The monthly Q&A is pulled from the conversations I have in onboarding calls with new Signalvs clients. Most of them are experts: agency owners, consultants, technical founders, or operators with a body of knowledge they want to make visible. And almost all of them are asking some version of the same thing: how do I get known for what I actually know?

1. What is public relations?

It is not the thing people usually think it is. It’s not event planning, press release writing, or media begging. At its best, PR is narrative design: the architecture of how someone becomes legible.

The Roman poet Ovid, exiled by Augustus for what he called a poem and a mistake, understood the dangers of visibility. His Tristia laments the loss of control over his own story. Public relations is the modern antidote to that fear. It is the intentional shaping of public comprehension before the public miscomprehends you.

You don’t have to be famous to need PR. You just have to be doing something that matters. And if you are, people will eventually invent a version of your work that fits their worldview. PR is your attempt to intercept that.

2. Why do most experts struggle with visibility?

Because their identity is forged in depth, not breadth.

Expertise comes from spending years inside a domain where social proof doesn't exist, where the only rewards are internal coherence and peer respect. And then we ask these people to translate that into tweets.

It’s like asking a Benedictine monk to start a YouTube channel. He might eventually figure it out, but the grammar of his world is incompatible with the algorithms of ours.

Most experts assume good work speaks for itself. It doesn’t. It mumbles. You have to put a microphone in front of it. And ideally, a translator.

3. Is there a moral case for self-promotion?

Yes. But it depends what you're promoting.

Seneca managed Roman affairs, advised emperors, and wrote meditations on grief and power without ever employing a publicist. But even he made sure his letters were copied and distributed.

There is a difference between visibility and vainglory. One says: here is something I believe the world needs. The other says: here is my ego, lacquered in slogans.

You are allowed to want to be known for your work. You are allowed to try. In a world where bad ideas go viral and good ones rot in unread PDFs, not making an effort to communicate is not humility. It is negligence.

4. What does it actually take to build authority in public?

Consistency, clarity, and context.

Consistency: saying the same thing, in different ways, over time. Repetition without fatigue. Familiarity breeds trust, but only when it signals coherence rather than laziness.

Clarity: not simplifying your ideas to the point of insult, but scaffolding them. Building bridges between where your audience is and where you are. It means learning to speak in analogies, stories, metaphors. This is why so many thought leaders read history. It's a library of patterns.

Context: your ideas don’t land in a vacuum. They land inside existing narratives. You need to understand the dominant myths in your space and decide which ones to align with, which to challenge, and which to ignore. There is no "neutral" positioning.

5. Should experts hire ghostwriters or PR firms?

Sometimes.

But the bar should be very high. Most ghostwriters don't sound like you. Most PR firms still operate like it's 2007. And outsourcing your voice too early is like sending a stunt double to your own wedding.

What works better is what I call signal scaffolding: building a content and visibility system around the real substance of your thinking. That can be aided by collaborators. But it cannot be fabricated from whole cloth.

You are not required to become a content creator. You are required to become findable, understandable, and credible. That takes infrastructure.

6. Why is traditional media less useful now?

Because traditional media is no longer the sole definer of legitimacy.

In 1964, if The New York Times said you were an expert, you were. That imprimatur came with instant trust. Today, nobody cares about your Forbes quote unless it gets clipped into a TikTok with dramatic music.

The media environment has been flattened and fragmented. Influence is decentralized. And that creates opportunity.

You no longer need to be chosen. But you do need to build your own stack of trust. It might look like: a clear point of view, one or two owned channels (email, podcast), a backlog of useful writing, and evidence of impact. With those in place, media becomes amplification, not validation.

7. How do you know if someone is actually a thought leader or just loud?

Thought leaders change the terms of discussion. Influencers change the volume.

Look at the history of science: Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos. Their impact wasn’t just in publishing ideas, but in reframing how other people thought ideas should be structured. They reset the mental infrastructure.

You can usually tell who’s a real thinker by asking: are other smart people citing them to advance a conversation, or to perform affiliation?

The former is intellectual gravity. The latter is brand cosplay.

8. Can a person be too early?

Yes. And they often are.

Most of the people who shaped the internet did so before it was cool. They were blogging about networks and open protocols in 1998 while everyone else was playing with animated .gifs. Nobody took them seriously until their thinking became retroactively useful.

To be early is to be misunderstood. That is not romantic. It is inconvenient. It means shouting into a void until the void starts to echo. It means investing in clarity and frameworks long before anyone asks for them.

But if you're right, and consistent, and patient, history tends to catch up.

9. What's the biggest misconception about PR?

That it can be separated from product.

If you are a founder, a researcher, a creator: your communications strategy is not a layer of frosting. It is part of the recipe. Bad ideas with good PR might go viral once. Good ideas with good PR reshape a category.

Every quote, every blog post, every case study should point back to the underlying system of value. Not as a sales pitch, but as a narrative thread. PR is not hype. It's architecture. It's coherence over time.

The best campaigns don't make people say "wow." They make people say "oh, of course."

10. What do you wish more experts understood?

That being understood is a strategic decision.

It is not enough to know. You must make your knowing communicable. That means choosing audiences, platforms, metaphors, timing. That means saying some things ten times and other things never. It means leaving the ivory tower and entering the arena of incentives.

To paraphrase Orwell: to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. To explain what is behind one’s eyes requires even more.

Public relations, when done well, is not manipulation. It is the ethical design of visibility. And in a world saturated with noise, building signal is not vanity.

It is responsibility.