CITED Sidebars: Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg sits down with Amanda Coffee of Coffee Communications

Cited Sidebars, Episode 4: Building Reputation Capital with Amanda Coffee Amanda Coffee, founder of Coffee Communications, joins Noah Greenberg on Cited Sidebars to talk about treating relationships as reputation capital, showing your work to the C-suite, and what a career across eBay, PayPal, Under Armour, and her own consultancy taught her about proving the value of comms. Topics covered: 1) Amanda’s superpower: networking that isn’t transactional, and how a relationship with Variety’s new AI reporter paid off in week one (0:56) 2) Planning the quarter around networking weeks and heads-down weeks (3:55) 3) In-house, agency, or freelance: why media relations is the hardest piece to hand off (5:19) 4) Comms teams don’t show their work enough: the Star Wars screening that looked like a pizza party (6:00) 5) The earnings transcript cheat sheet, and getting credit when PR shapes how LLMs understand your products (7:04) 6) Why big companies are hiring events people: in-person moments make new tech click (8:51) 7) The underrated move: networking with comms peers at other companies (10:16) 8) What running her own firm taught her, and why leaders stopped questioning relationship building (11:56) 9) Consulting as an “adult internship,” and why Fortune 20 companies now hire independent comms talent (13:58) 10) Proving impact with an audience-based approach to goals and reporting (16:27) 11) Earned creator partnerships: what creators and athletes actually want from brands (19:21) 12) Who Amanda learns from: media brands’ in-person events, awards programs, and journalists on LinkedIn (23:12) 13) Advice for anyone building comms from scratch at a fast-growing AI company: give yourself grace, find the anecdotes, and lean on your peers (25:54) Cited Sidebars is Stacker’s ongoing conversation with the people building brand visibility in the AI search era — PR, independent media, agencies, and in-house teams, each one answering the same question: how do you earn attention, and prove it’s working, now that clicks and impressions don’t tell the whole story. Subscribe for more conversations with the people building the future of AI search and answer engine optimization. #AEO #GEO #AISearch #PR #Communications