Ready for PR?
Before you hire a PR agency or public relations consultant to help you get publicity for your company, you’ll want to do a little self-assessment ahead of time to determine what you have to work with.
Spend an hour or two going over these questions with your management team and prepare a short list of answers.
When you come to an initial meeting with this information, you will impress the PR people you talk to and have a much more useful conversation with them.
They’ll be able to give you a much better idea of what they can do for you, what kind of results will be reasonable, and how much it will cost.
I. What do you have to work with?
Company News
1. What new product announcements are planned over the next six months?
2. Any new services (consulting. training, etc.)?
3. Are you changing the way you deliver products or services (such as moving to online training)?
4. Anything new with pricing?
5. Any new hires to the management team?
6. Planning to move to a new location?
7. Any new partnerships?
8. Any new deals?
9. Have you won any awards recently?
Trends
10. What are the current trends in your market? How do you fit in?
11. What current business trends are affecting your business? Are you outsourcing? Feeling the effects of a market recovery or recession?
Experts
12. Is anyone in your company considered an industry expert? What is their area of expertise?
13. Who at your company is blogging?
14. Who is tweeting?
15. Who manages your Facebook page?
16. Who is responsible for your company’s presence on LinkedIn and other social networks?
17. Do you have anyone creating podcasts or videos?
Clients
18. Do you have any relatively new case studies? For what companies? What kind of results did they achieve with your software?
19. Do you have any users at large or well-known companies who are willing to be quoted?
20. Is there anything unusual about any of your users?
21. Is any user doing something different or unusual with your software?
22. Is there anything highly visual about the way people use your software? Or what they do before or after using the software?
23. If you analyzed the purchase patterns of your users, would that show anything interesting?
Education Strategy
24. Is there a topic about which you are trying to educate the market? Do you advocate a particular strategy or point of view?
Personalities
25. Is there anything unusual or quirky about your founder, president, or management team? This could include their background, hobbies, where they live, what kind of car they drive, their work style, etc.
26. Do you have any unusual employees (background, hobbies, etc.)?
27. If you have investors, are any well-known or unusual?
28. Is there anything unusual about the way you run the company? The perks you offer staff?
29. Do you do anything unusual for holidays?
30. Are there any topics (not software or business-related) about which you feel strongly?
Giving Back
31. Do you do anything to support the local community? Contribute to or volunteer at charities?
II. Where do you want to get publicity?
· What websites are most influential in your market?
· What blogs?
· What newspapers?
· What newsletters?
· What e-mail newsletters?
· What magazines?
· What online communities/social networks?
· What columnists?
· What radio or TV shows?
· What analysts?
· Who else matters in your market?
III. What are your goals for your PR effort?
· Are you looking for lead generation?
· Sales?
· Recruiting?
· Impress partners?
· Build a channel?
· Investors?
· Partners?
IV. In what time frame do you need to see results?
- As soon as possible
- 6-12 months
- 12-24 months
- Ongoing
Leximimicry – what’s that?
I recently started following Damon Carson, a PR wiz who advertised in one of the HARO newsletters.
For anyone who doesn’t know what HARO is… HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. It’s a 3x/day listserv where reporters and bloggers ask for sources to help with stories they are writing. We’ve been able to get clients some amazing coverage thanks to HARO, including WSJ.com and CNN.com. Peter Shankman runs it – it’s free and well worth signing up for. You can sign up here: HARO
Anyway, one of the best parts about HARO is the advertisement at the top of each issue. I open every one, just to see who is advertising. And one day it was Damon.
He has some very interesting PR strategies, a lot of which can be copied by anyone and used in any market.
Here’s the latest (I checked and he said it was OK to share here)… You can find more tips from Damon at his website: Publicity Associates.
Leximimicry
(From the Greek – lexikos, of words, and mimesis, imitation)
Here is a fun little technique – “leximimicry” – if you want to improve your press release and promotional writing.
Find a magazine that has products or services either similar to yours or that target the same audience. Read through this magazine. Pay very close attention to the words used in the different articles written by the editors and reporters to describe different things. Also, you can very often find a completely different product than yours described in a way that you could borrow to describe your own.
Look at the paid advertisements in particular. These advertisers are often large companies spending huge sums of money for the best ad designers in the world. Part of any great print ad is the copy. Very high-priced copywriters choose just the right words and phrases to position a product or service in just the right way so you will want to buy.
You don’t have to be a word sleuth, just a leximimric. Read and copy. This is Bootstrapping 101, baby. You can get all the pizzazz of high-priced words and writing styles for nary a cent.
Not long ago I was working on a press release for a high-end design client. I picked up a copy of an affluent design magazine and began reading very closely. I typed into my computer any words or phrases that I thought were particularly good and/or descriptive. Here are some I found:
The use of vivid, expressive color enlivens any home.
The lamp redefined.
Inspired by…
Intoxicating
Following in the footsteps
Unbridled talent
Reminiscent of
Discriminating clients
Capture the imagination
Motifs
Kaleidoscope of color
Blurring the line between form and function
Reveals
Metal like you’ve never seen it before
I then integrated some of these words and phraseologies into the press release. This is leximimicry. At this point, I was using the language of the design world to pitch a design story. If I were writing something promotional about a new fishing lure, I would want to study the language of fishing using this very same method. Likewise, business has its own language…”return on investment,” “target market,” “break-even point.”
Using the proper language greatly enhances any press release or promotional writing. And practicing leximimicry makes it fast and easy.
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Learn How to Manage PR
We’ve been working on some free email courses to help clients (and prospective clients) learn more about managing specific types of marketing.
The idea is that the more you know about what to expect and how the process works, the easier it will be to manage someone doing that work for you, and the better your results will be.
The first course is almost ready…
It’s How to Manage Public Relations.
The idea is that you get 10 email lessons (one per day for 10 days). Most people will be able to read each email in less than 2 minutes.
So in 20 minutes total you will learn a whole lot about how to manage someone who is doing PR for you.
Those 10 emails cover:
1. Before you begin – what you need to understand before getting started
2. How much will it cost?
3. What info to gather – what information are you going to need to provide to your PR rep for them to do the work
4. What to look for in someone you hire to do PR – what personality, skills and experience you need
5. Interview questions – what to ask to tell if the PR person you are talking to knows what s/he is doing
6. The process – what steps are they going to go through in doing the work
7. Status reports – what kind of status reports should you ask for
8. Questions to ask – what questions should you ask in meetings to make sure things are going well and keep the work on track
9. Avoiding problems – common problems that occur with PR, how to identify them early, what to do, and how to prevent them in the first place
10. What if you have no budget – things you can do (by yourself or outsource) when your budget is $500 or less
We don’t have the course set up in the autoresponder yet, but if you’d like to see it I can send it to you in a Word doc.
But you have to promise to give me feedback!
Or you can check back in a week or two, when it should be available on our website.
If you’d like to see it now, email me at jaschramm@j-m-r.com.
I Blogged About You
Here’s an idea courtesy of Joan Stewart, who writes the Publicity Hound, a great email newsletter about generating PR for your business.
She is writing about how to get the attention of journalists, but this is also a great way to get to know anyone who blogs – including influential people in your industry whom it would be hard to meet otherwise.
I disagree on one point though… You don’t have to necessarily send them an email to let people know you blogged about them – in fact, I probably wouldn’t. Read more
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