The best ChatGPT prompts for public relations in 2024
How to get the most out of chatbots for your public relations efforts
We here at Prezly have been famously critical of generative AI for creative projects. And we stand by that. ChatGPT, Jasper, Gemini, etc., should absolutely not be a plug-and-publish tool for any serious PR efforts.
But that's not to say that we can't use chatbots at all. There are ways to successfully leverage the technology without relinquishing creative control. Here are some tried and tested ChatGPT prompts with examples to make you your best (professional) self.
- A quick but important disclaimer
- ChatGPT prompts for press releases
- ChatGPT prompts for crisis communication
- ChatGPT prompts for content
- ChatGPT prompts for social media
- ChatGPT prompts for personal & career growth
- Conclusion
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ChatGPT is overhyped. While it seems to be the only thing anyone on comms and marketing Twitter can talk about (all other topics have been thusly banned), the average person just really isn't that engaged with it. Only 5% of Americans polled said they found it "very" or "extremely" useful, according to a recent Pew Research study, and only 14% of Americans had even tried ChatGPT at all.
You have those on one end of the spectrum who are confident that generative AI chatbots are going to save the world from itself. You have people on the other end of the spectrum who are positive that ChatGPT is going to usher in the technological and creative apocalypse. Then you have some guy named Jeff in the middle who is like, "eh."
Regardless of where you stand on generative AI ideologically, you (yes, you) should never, ever, ever publish AI content as your own. There are myriad ethical or even legal issues around publishing generative AI content.
It's also worth mentioning that ChatGPT has a very distinct and easily identified cadence. This isn't surprising (it is, after all, just a tool), but the number of people attempting to pass off ChatGPT's linguistic nuance as their own is a little embarrassing and will become only increasingly so as more people become attuned to its style.
If you do plan to use ChatGPT for your work-related doings, please, for the love of all that is good and decent, do not do this:
Without further ado, let's talk about how you can (and should) use ChatGPT for your PR.
We've talked previously about ChatGPT for press releases, but let's go a bit further. Here are some prompt ideas, use cases, and examples to get the press release juices flowing.
Why not ask ChatGPT to give you a solid outline for your next release? Nobody wants to start writing from a blank page, but you definitely don't want to over-rely on ChatGPT to write the full press release, forcing you to spend hours re-writing.
In our experience, ChatGPT is going to go a little hard no matter how brief or succinct you ask it to be, so prompting "bullet point outline" and "very brief" is ideal. Otherwise, you'll be deleting and re-writing paragraph after paragraph of irrelevant text.
You can say a lot about ChatGPT, but you definitely can't accuse it of being laconic.
Example prompt:
- Create a brief bullet point outline for a press release for a new line of luxury fashion watches
ChatGPT can be useful for condensing and distilling blocks of text into easy-to-digest summaries for things like social posts and email. Rewriting written text is pretty much always a pain, so this can be a pretty great timesaver.
Example prompts:
- Draft a 50-word email with a short summary of this press release: [and then add the press release text here]
- Create a bullet point summary of the following press release: [and then add the press release text here]
A crisis is never fun. You can use ChatGPT to make sure cooler heads prevail during this trying time by using the following prompts.
You can prompt ChatGPT to give you a good, brief outline of a crisis comms response to a variety of internal and external events or incidents. Now, take extra care to double and triple-check your rewrite because the only thing worse than a communications crisis is a bungled response to a communications crisis.
Example prompt:
- Write a brief outline of a crisis comms response to a data breach.
This, in our opinion, is where ChatGPT shines. It can evaluate your text and give insights into possible pain points to address before publishing.
Example prompt:
- Analyze the following crisis comms response to a data breach. Evaluate for tone, appropriate level of apology, and identify any possible complaints to the crisis response.
Now, is a chatbot a reasonable alternative to a human colleague? Absolutely not. But allowing the generative AI to give you feedback is a pretty decent starting point to self-evaluate and make any edits before turning it over to your work bestie.
Hopefully it doesn't need to be stated again that copying and pasting content straight from ChatGPT into a blog or website is not a good content strategy. Or, really, any kind of strategy. But there are some handy ChatGPT uses for content that doesn't involve selling your soul to the AI machine.
ChatGPT is useful for outlining blog and website content. When creating the prompts, it's best to emphasize brevity because, as previously mentioned, the chatbots will tend to run amok, which takes extra time to polish up. Just plug in the topic you'd like to see, get your skeleton outline, and be your best creative self.
Example prompt:
- Create an article outline for the best ways to advance your PR career. Keep the outline very brief.
Sometimes you don't want to wade through a bunch of charts and spreadsheets to find some keywords. Should you do this, from a strategic standpoint? Yeah, absolutely. But I'm not here to tell you how to live your life.
Get some (potentially) relevant keywords from ChatGPT by asking the machine. From here, you can use other tools like Ahrefs to do some thoughtful and real-time keyword research.
Example prompts:
- What are some relevant SEO keywords about the future of PR?
- Generate a list of SEO keywords around PR software.
You can give ChatGPT a topic and ask it to generate a list of blog post ideas for your blog or website based on a specific topic or niche.
Example prompts:
- Generate 20 blog article topics centered around women in PR.
- Give me five corporate blog ideas about the benefits of working from home.
- Give me five corporate blog ideas about the drawbacks of working from home from the C-suite perspective.
You can ask ChatGPT to give you an overall analysis of your writing, and it does a fairly decent job of summarizing the overall sentiment of a block of text.
Example prompt:
- Analyze the tone of this article: How to do PR outreach (and 10 garbage fire mistakes to avoid)**
** (at this time, ChatGPT 3.5 does not have access to the web, so the contents of the article have to be copied and pasted into the chatbot)
You can ask ChatGPT to analyze your content for spelling and grammar mistakes. This is really not as effective as a spellcheck plugin that can give direct feedback directly within your text, but it is a free workaround.
Example prompts:
- Check the following text for spelling or grammar mistakes. Also, check for readability and tone.
- Check this article for American standard spelling.
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Write & publish brand stories in an online newsroom
Send email campaigns, pitches & newsletters
Manage all your contact lists in a single CRM, with easy import & export
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As we've mentioned previously, it's a little weird to use an AI chatbot to connect with an audience of (presumably) real live people. I mean, in theory, it's weird. But this is all a little weird. So let's do it the best way we can, despite the weirdness.
Is motivation running low? Is the endless monotony of Twitter getting to you? Ask ChatGPT for some inspo! Just let it generally know what you'd like to post about and maybe a bit about your audience, and get a list of some ideas.
Example prompts:
- Give me five engaging social media post ideas around the topic of Mother's Day. The audience is mostly pregnant women or new mothers.
- Generate social media post topic ideas around burnout in marketing.
- Think of an engaging question to ask my LinkedIn audience on the subject of authenticity in the workplace. My audience is marketing and comms professionals.
- Give me ten quotes from famous businesspeople with attribution around the topic of resilience and overcoming.
Asking ChatGPT to do high-level content strategy probably won't go great. But you can always use it to get you started.
Example prompt:
- Give me a one-month content calendar for an organic juice Twitter account, posting 2x a week.
Generative AI can be a useful brainstorming tool to level up your career. You can ask it myriad questions about the industry and use it as a jumping-off point for your own research and development.
If you are unclear about a public relations topic, want a little bit more of a breakdown on a subject, or need a snappy explanation, you can ask ChatGPT to give you a summary.
Example prompts:
- Explain reactive PR like I'm five years old.
- Give ten examples of failed PR campaigns and why they were considered failures.
Ask ChatGPT to do the research for you! You can ask ChatGPT for course or certification recommendations that focus on a variety of different topics related to your professional endeavors.
Example prompts:
- Suggest some in-depth courses with certifications on the topic of SEO and content marketing.
- List five courses on improving workplace communication.
You can ask ChatGPT to generate a list of social media personalities to follow within the topic of public relations or, really, any field of interest you may have.
Example prompts:
- Generate a list of social media personalities to follow on the topic of public relations.
- Name ten thoughtful experts on SEO marketing.
- Identify 20 thought leaders on the subject of applied AI in comms.
Widely used generative AI is in its infancy, and it's still unclear where we're all going with this technology. While there are plenty of ChatGPT limitations, it can definitely be a useful tool for comms and public relations (if used correctly).
There are also plenty of other new tools that are leveraging AI to make lives easier across a bunch of different industries.
How to work with the robots, not against them.
If you have any other ideas about great ChatGPT prompts for public relations, give us a shout on Twitter. And if you're interested in more tools that help you be the best PR possible, why not try Prezly for free? 👇
Prezly – software for modern PR teams
Write & publish brand stories in an online newsroom
Send email campaigns, pitches & newsletters
Manage all your contact lists in a single CRM, with easy import & export
Measure performance to see who's engaging with your stories
