I used to assume business owners know what I mean when I refer to public relations, but I’ve learned the folly of that assumption. I also used to think business owners would know that marketing is their real job, not making widgets, but most don’t.
To help clarify, let’s put a couple of straight-forward definitions on the table:
Marketing is the process of building strong customer relationships by creating value through the sale of products and services. Value accrues to customers and company alike.
Public relations is the process of an organization interacting with its various constituencies, including customers, prospective customers, suppliers, employees, and the public at large, to build a favorable image. Bottom line: good public relations results when other people say good things about your business.
Is PR Part of Marketing?
PR often is considered a subset of marketing, which it is. Anything that helps reach the customer is a tool to use in marketing. In bigger companies, public relations, or “corporate communications” usually serves that function, plus building and maintaining overall corporate image. That is a broader function.
For example, if a corporate executive commits a crime, it could result in a serious blow to the company’s reputation. The job of the corporate public relations staff is to keep the focus off the company and its products.
In such cases, PR plays only an ancillary role to marketing, but, done right, it serves the higher purpose of keeping the company’s image and market value price intact.
Get Known, Get Found, Get Traffic, Get Business
In small businesses the owner often IS the business. That means the company’s image is almost always tied directly to the products or services offered, so having a good public image is essential. This is where PR can work wonders for a small business.
So what is role of public relations in small business? Helping the business get known, get found, get traffic and get business. Any other kind of result is just talk and not worth your time.
Small Business Public Relations
Doing effective public relations for a small business doesn’t have to be difficult. It requires some common sense, the ability to find the hidden stories in your business and the means to get them out to the public.
The field is wide open, limited only by your imagination and energy. Here are some of the PR basics you should considering doing now:
- Special events – have an open house to get people into your store, or team up with other business owners to offer a limited time price break.
- Contests/give aways – have a drawing for something you sell, and require people to register at your store.
- Charity support – throw your support behind a local charity and donate a percentage of sales or profits for a specified period of time.
- Public speaking – go out to civic and networking groups, not to talk about your business, but about the kinds of problems they have that you can help them solve.
- Award a scholarship – you can generate loads of goodwill with a $500 or $1,000 scholarship to a local graduating high school senior, and even more if you tie it to your business artfully.
How to Get Maximum Leverage from Public Relations Events
Here’s what makes all these things work: each presents a golden opportunity to generate favorable publicity for your business. None of these are difficult to dream up. They require some work, but the potential payoff is substantial.
Put out a series of press releases, both online and to local news media. Local newspapers, especially weeklies, often use the kind of news these activities generate….IF…the newspaper staff considers your stories of interest to its readers. If the story is good enough you may get television coverage for it, too.
The secret for success? Don’t try to hog the spotlight. Put others out front and you will get far more notice than if you try to be the center of attention.
Next: a real-life example of small business PR that got local TV and newspaper coverage for less than $500.
Filed under ThePRDoc Articles by on Jul 13th, 2010. Comment. 
Small businesses have it all over big ones when it comes to online PR. Less bureaucracy, less delay, more action.
And, they seldom retain big PR firms.
There, my bias is on the table, but it’s based on observation and fact. Too many big PR firms think of online PR as social media and nothing more. It’s not that simple.
The Big Problem with Big PR
Over the past two years I’ve spoken with people in PR firms big and small and have concluded people in the smaller firms understand online PR better than those in big ones. It can be a challenge finding junior level professionals at big firms who can write at all, let alone write search engine optimized content.
The days of “disruptive media” specialists are over. PR professionals must be able to develop content in a variety of online forms – website pages, press releases, blog posts, articles, video scripts, and more – to be considered fundamentally sound.
The Small Businesses PR Solution
Web offers good advice: "Use your news to attract customers."
The secret to having a big online image is first to have an online presence. For that, you don’t need a PR firm, but the help of a PR pro is a good idea. There are plenty of good solo practitioners available, and often they provide better service and results than the big firms.
Here are some things you should look for in a public relations consultant:
- Work samples – don’t settle for a stack of brochures or press releases. Ask to see online content the person has produced, especially website content and press releases.
- Social media – does the PR pro use social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook? Look at what they post on their own pages. Some fun or trivial information is okay, but the bulk of it should have substance.
- Testimonials – if none are provided on the PR person’s website ask to speak with customers, or simply call some of the businesses represented in the work samples.
Here are some questions to ask:
- What is the basic building block of online PR? (Keyword research.)
- When writing online PR materials do you write for search engines of human readers? (Both, but if in doubt, write for humans.)
- What is keyword density and how much does it matter? (The relative number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears in the copy; it’s important to include several references, but not overdo it.)
- If I have a Facebook fan page, why do I need my own website? (You don’t own or control Facebook; if the rules change, your page could be meaningless or disappear.)
- Do you recommend I do only online PR and marketing? (No.)
If you do nothing more than take these simple steps you will be well ahead of most small business owners seeking public relations and marketing help.
What’s the difference between public relations and marketing? Next time.
Website – does it present a professional image, including useful content and attractive appearance? Is it easy to find your way around?
Filed under Small Business Public Relations, ThePRDoc Articles by on Jun 28th, 2010. Comment.
I subscribe to a number of online PR and marketing news alerts to track developments and trends. The quality is not uniformly good, and unfortunately, the feeds that consistently come up short are about small business marketing and public relations.
PR people spend considerable time debating how to charge and how to get others to appreciate them more, but few weigh in on how best to serve the needs of small businesses.
Considering the difficulty I have locating meaningful insights, I imagine small business owners find it at least equally difficult. It’s time to change that.
Make Your Image Big Online
Online PR offers small businesses a chance to look much bigger than they are, so they can compete more effectively with companies many times their own size.
If you own a small business and you’re not using any form of public relations in your marketing mix – especially online PR – you’re missing out on a great way pro..+mote your business.
I say that as a former small business owner who has done “traditional” public relations for global giants and pre-IPO start ups. Now I help small businesses use public relations to do more business and make more money.
Public Relations Attributes
PR often is used interchangeably with publicity, but that’s a mistake. In some cases, good PR involves getting no publicity at all. Among other things, PR is:
- Interacting with your constituencies – prospects, clients, vendors, employees, your community and the public at large – to build your brand, image and reputation;
- Getting the benefit third-party credibility when others say good things about your products and services;
- A long-term proposition – you must work at it consistently for months and years to get best results;
Online PR Is…
All of the above and more, using digital tools that include:
- Keyword research;
- Search engine optimized content – press releases, articles, videos, blog posts and informational web pages;
- A variety of specialized websites;
- Simultaneous outreach to prospects and customers, as well as journalists.
Public relations always has been a great way for small businesses to get known, usually at substantially less cost than advertising. The Internet magnifies and increases the effectiveness of online PR and makes it an essential tool for small businesses.
Today, small brick and mortar businesses that have flown under the radar of local newspapers are finding audiences online. PR pros who know how to serve them are doing well, as are business owners with the inclination and time to do their own public relations.
Next: the fundamentals of online PR.
Filed under Small Business Public Relations, ThePRDoc Articles by on Jun 2nd, 2010. Comment.
I just read an article by Sally Falkow about the increasing importance of PR people to journalists, which called to mind something I read a few weeks back by Tac Anderson. Falkow’s article articulates a familiar theme:
newspapers and their staffs are dwindling, and print soon will be a relic;- newspaper editors are pushing reporters for more content for the papers’ websites;
- because of more work and fewer people in newsrooms to do it, PR people are more important now than ever;
- journalists need more from PR people – text, images, video, quotes; and above all,
- optimized content, so journalists can find it (because journalists use Google, too).
Anderson’s observations and conclusions are less mainstream, which may be why I remembered them when I read the subsequent article:
- good journalism helps companies in particular, and society in general;
- reporters face growing competition from bloggers, who frequently don’t observe the protocols of journalism;
- struggling newspapers should become PR agencies and web publishers for businesses because they already have the in-house talent;
- journalists don’t have the time to tell some of the best stories inside companies, for lack of access and time;
- corporate press sites need to evolve into news sites; and
- companies should have “internal” journalists, hired from the ranks of working (formerly?) journalists.
This definitely is not mainstream, and too big a leap for most executives, which is why the piece is worth some thought. Anderson contends that companies can counter the rush-to-publish mentality of the Net, and the frequent errors that result, by putting a new type of journalist on the corporate payroll:
“These new journalists need to be separate from Marketing and PR. These new journalists will be able to do the deep reporting you don’t get from a press release or a marketing campaign.”
Most big companies already have such people on staff in corporate communications or public relations departments. In my experience, competent PR professionals, whether former journalists or not, do develop the stories and get them out to targeted audiences in far more depth than a press release allows.
That’s what media relations is all about, or should be. To the extent that doesn’t happen, it is a communications failure by the company. However, the kind of radical cure Anderson suggests isn’t required. I can’t imagine a company that would want its communications people to “go off message” and “call a spade a spade” as he suggests.
Falkow and Anderson agree that companies must provide more information online – copy, images, bios, quotes, video and more. But Falkow hits on a key point too few PR people make: the stuff has to be optimized for search engines.
Way too many PR pros I know can’t write SEO copy, and count on search engine specialists to optimize them, if they do it at all.
SEO copywriting is as much a core public relations skill as any other type of writing. Corporations need PR people who optimize every piece of content they produce so it’s easier for journalists to find and access. That will be much easier to sell to a CEO.
Filed under ThePRDoc Articles by on May 10th, 2010. 2 Comments.
A post by Laurie Sullivan on SearchBlog regarding the splintering of the Internet by proprietary standards caught my eye. A brief excerpt:
“Marketers who want to build iPhone campaigns or Facebook Fan page face a quandary: they must leave behind many of the tools — analytics, search engine optimization (SEO) and click-through rates (CTR) — that accompany campaigns across the open Web, according to Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff .”
The reason is that Apple and Facebook, in particular, have created proprietary platforms to exert more control. That is not necessarily for the collective good. Bernoff refers to the phenomenon as the “Splinternet” because it fractures the open approach that has been at the heart of the Internet’s success. Developers and marketers now find it increasingly difficult to create a unified experience.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Apple for years. I never forgave the company for keeping its OS proprietary and becoming more cult than company for a long, dark period. But I bought an iPhone 3GS because my grown children (and many clients) have iPhones and we can communicate seamlessly. The overwhelming array of apps available for the iPhone also appealed to me, from metronomes to simulated flash apps for the camera.
Unfortunately, that’s the only kind of flash I will have on my iPhone because Apple has declared Flash an imperfect product that cannot be allowed to sully its user experience. I beg to differ. The Apple experience is defined considerably by AT&T’s network, which is anything but perfect. I put up with the dropped calls; I think I could manage the ticks in Flash.
But what should be of concern to Apple is that I could do without the iPhone altogether, now that other, more open, platforms are catching up. I stopped buying Sony computers because of the way Sonly loaded them up with intrusive and annoying proprietary junk I didn’t want. I could do the same because of what Apple leaves off the phone.
Apple may be setting itself up for another fall, the way it went over the cliff in the 1980s. The Mac OS clearly was superior to DOS, so much better that the corporate department where I worked in the mid-1980s cancelled its order for IBM boxes in favor of Macs. I bought one for personal use, too – $3,700 for the computer and dot matrix printer, which was a hefty percentage of my annual salary then.
It was my last Mac, because I decided it would be helpful to have software with my hardware. Now I want video with my Internet, and a whole lot of it comes in Flash form. It rankles me every time I hit that flash wall on my iPhone, and it will be on my mind as I continue to shop for mobile devices. Android is looking better all the time.
Facebook is another matter. I have an account, but don’t spend much time on it. Being a news geek, Twitter provides more of what I want. Part of my reticence about Facebook, however, is the company’s cavalier attitude regarding privacy. If the millions of users ever read the terms of use (and can understand them), they may realize they are forfeiting a lot for the privilege of having access.
I see a growing number of critics voicing concerns similar to mine. As a public relations professional, I find it impossible not to look for trends. It appears a trend toward a proprietary Internet – more precisely, numerous variations of it, forming a “Splinternet” – is emerging. Don’t Blu-ray me, Dude.
There are people far more qualified than I to assess the meaning of this, but as one who has been involved in promoting online and mobile communications for many years, I am on record in opposition – and it will affect what I buy and whose services I use.
About the author: Jim Bowman, ThePRDoc® is a speaker, copywriter and career public relations professional with international experience in corporate, agency and government communications. He helps small businesses and marketing pros who serve them use big company PR and marketing strategies to do more business. Get the whole story at http://www.ThePRDoc.com, and follow Jim on Twitter.
Filed under ThePRDoc Articles by on May 8th, 2010. Comment.
