Nick Leighton introduces the concept of Conversation Visibility™. Buyer behavior has shifted toward seeking peer-to-peer, unfiltered opinions, making platforms like Reddit incredibly valuable.

But as Nick explains, traditional marketing and broadcasting do not work on Reddit. The community actively rejects corporate language.

Public user histories and aggressive anti-spam bots mean companies cannot simply create new accounts to shill their products without severe backlash.

Instead, brands must focus on providing genuine value, utility, and expertise to become informed participants in ongoing discussions.

Key Takeaways

• Traditional promotional marketing fails on Reddit because the user base quickly identifies and penalizes corporate language.
• Conversation Visibility™ requires brands to act as informed participants who add value and expertise rather than simply broadcasting a message.
• Global tech, AI, and SaaS companies currently see the most strategic advantage on Reddit, while highly regulated industries like healthcare face tougher compliance hurdles.
• The internet is moving toward a decentralized trust economy, meaning future visibility will rely on being contextually present in trusted conversations rather than relying on traditional advertising.

About the Guest

Nick Leighton is the owner of NettResults, an international PR and marketing agency with a strong focus on the Middle East, helping companies and organizations navigate visibility, reputation, and communications across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the wider GCC region. For more than two decades, Nick has advised brands on strategic communications, market positioning, media relations, and reputation management in rapidly evolving markets. Through NettResults’ work in the region, he has supported global companies entering the Middle East as well as regional organizations looking to strengthen credibility, visibility, and influence across international audiences.

Nick’s work increasingly focuses on how digital trust is evolving — particularly the growing role of decentralized online conversations, Reddit communities, AI-assisted search, and changing buyer behavior in shaping public perception and discovery. He is also the creator of Conversation Visibility™, a strategic Reddit visibility framework designed to help organizations become contextually visible inside the conversations influencing trust, search behavior, media narratives, and AI-generated recommendations. In addition to leading NettResults, Nick is a business coach, speaker, and author of The AI Effect and the best-selling book Exactly Where You Want To Be: A Business Owner’s Guide to Passion, Profit and Happiness. He regularly speaks on communications strategy, entrepreneurship, AI, reputation management, and the future of digital visibility.

About the Hosts

Abbie Fink is president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. Her marketing communications background includes skills in media relations, digital communications, social media strategies, special event management, crisis communications, community relations, issues management, and marketing promotions for both the private and public sectors, including such industries as healthcare, financial services, professional services, government affairs and tribal affairs, as well as not-for-profit organizations.

Dr. Adrian McIntyre is a cultural anthropologist, media personality, speaker, and strategic communications consultant for PR agencies and marketing firms. He's lived in over 30 countries and spent more than a decade in the Middle East and Africa as a researcher, journalist, communications adviser, media spokesperson, and storytelling consultant. He earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Fulbright scholar and National Science Foundation fellow. Adrian helps agency leaders strengthen their positioning, sharpen their messaging, boost their visibility, and win new clients by replacing impersonal, intrusive and ineffective marketing tactics with authentic human conversations.

PRGN Presents is brought to you by Public Relations Global Network, the world’s local public relations agency. Our executive producer is Adrian McIntyre. The show is produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, AZ.

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From the Public Relations Global Network, this is PRGN Presents. I’m Adrian McIntyre.

And I’m Abbie Fink, president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Our guests on this biweekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now let’s meet our guest for this episode.

Hi, I’m Nick Leighton. I’m the agency owner of NettResults, an international PR and marketing agency with a strong focus in the Middle East. We help companies and organizations navigate visibility, reputation and communications across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC region.

Nick, I always enjoy having conversations with you because you open up my eyes to things that I think I should know about, I know a little bit about, but I’m always slightly hesitant to try. And after I have a conversation with you, I usually dive right into it. So today we’re going to be talking about Reddit, which is something I have poked around a little bit as a consumer to find out information, but really thinking about it in terms of how business should should be thinking about Reddit as a strategic platform.

You have created the Conversation Visibility and let’s talk a little bit about that first to sort of set the tone for the rest of the conversation about the impact that Reddit can and should have on businesses and what we’re using for it from an influence perspective.

Sure, always great to be here. I think the first question is why is Reddit coming up now? Why are companies suddenly paying attention to Reddit? And I think that’s probably because buyer behavior has changed and it’s probably changing before the market department actually realizes it. So people are beginning to catch up. So I think there’s three reasons why Reddit is part of the conversation. Why people might be listening to the podcast the first time. First thing of those three elements is be people are physically searching in Google or their favorite browser, best CRM, Reddit or best cybersecurity platform, Reddit. They’re putting Reddit in their search strings, which makes Reddit obviously more valuable because they want honest opinions, they want real users, they want community to validate what they’re hearing, they’re not looking for the polished marketing pages that we often are involved in.

And I think secondly, technology bars particularly, but I’m seeing this in many industries, are increasingly trusting the conversations more than the campaigns. So if you think about Reddit as a platform, if you’ve been to it, it’s peer to peer, it’s unfiltered, it’s less corporate, it’s authentic, it’s messy, but it’s authentic. And I think the third reason which we might come back to is this AI discovery shift. Reddit discussions are increasingly influential in Google visibility, AI assisted searches, recommendation systems. So the future discovery layer of the Internet is becoming increasingly community driven.

And is that then why you’ve started this conversation visibility as a thing to sort of capture what’s happening in Reddit from a strategic perspective?

Absolutely. Bullseye. Conversation visibility helps companies become strategically visible inside the online conversations that are already shaping the trust of buyers and the decisions they want to make. So this isn’t traditional social media marketing. It’s not putting means, it’s not growth hacking, it’s not spam, it’s not fake reviews, it is contextual visibility, it’s strategic participation, it’s understanding the community sentiment and then showing up where the influential conversations already exist. So if buyers are discussing your category every day and your company is absent from that discussion, that absence eventually becomes strategic.

Nick, I think the macro shift here is really interesting because on the one hand we humans are doing what we’ve always done. We’re looking for recommendations from people that we trust. And you know, every business forever has known that word of mouth marketing is really great. It doesn’t cost a lot except you’ve got a great product or service and good know customer support. So you’ve built a loyal, so that can be an investment.

But then the word spreads because the contextual piece was just how we lived our lives. I might mention to my friend that, you know, we’re, we’re going out for pizza and he’ll say, oh, do you know the new place that just opened up down the street? Oh, it’s really great. And here’s what I love about it. And the Internet, and particularly the so called social Internet has had this going on for a long time. I mean Reddit’s been around since 2005.

So what we’re now doing is tapping into those conversations with people that we don’t know, but implicitly we’re treating them as if they’re more trustworthy than the brand stuff. So I just wanted to Flag that. This is so interesting to me because the shift you we’ve already spoken to away from the carefully constructed and curated content marketing on our own website is no longer where people are looking for the answers. It’s very much like Abbie, the data that we’ve talked about in the past about people are not.

They’re trusting the ordinary everyday person or even the employee’s perspective over the official corporate campaign or commercial or any of those things. So it’s really, really interesting to me that alongside word of mouth, we now have to think about word of machine and how the machines are spreading, what we’ve always been doing.

Yeah, I think if you think back 20 years ago and if someone came to my PR agency and said, explain PR, why is it going to work? I’d say, well, did you go and see a movie because you saw an advert for it, or did you read a review from someone who you trust in the media about that movie and thus you got the opinions and then you went see it and normally they’d seen a review written by someone that they knew or they trusted.

So we’ve just evolved a little bit because there are less people writing a traditional media, those kind of things. So now we’re looking for what we call NRHCALs, key opinion leaders. And who are they out there and what are they talking about? So part of this is to go and find those key opinion leaders, have a conversation, a genuine conversation with them, and say, oh, I see, you’re talking about telecommunication and how big telcos around the world are making money. Do we align on something? Okay, let’s get the conversation going. So that’s subtle.

So how do we start that? Like what is the, you know, the. There are hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of Reddit conversations happening. You know, from, if you think about it from a traditional marketing perspective, we kind of understand where we’re supposed to be. We have the research that backs up. These are our target audiences. This is the messages that resonate because this is user generated content. This is your influencers, these are the people that are having everyday conversations to get into it. To be able to truly make an impact, we have to think differently about what we might define as traditional approaches in order to truly start using this to our advantage. So without giving away all of your secrets, of course, there’s opportunity here to sort of level set, you know, what, what it is and what we should be thinking about and advising as we are adding Reddit to our list of things that are important for the clients and Businesses that we represent, both as a marketing channel, but really an understanding that conversations are happening whether you’re there or not. You need to understand what’s going on there.

Abbie, you’re absolutely right. Traditional marketing does approach does fail in Reddit. And the answer is that Reddit can smell corporate language from a mile away and they don’t want it. So the Reddit culture is value first, utility first, peer first. So the community rewards expertise, honesty and usefulness, not marketing copy that we’ve polished in our offices. So the way we communicate has to be different.

Reddit is comment first, not campaign first. In other words, most brands, they try to broadcast, promote or control the narratives, but Reddit works more like participation. It’s contribution, it’s contextual relevance. The brands that win on Reddit usually behave less like advertisers and more like informed participants. And that’s ultimately what we’re always trying to do, be an informed participant on

Reddit and who leads those conversations? Then do you put this in the hands of, as Adrienne said, our employees have become brand ambassadors. They have a different viewpoint and perspective. Does it still live with the marketing public relations teams? Where does the responsibility for engaging in these conversations live? And the next part of that question then is, how do we measure its success? How do we know if we are reaching and activating in the way that we want to by participating there?

Right, Great question. So we need a lot of visibility, first of all. So it’s not something you just delve into and go to one of your team members or just get on Reddit, see what you can see, see how you could participate. There has to be quite a coherent audit of where a brand is, who’s talking about them and how they’re being talked about. Could be positive, could be negative. So all that needs to be thought about first. Then can we use the existing people on Reddit, can we go to them, just as you go to a member of the press and go, let’s have a conversation and try and educate them, maybe? Or do we need to find other key opinion leaders who are not part of that conversation or that sub thread today and ask them to participate in that sub thread. So there’s multiple things that are going to go on at once.

I obviously think that PR agency is probably best position to do that. It takes quite a lot of time and investment and that brand awareness to be able to do that in a very subtle way. So we often are using non branded work when we’re on Reddit. We’re talking about Conversations more than a brand. But ultimately we know it’s going to lead to a brand recognition. Does that somewhat answer the question?

Well, it’s important, I think, to put in the context here the culture of Reddit, which you’ve pointed to, Nick. But anybody who’s been actively involved or who has tried to do something traditional has found how quickly it can backfire because individual users on Reddit, who are largely anonymous, have public profiles. And so you see, you can, you can actually go look at a user. You can look at their entire comment history, which subreddits they’re participating in.

Every subreddit is moderated by a combination of real people and bots. The bots are aggressively looking for certain types of behavior that they will flag as either spam or abusive or other things, which is one of the. I mean, Reddit’s a bit unruly, but it has, generally speaking, avoided some of the more toxic dimensions of the 4chan 8chan other kind of forums where unfettered garbage flows. So that’s quite interesting. But what this means is you can’t just jump in and start answering questions about your own brand, even if you’re acting like a normal person, because I look at your comment history and I see the only thing you do on here is post, you know, affirming things about this company, and that immediately kills your credibility.

It’s very sensitive.

Abbie, you used the word activation. I actually think — I had not thought of this in that context before — but I think that’s the exact right way to think about this. If you were doing event marketing or if you were doing a brand activation at a sporting event or on the street somewhere or in some other context, you would have to think very carefully about the culture of that place, what you’re offering, who’s doing it.

Are you hiring promo girls to go around with Red Bull? Or is it some other kind of, you know, like, what’s the actual way you’re going to engage people? That’s probably a very good place to start thinking. But there are no easy answers here. It’s going to differ from subreddit to subreddit and brand to brand.

And so that’s where a PR agency kind of brings some advantages. Because if you think of traditional PR or media relations, a brand comes to you. They may not be known by the media, but you have relationships already with the media, so you can get them in front of the media, and then you start building up that brand’s profile. And that’s kind of the same in Reddit because you can’t just jump in on your own. As you said, if I start an account today, people aren’t going to take me seriously. I have no conversation history. But if the agency is nurturing conversations and that can be trusted, then if a brand comes to us and they want some help, okay, we’re in a position to be able to get them in front of other key opinion leaders at that stage.

So are there businesses or industries or topics, and this is more anecdotal, I think, but that are seeing more success in that space. I mean, we have, we have recently dived in a little bit in the mental health space with some of our service providers and such in a thought leadership context in terms of offering up resources and recommendations and things not specifically for come to us, but we are knowledgeable and have expertise in this space.

Certainly certain products and things have found. But from your own perspective, really, are there better, better types of things that are going to work better in the Reddit space? Is it growing into a place where it’s going to be? I mean, it is already cluttered and messy as you say, but do you see any industries or types of organizations that are going to find a little bit more success in this space? It’s not going to be right for everybody.

Right. So yeah, it’s not right for, you know, your local pizza joint. They just, yeah, sure, Reddit could probably kill the local pizza joint, but they’re not gonna be able to afford the kind of service that is gonna be required from a PR agency to do this work. So small business, probably not where you wanna be. I mean, Reddit’s global, therefore global companies definitely have an advantage of how to use this.

So that’s one point. We find particular success with technology companies, but we were pretty heavy in that area. So technology, cybersecurity, AI software, SaaS, all that can definitely benefit. And I think a lot of the buyers will go to Reddit who are looking for purchase in that area. We also do do healthcare, but we have not done any healthcare Reddit campaigns. I think there’s some more country by country specific regulations and I think that would have to take some very serious views to make sure that you were compliant within that industry and within every country. So I’m not quite sure how that would pan out. Sounds pretty complex. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but that would probably be something very interesting to see if you could build that out.

Yeah, and I think where it came from, and you’re right in terms of the challenges There’s a lot of here in the US the HIPAA guidelines that will oversee healthcare and things that you can and can’t say and recommendations and things like that. And you’re right. I think that answer probably applies to industry in general in all markets. Right. And what is working here in the States may not be appropriate in another market. It may not translate well culturally, other things. So I think you’re right there.

My interest in the response is a lot to do with. We have grown, we, the global we that do this work have grown in terms of how we look at all of the platforms that are available to us at a particular time and what we might think about. One platform that we started on, you know, 10 years ago isn’t where we want to be anymore because it has matured in a way that doesn’t make sense for us. The users are different than what we are typically wanting to engage with. And so I think there’s something to say there.

Yeah, no, totally.

There’s a, there’s a multidimensionality to this that. I agree with you, Nick. PR firms, if they can wrap their heads around some things that might be new to them, the core strategic skill set of an experienced PR and communications firm is going to be invaluable here. And maybe you didn’t think of these channels as relevant, so there’s some specific things you need to learn. But behind it all, you’re really trying to orchestrate a kind of influence operation, if you will, which might involve producing targeted content for a specific group of people, you know, tend to be active on Reddit. So it’s an indirect…

In other words, rather than general content marketing on your website, for anybody who wants to know it, you might target something which could be in the form of direct outreach. Hey, we’ve written something we think you might find interesting. Or it could be more indirect, but aimed at those, at those groups of people. It’s very much also like Google reviews. You can’t solicit those reviews. Google doesn’t like it if you try to manipulate the reviews. But obviously reviews are important, so businesses have to think about how they can ask people to go leave a review.

So you might find out if some people in your user base, if you’re in tech or in, in your community, if you’re in some other thing. Is anyone in here active on Reddit? Would, would you occasionally, from time to time, think about maybe inserting us into the conversation? It’s a kind of influencer play, but you can’t make that Too explicit. And you probably can’t pay for it without somehow getting your culture wires crossed here and again, getting into real trouble.

And some of the, some of the beauty of Reddit is how resistant it is to all of this form of strategy and manipulation. Just a really quick example for color. Literally yesterday I Googled how long can you keep cooked chicken in the refrigerator, right? And the number one result was a Reddit thread that started 10 years ago, right? And this, the person had posted a question in a subreddit on, what do you call it? Meal, Meal planning and prepping for meal prepping, where you cook a bunch of stuff on Sunday and you box it up for the week. So in that subreddit, someone 10 years ago had said, hey, what do you guys think about cooked chicken? And there was literally thousands of comments. But there was one guy who 10 years ago responded to this and said, I go for six days. I, I, if I’ll eat it after six days. And then everyone’s like, oh my God, is he still alive?

And now every year, every few months, somebody’s coming back to this exact same thread, which continues to rank in Google, asking, hey, and I think the username is like, WTF74 or something, right? Are you still here? He’s like, alive and kicking. And now the thread itself has become hilarious because it’s a thread about how long you can keep a Reddit thread going in the refrigerator, so to speak. Now, if Foster Farms or Tyson wanted to come in there and be like, actually, we’ve got a helpful guide for chicken on the like, it would absolutely bomb. And they would not just get shut down, they would get pursued to the edge of town and chased on a, like the mob would turn on them. So it’s fun, it’s funny, and you can’t try to force it. That’s my takeaway there.

Get out of it. You’ll be thrown out before you know it. And that’s where the service is, Conversation visibility. This is not a Reddit service. We happen to apply it within Reddit. So it’s called conversation visibility for a very good reason. But you’re absolutely right. Come up with a corporate polished marketing message. It’s just not going to work with this audience. So, and that’s, you know, goes back for me saying, a lot of what we do is unbranded.

It’s the, and it’s about the conversation. And that’s education we have to have with our clients. You know, we can talk about a subject, but you know what, your brand name may not be in that yet. We’ve got to wait for other people to bring the brand to the conversation. And that’s part of our strategy when we start building up with clients.

Well, I’m using that example, though. They could have had a lot of fun with that too, right there. People could have popped in there and, you know, said, made, made the conversation be conversation. You think about some of things we’ve seen in some of the other platforms where the brand has been given the chance to be a little bit more irreverent, a little bit more sassy, and it has worked, worked to their advantage. But, you know, if we are seeing more and more companies, organizations, businesses paying attention to what Reddit is all about and acknowledging that it’s becoming an important platform for visibility and a place to engage and be a part of conversation, what does that look like over the next, you know, three to five years? How is it going to, how do we continue to make it be relevant?

How do we make sure that the content that we are or the conversations that we are engaging in are, you know, relevant? And what is the impact on that going to be for really the future positioning? You’re doing it from a marketing perspective, but it has a different approach. What does it look like over the next handful of years? Where do we take it from here?

Yeah, great question. Yeah. What’s the future look like? Well, I think we’re moving into a much more decentralized trust economy. So discovery becomes less homepage driven, less ad driven, and more conversation driven. So AI assistants increasingly summarize the whole community consensus, the discussion patterns and the trusted resources and everything that’s been written very quickly, very easily. So that’s why Adrian got such a good review of Chicken, because there was so much information over the last 10 years and that’s where AI has really helped us. So I think visibility, insight, trusted conversations will eventually become as important as traditional media visibility. The brands that win won’t necessarily be the loudest, but they’ll be the most contextually present.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

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