Good companies don't automatically get noticed. And doing good work isn't enough to ensure that customers, investors, journalists, communities, or increasingly AI systems understand why your company matters.

Melissa Baldwin has spent more than 20 years exclusively in energy and climate communications. As Senior Vice President at Tigercomm and host of the Scaling Clean podcast, she's had a front-row seat to what helps companies earn attention and trust, and what causes otherwise strong companies to remain largely invisible.

Melissa and Nico dig into why communications is routinely underfunded, why executive silence is itself a strategic choice, and what the best companies do differently to become useful sources of information for their markets. Melissa shares examples from Zillow and Redfin, explains why proprietary data can create authority far beyond traditional promotional content, and makes the case for giving CEOs a much larger role in telling the company story.

Then they turn to a rapidly changing question: what happens when discovery moves from Google search results to AI-generated answers? Melissa explains how longer, more specific prompts are changing search behavior, why mentions and credible third-party sources increasingly matter, and how companies can begin auditing whether they even show up when an AI system is asked who matters in their category. The conversation also explores why community engagement should be treated as project risk management and why developers need to begin earning local trust long before they need an approval.

Expect to learn:

🔹 Why strong companies can remain invisible despite doing great work

🔹 What useful content does differently from promotional content

🔹 How to evaluate whether your company is showing up in AI-generated answers

🔹 Why community engagement belongs in the project-risk conversation

If your company is doing work worth noticing, this conversation is a useful challenge to ask whether you're making it easy enough for the right people to actually find, understand, and trust you.

Are there other technologies you’ve scouted on the frontlines of the Clean Energy Revolution that you think we should be covering here on SunCast?

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