the pitches that actually work have this in common, these several attributes. Number one is they've actually looked at what we do, who our guests are, the topics that we talk about.

(22:07):

We have guidelines, pitching guidelines on our website. They've looked at that and they meet those criteria. That's number one. Number two is the guests that they're pitching fits. So in our case, our earned media is literally the most senior C-level executives from the very largest and most well brands in the world. That's who we seek. That's who we get as guests. So if you're pitching a great idea, a great topic from a startup that is doing business process software that is not a big company, that person is not going to get invited almost certainly to be a guest on CXOTalk for the earned that falls into the paid. So the pitches that work, and this would be true whether it's us or any other podcast that you're pitching, have a clear understanding of who they are, what they talk about, the type of guests that they seek, and don't pitch them if you don't meet, because it falls kind of into the spray and prey also if you're just sort of sending these generic emails out.

Dave Reddy (23:24):

Yeah, that's great advice. And in fact, I find myself, when we're working on pitches, both for earned media and legit paid media, there's plenty of non-legit paid media. The types who call you up and say they're going to put you on their cover of their magazine for $5,000, and their magazine of course reaches five people. But my team and I, we try to pitch pretty much the same way regardless, earns in trouble. We all know that that's not news. There's a monetary issue, there's a trust issue. Paid seems to be filling some of the holes that are being left behind by a shrinking earned ecosystem. What are those holes, and do you see that ever changing back to where earned is king again? Okay,

Michael Krigsman (24:03):

Let me just say first that earned plays the role of getting a message out there that the writer or the editor wants to put out in their publication. That's the role of earned paid. The role is getting a message out there that the client, the buyer, the customer wants to put out there. Fundamentally, that's the distinction. It's a matter of emphasis for legit media for quality outlets like CXOTalk. And there are many others, whether you do earned or you do paid, they will do a good job. They will have integrity about what they do. They're not going to call your product revolutionary unless it genuinely is revolutionary. They will do a good job, but the emphasis and the goals are different, whether in the case of earned, it's the journalist's objective, or in the case of paid, whether it's the customer's objective, you have to be clear about that distinction and then you'll be successful with both earned and paid.

Dave Reddy (25:23):

Let's pivot to ai. You've done quite a bit in that world, even before it got hot to trot. A couple years ago in November, you had a side job on the AI ethics board for I-E-E-E-A few years ago. You were an advisor for copy ai, which was using GPT-3 to create human-like text, and that was before everything went nuts with GPT chat GPT in November 22. So talk to me about ai. As someone who's worked in it, is it good, is it bad? Is it both? Where do you stand on it right now?

Michael Krigsman (25:56):

Personally, I think AI is incredible. I can tell you on a daily basis, I use no less than 2, 3, 4, 5 different large language models to do research, to help summarize things and sometimes to help create discussion agendas and plans. And I will take an idea and I'll run it through multiple models in order to see what they come up with, and then I kind of triangulate and pull ideas out. I don't use AI as a substitute for thinking or for writing. I use it as an adjunct and as an adjunct, as a critical partner, so to speak, critical thinking partner, I should say. I think it's great. AI is going to have profound impacts on our workforce in the coming years. It's going to have profound impact on how we relate to companies that are now using ai. I think AI ethics is extremely important because what will happen in the future is decisions, for example, financial decisions. And we're not there yet by and large, but decisions will be made by ai. The AI may make mistakes, and if the AI makes a mistake in your particular case, or in my particular case, there's a real world impact. And so I think that the importance of AI ethics, responsible AI is absolutely crucial. In fact, we are just starting a series and an emphasis on AI ethics and responsible technology for this reason, bullish on ai, hugely bullish on ai, but I also know that we need to be very careful.

Dave Reddy (28:04):

Couple ideas. When it comes to AI ethics, what are two or three things you think we absolutely need to do since this appears it's going to be a conversation over the next four years? At minimum,

Michael Krigsman (28:14):

I think there needs to be guidelines. Now, I just had a conversation this past Friday on CXOTalk with the chief analytics officer of FCO, the FCO score, and their AI ethics is extremely important to them. Now, he was saying that there should be industry, and I think that's definitely the case. And I should mention that FICO does a tremendous amount with their product process in order to build in ethical AI around the data and so on. But I also know many people who think there should be government regulation, and I think ultimately there will be government regulation. There's a lot happening in the us. There's a lot happening in the UK and in Europe. We've had several times on our show, a member of the House of Lords who's deeply involved looking at these AI issues, and he even wrote a book on the subject. So I think government regulation will be inevitable. However, the rubber really hits the road when it comes to companies because the government can put out all kinds of regulations, but companies are going to have to adapt and they're going to have to develop their own internal standards. So I think that the key thing is being focused on the need for standards and the need for awareness of bias in the data and the need to weed that out and to have remediation steps when ais make a mistake.

Dave Reddy (29:59):

So that leads to are you optimistic for the future of ai? Are you optimistic for the future of tech? You're living this every day. You're talking to people every day about this. How bullish are you,

Michael Krigsman (30:10):

Dave? I'm a technologist, as you say. I live this, I breathe this. I talk with people about technology. I talk with the creators of technology every day, so I'm very bullish. I think ai, we are entering this golden age where AI will do things that appear magical to us today, but it's not without risk. And so I do think we need to take a balanced approach as we were just talking.

Dave Reddy (30:38):

Okay. My final question as we go light every time with the final question, New York or Boston?

Michael Krigsman (30:44):

I love both. Can I do half and half? Sure. Half my time in Boston and half in New York. How's that?

Dave Reddy (30:51):

Yankees are Red Sox.

Michael Krigsman (30:52):

I live not too far away from Fenway Park. And the absolute truth is that my largest interaction with the Red Sox is the traffic through Kenmore Square. So for that reason, I'm going to choose the Yankees. There's a lot of traffic on Red Sox days.

Dave Reddy (31:13):

Yeah, Boston ain’t an easy town to get around. That's perfectly fair. Alright, my friend, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it and continued, good luck, 800 episodes. Congratulations, Michael, continued. Good luck on CX O talk.

Michael Krigsman (31:26):

Thank you. It's great to talk with you. Dave.

Dave Reddy (31:29):

I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Michael Krigsman of CXOTalk. Join us next month when we interview yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready@bigvalley.co. That's DRE double DY at Big Valley, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters@bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening and as always, think big.

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