How to be Interesting On-line

Seth Liss, SunSentinel.com's news community manager has some good tips for those of us who have noticed less feedback from social media activity recently. More people have piled into social media with varying levels of communications skills, muddying the waters for us all.

Time was, being on social media was novel and we all reacted to each other. Now everyone's at it, the boring get blanked out. So Seth's advice starts with the obvious: drop the minutiae of everyday living. We've all un-followed Tweeters who are obsessed by their everyday existence.

But I do agree that when you do post a newsworthy event, it's the details you bring out that make it more interesting. Every PR person and reporter knows this - and we are all occasional reporters now. As he says, 'I want to read more than: "My child took his first steps today." I want to know how it came about, where did it happen, how many steps, and how it made you feel.' Hard to do in 140 characters, I know, but whoever said good communications skills are easy?

He also reminds us to clear off to a private space if we are start engaging in a 1-2-1 conversation. I think it's a bit like talking loudly during a film in the cinema.

Seth's really nailed it when he suggests putting posts with links into context. There's no point in recommending something without giving us a clue so we can judge for ourselves whether we might agree with you. As he points out: "That approach makes it easier to agree or disagree and open the conversation up to others in your network."

Seth recruits good PR research to make a point. If you're thinking of going for the promotional jugular in your posts, you may want to consider that Edelman's Trust Barometer survey showed that "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45 percent to 25 percent since 2008." (Edelman is the world's largest PR company and their annual Trust Barometer survey is based on nearly 5,000 25-minute interviews with informed people aged 24-60 in 20 countries)

So, if being promotional and your day-to-day wanderings are a no-no: what does work? As ever in PR, sharing good information is the key to being worth reading or listened to. He counsels us to develop expertise and share learnings if we want to be valued sources of interesting material.

His next observation is harder to do, but it makes a lot of sense: timing is key. Most people dip into their social media accounts so: "Know when to post." I'm going to start noting when people I admire are posting so we're more likely to deepen the connection. That's the whole point of social media.

Finally he repeats advice given by everyone I respect in the on-line PR game: listen first, then comment. "If people know you are interested in what they have to say, they will most likely be curious about what you have to say as well."

That's why following people you're interested in often produces a reciprocal response.

I'd say it pays to listen well before you speak, then you stand to engage with the best in your field. And that further builds your on line reputation. And boosting reputation is what PR is all about on and offline.

Clear Expression for PR

"If you think in terms of what problems you solve instead of what services you offer, your messages will be simpler."
http://ping.fm/CCcPp

That's such a good approach to marketing and PR communications. Less is always more!

Eco Car

Look out for Nissan's 'Leaf' in 2010 - an all-electric car doing 100 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 90mph.

We're currently up for a Scottish environmental award: VIBES, which may be a first for a Scottish PR agency? We have seen the business sense in "reduce, re-use, recycle" and have run our Edinburgh PR agency on that basis since 1986. Plus we do like to keep abreast of promising eco-tech developments.

Influential Tweeters

The Klout Twitter app measures the influencing powers of individual Tweeps to "find the people the world listens to,"


Klout now lets you see the most influential Tweeters on a topic so you can build a Twitter list of the results.


Really useful for PR as it is all about reputation and influence.

New Twitter Search by Business

Twitter's new search via third-party app will allow search by business - helping businesses promote, defend, or address problems fast.

Orange deal integrates Twitter in UK TV

Orange has made deals with U.K. TV cos to integrate Twitter into news progs, films, TV shows, and football games.

Orange SMS Tweets

UK users can tweet via SMS with Vodafone, O2, and now Orange, at 86444.

Snapshot puts Orange UK into the Twitter Picture

Orange UK users can send picture messages to Twitter thanks to Orange's picture message site called Snapshot.

UK's Global Cultural Impact

The UK has had an outsized cultural impact on the world. From music to sports to literature...and now-MMS with Twitter. http://ping.fm/AQGu9

Social Media Friends Data

The real cost of 'free' social media is our friends' data?

Schedule Priorities says Covey

"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." Stephen R. Covey. Brilliant!

So often we end up with so many PR ideas, that it's hard to get them all done. The window of opportunity is not long in the news agenda.

The Main Thing is to Keep an Eye on the ball

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing" Stephen R. Covey.

So true in a creative biz like ours! That is going to sit at the top of my GoogleNotes gadget for the next few weeks to keep me focused on client's key objectives which is the key to all good PR.

30 low cost PR tips at 4networking

Looking forward to giving 30 lo-cost PR tips at 4networking.biz in Leith, Edinburgh on 24th November. £10 inc breakfast.

Jo Malone Helps Entrepreneurs

Calling all UK aspiring entrepreneurs! New BBC 1 series with Jo Malone is here to help.

Let's hope the new entrepreneurs have as much fun and fulfilment as I've had running PHPR in Edinburgh for 22 years. It still gives me a buzz when our PR gets taken up in the media, or our online PR gets clients onto Google page 1.

Social Media Trends

Six Social Media Trends for 2010 David Armano: Harvard Business Review: More popular, more mobile, less social.

VIBES awards - PHPR shortlisted for top Scottish environmental awards

Just got invite to the VIBES awards ceremony (Scotland's top eco awards for biz) at the Scottish Parliament. We're short-listed! Think that may be a first for a Scottish PR agency? Fingers crossed!

Outsourcing

"Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy." Groucho Marx

I smile at this as I plough on, identifying tasks that I can parcel up and outsource. I keep on paring down to the elements of running a PR agency in Edinburgh that I love: meeting people and coming up with interesting ideas to put them onto the news agenda, both on and offline.

Bolder PR

"You must do the things you think you cannot do." Eleanor Roosevelt

I've got this sitting at the top of my to do list this month to inspire me to be bolder. After 22 years of running a PR business in Edinburgh, I do find good quotes are more than just a quick pick-me-up. Placed strategically, they help me to stay fully motivated.

Gorkana Trial Looking Good

Trialling Gorkana media data. Not cheap, but they do good networking events & advance features is free 'till the end of the month. Seems good on Edinburgh media, which is our local PR list and has excellent online PR lists.

Fuel Cells Challenge

Carbon Trust's Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge has £8m to support projects that promise to slash the cost of fuel cells.

We're currently short-listed for a Scottish environmental award, which I think is quite unusual for a PR agency, so we keep an eye on new eco-tech developments. And situated on Edinburgh's sea-front, we are particularly interested in staying cosy!

Organising PR

Task lists are too general to be much use when we get round to implementing them - we've forgotten the intended details. Much better to break the task down and add notes so we don't just give up at the thought of doing the whole thing at once.

Branding social media

Promote your brand consistently by registering an available username on the best social media sites. with http://ping.fm/RtycM

Creative Thinking in PR

"The flypaper of an unfocused mind"..."may trap new ideas and unexpected associations" better than reasoning.

That goes alongside the thought that few really good ideas come to you in the office.

That's one of the reasons our PR agency is beside the beach in Edinburgh - when we need a good idea we go for a walk. All those negative ions work wonders!

Daydreaming up better ideas?

Daydreaming activates areas of the brain that solve complex problems and may be the only time they work together.

Another good reason for our PR agency to work in a seaside location - honest!

Ideas for PR

How often do you have a great idea at your desk? No? In the shower? Or in bed? Breakthrough by not working!

We've always found the seaside location for our PR agency in Edinburgh is great for thinking up good PR campaigns and ideas.

All Work is no fun

Hard work overrated says co-founder of Flick in Fast Company. It may be bad for you!

We like hard work at PHPR, but when it extends to long hours we're so glad we're located our PR agency by the sea on the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh. Great for taking a break and coming up with fresh ideas.

Brad at 4networking in Scotland

See details for Brad Burton at 4 networking in Edinburgh 13 & 14 + Glasgow 15th.

4networking founder in Edinburgh

Looking forward to top motivator & 4networking founder, Brad Burton, speaking in Edinburgh on 13 & 14 + Glasgow on 15th

Clarity in Communications

Jon Moon's simple idea about Words in Tables has spawned many ramifications, but they all lead to one end: better communications. Ignore his ideas at your peril! Always insightful and entertaining, his free taster sessions on injecting clarity into communications are an education in themselves.

Build relationships with the media online

An inexpensive online training courses from the National Union of Journalists' Scottish office shows how editors and journalists select stories and how to connect to them. Called Interactive Media Awareness.

Subbing Copy - time to revive a lost wordsmithing art?

The National Union for Journalists in Scotland have produced a bargain (imho) online course designed to teach how to produce intelligible and attractive copy, with headings that are fit for professional publication.

Forwarding Is the New Networking

Tom Davenport's The Next Big Thing blog at Harvard Business says forwarding info is a way of saying, "I know what you're interested in, and I'm thinking about you."

But he points out "you can go too far with forwarding" and advises against being "a mass forwarder". Many executives complain they got too many indiscriminate forwards.

He says, "Forwarding to a list (or retweeting to a list of followers, BTW) cheapens the networking value of the act. It's the online equivalent of finding a credit card offer from Capital One in your mailbox".

Why the Wrong People Get Laid Off

Really thought provoking piece in a Harvard Business School blog by Peter Bregman on "Why the Wrong People Get Laid Off - essentially they are "too confusing to fire" because no-one understands the consequences of getting rid of them. Means that in a downturn, better organised people who communicate more (and are much more effective employees) get the heave-ho. Another reason why smaller businesses have an edge over larger organisations? But also a warning not to let it happen in your business.

40% of tweets "pointless"

A report on Twitter yesterday claimed that only 5.85% of tweets are self promotion and 3.75% spam - you could have fooled me as I'd have said self promo was the prime force behind more than that! By carefully monitoring my follows I don't get much I consider spam.

And that's the point. Everyone's personal inbox will vary according to what they, as the gatekeepers, set up. That's why Twitter works. It puts you in control. As far as I can tell, this report is an analysis of the raw Twitter stream, which I doubt anyone actually experiences.

Apparently 8.7% of posts had "pass-along" value. And 40% were "pointless babble", although I expect their close mates would find it interesting enough at the time.

It's like any media. If I set up a newsletter confined to news about my street, a handful of people on the street and their mums might be interested. At least Twitter and other online media doesn't use up good paper & ink. Find the report at: http://bit.ly/2SybV8

Seeing the online PR light through training

PR people often ask me about how to get on top of online PR quickly.



I usually recommend David Meerman Scott's book: The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I think that book is a great starting place, and they'll find that online PR and marketing are converging online, so the whole ballpark just got a lot bigger. But the truth is, one book, no matter how good, doesn't give you a licence to practice. I've also put in a major time investment in training.

My CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) CPD Excellence log shows I've clocked up an average of 250 hours a year, each year for the last 4 years. That's currently 1,000 hours of formal training logged, not counting at least 10 times more time refining that training through practice.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to develop an expertise in a subject, and I reckon I must be getting close to that by now if you add the "putting it into practice" element.

If you count on around 240 working days a year after subtracting weekends and holidays, I'm spending over an hour a day on logged training. Not all of it is online PR and marketing. There's useful stuff about business processes and public speaking skills in there too. But I'm always picking up online PR and marketing tips while I'm working. Twitter sends me off on all sorts of interesting links and that's not logged, nor is watching the world's top experts on TED.

So why don't I feel an expert on anything? I think the explanation lies in something my tutor in the philosophy department said over 30 years ago. Bear in mind that he was a renowned professor close to retirement: he said, "The more I know, the more I discover there is to know, so now I feel I know less than I did when I started". I can relate to that!

Sometimes you just have to get comfortable with the idea that you have put in the spadework and know a lot more than most.

But logging the time spent on training puts good statistics behind you. That's quite an important professional booster, especially for smaller company owners and freelancers that are not in large organisations with structured training and development programs run by development professionals. And it's not just PR professionals. I reckon this could apply to any knowledge-led service providers.

I never thought I would say this as I struggle each year to add up my hours and file my CPD reports, but thank you CIPR CPD Excellence program and CIPR's Debbie Liddle for ensuring that, no matter how busy I am, I plan my training year in accord with my business goals and log my hours.

No laws for free information

If you want all your news free of charge, can you retain quality news outlets?

Several UK media have seen their offline circulation plummet as more people access content online. But despite higher online readerships, many media are reportedly struggling to make money online as content users blank out a lot of online advertising. And that means shedding writers and relying more on standard fare from news agencies and press hand-outs from PR.


Does it matter?


Well, yes, if you want to generate high quality media coverage sitting alongside material people actually want to read. Material that packs the editorial endorsement factor that is a powerfull recommendation of your company to thousands and sometimes millions of others.

Yes, it matters if you want an editorial endorsement that you can wear like a badge of honour for the next squillion years: "as seen on BBC TV" or "as seen in the FT", with links to the coverage or a hotlink to a quote from it.

Yes it matters if you want a media recommendation your business can be proud of, because someone has to pay editorial staff to create the content that you are proud to be seen in, and edit the publication to maintain its reputation for credibility.

A media recommendation where anyone can get a look in is no recommendation at all, regardless of whether the news source is on or offline.

So it matters when an influential author like Chris Anderson writes a new book, called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” arguing that there is a law dictating that anything made of ideas, like information, gravitates inexorably to being free - that it 'wants' to be free. And he doesn't mean unfettered free speech. He is talking about free of charge.

Now free of charge, when it comes to information usually translates into a vastly reduced budget to invest in good writers. You would think that PR people would welcome that as it might open doors for news releases to be used almost wholesale. But I know I am not alone in being more concerned with the bigger picture. Sure, getting news releases taken up is one thing, but a swing towards accepting unrestricted content reduces the impact of coverage on the site to the point that it would be worthless from a PR point of view.

Anderson is editor of the popular Wired magazine and author of the best-selling book, The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In that book he argued the Internet offers everything to everyone, and trailing in the wake of success, a tail of endless near misses can now have a market. That never convinced me entirely. I can see that there is more of a long tail than before the Internet, when physical shop space limited the choice on offer. But I've always thought that assuming an upward graph line will continue forever is just that: an assumption. So I couldn't see how the tail of unlimited demand would continue indefinitely. Surely the near misses would start drifting further off the mark and become irrelevant?

In today's issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Anderson's latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and finds similar holes in the idea that a tendency towards free information is the only force affecting pricing online. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

Gladwell is no stranger to big ideas. He was named one of the top 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2005 and his books: The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers have all been international best-sellers.


Gladwell takes Anderson's examples of how we all rush to free services, so they cost a bomb to handle the demand, like YouTube, forcing owners to retreat from the abundance thinking model that propels free information. Universal free information is often of such questionable quality that even YouTube pays for professional content provide from TV stations and film production companies for quality content to keep users happy and deliver audiences for advertisers.

Gladwell says there are plenty of models where information is running in just the opposite direction from free - in drug companies, for example where the high costs of trialling to meet regulations need to be recouped. Or where both models are used: the New York Times puts its content up free on the Web site, but the Wall Street Journal has over a million subscribers paying for online access to its content.

Gladwell predicts Apple could make more from selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself and may one day offer the phone free to boost download sales (yes, please!). Or give away downloads to boost the phone sales. Or carry on charging for both.

He concludes that the only law is that "the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws".

And that's good news for those who want quality journalism to continue, because quality comes from an editing process to sort the wheat from the chaff. Plus sources to provide information and run around getting pictures set up and arranging interviews (PR people). Plus someone to write it up and place the information in context - and that understanding of context comes with in-depth experience in a sector.

All that means skilled intelligent human intervention - and with humans come minor factors like a liking for food, a need for clothes and a roof over their heads, plus obligations to care for family members and spending money.

In short: great media needs to be paid for somewhere down the line.

And great media is an inspiration and a challenge to PR people to come up with issues-led ideas and spokespeople that can stretch to fit the news agenda, add to the debate and showcase their company's talent. And when they do, they get all the conferred credit that editorial endorsement can bring.

Used well (and I've seen an astonishing number of businesses fail to capitalise on good quality coverage of their businesses) good editorial endorsement is like a prestigious award and can be referred to almost indefinitely thereafter.

Touches that sell online

The PR, sales and marketing touches that nudge a prospective customer into making a buy decision go something like this, although at any stage, a particularly strong recommendation from a trusted person or a respected media source (on or offline) can accelerate the process dramatically. As can 'clicking' with someone who has already got a well-developed need for your product or services and has already done a fair amount of research.

A potential customer stumbles across your website in an unrelated search (touch 1) and think 'that's interesting'. They may even save your URL in their favourites. Then forget all about it until a blog they're following recommends you (touch 2), but the phone rings and they get side-tracked.

Then they notice a piece about you in a trade or consumer publication (on or offline). Or on Face-book, Twitter etc (touch 3). Since this is the third time your name has come up, they start to remember you (the memory likes to work in groups of three, which is why triads are so popular and memorable in prose and speeches).

So they note down the name and look up your website (touch 4).

If the page they land on takes them to something interesting (instead of a wait for flash content to download) and the interesting content contains a clear and easy call to action on the page, you may well accelerate them on to the next touch.

Activating the call to action does what it says on the tin. A call to action is an exhortation to take action accompanied by an easy way to initiate the next step in the sales dialogue: click on an email address for further info, or a Skype call button etc) (touch 5). If they respond to a call to action, they have seriously entered your sales pipeline and are now a qualified or 'hot' sales prospect and should be tagged as such in your database or CRM program (such as www.salesforce.com).

You respond to their enquiry with further marketing information (touch 6). Plus an invitation to another call to action (touch 7) - maybe a special offer, a white paper to download, a newsletter to subscribe to (collecting their info into a permission-based database if you didn't capture it at touch 6).

Now you have their permission (always with an easy unsubscribe route and backed by a good data privacy management system following good data protection practices - see http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk) you can embark on a relationship-building series of exchanges (touches 8 onwards).

Depending on the nature of your product or service and your communications strategy and company ethos, your company's marketing and sales materials will flow alongside these relationship building exchanges, via automated responses, information provision and further calls to action and website interactions into negotiated sales. Larger sales and service contracts may have to be reeled in via a tendering system or individual sales exchanges on the telephone, presentations at meetings, or via mail or email.

Looking backwards through this process, are there any points where your PR, sales and marketing could be strengthened? Are there any points where the sales process ceases to flow? Points where you lose them?

See the next post to make the most of your sales enquiries.

Touches for Sales

Sales people talk about the number of 'touches' it takes to make a sale: 'touches' being the number of nudges towards a sale that a prospective customer needs before they finally choose to buy from you. Obviously there are less touches on the way to picking up a chocolate bar with the milk, although branding and advertising touches may well influence the 'impulse' decision.

Even with seemingly simple online purchases, it can take 9 or more touches to make a successful sale. The Internet makes it much easier to deliver touches at the point the customer is making the buying decision.

But the multiplicity of touches can be very confusing if you are seeking to nail just one magic sales bullet that lands customers. Especially if you have been diligently asking new clients how they heard about you, as recommended in most business marketing guides. At best, a new customer will remember the last touch towards their purchase decision. That last touch is often just the tip of the whole publicity chain.

So what touches work? It will vary from business to business (and individual buyers) across the mix of sales, marketing and PR touches that collectively topple the decision over the sales edge into a purchase. Usually personal recommendations, enough media coverage to create buzz on and offline, good information on and offline, high visibility and plenty of new things happening, plus good connections will boost a business. The business will also need to offer an effective and available product or service at a reasonable price.

To find out more about why people buy from you, you will need to develop a relationship with customers to discover more of the marketing mix that actually drove them to you. And even then, they won't remember some of the process!

It makes sense therefore to cover plenty of ways to 'touch' your potential customers in your marketing strategy. Track what seems to be making a difference by asking new clients and by looking at the sales figures. There are hundreds of marketing, PR and sales tactics that can be deployed. Generally a mix of PR, sales and marketing tactics together deliver up to 50% more sales than concentrating individually on just PR, or on sales, or marketing on its own.

The choice of individual publicity tactics is usually a trade-off: budget v time, proven tactics v new opportunities (but if your competitors are not using a tactic, there's often a good reason for that).

Most powerful for most businesses is trusted word of mouth recommendations (on or offline) and you can enhance that with referrals incentives. But you usually need to add good marketing materials (including a good website that performs well in searches) plus social media interaction and good sales processes to reel new customers in.

Media recommendation is also very powerful as it carries the editorial endorsement factor ('as seen on TV', or 'marvellous' says The Times) and the media reach many thousands of people. Referring to that media coverage on your on and offline sales and marketing materials is important to monetise that editorial endorsement and ensure it carries on working for you.

We advise clients to run 10 on and offline sales, marketing and PR techniques at any one time, testing every 3-6 months the effects of dropping one and trying another.

See how it all works together in my next blog.

Online News Rooms

One of the first things I usually do for clients is sort out an online news room on their site with their web designer. Given all the wonderfully rich and detailed search engine content that can go up there, creating your very own online newsroom is too good an opportunity to miss. I'm amazed that even companies with internal PR advisers, or previous PR professionals, often have not got round to this. Indeed, some web designers that say they offer SEO services have asked me what an online news room is, and what should it contain.

It's really important if you want media coverage to have an online news room. Reporters rarely read releases these days: they are swamped by them. But they do what anyone does when they need information. When they're asked by an editor to write about a topic, they usually turn to Google to search for relevant information. So it really matters that you put useful content about key issues that are relevant to your industry up there in your online news room.

The online news room allows you to put up all your news releases and articles, plus background on your company, bios of key people etc. It builds up into a large body of highly relevant search engine friendly content that will really help the media write about you. And boost your website performance in online searches.

You can also add product and service background information. In fact anything a journalist might be interested in. Of course, if you have press kits, they should go up. And photos (but be sure to have a link or a request form for high resolution images as web pictures are far too small for print media). Maybe you run events that the media would be interested in? Or have good blogs, videos or podcasts that can be linked to? And financial information that you are willing to disclose - maybe about your backers (with their approval, of course).

If you run the analytics, it's amazing how many ordinary site visitors like to see what you're putting out to the media: the new room is a very popular page on a website. That means you are communicating your company progress and background to all sorts of useful people through an online news room: potential recruits, investors and clients, plus suppliers and advisers. Existing staff, friends and family will all be better able to recommend your business if they can tap into good quality information on the site. Especially if it is distilled into media-friendly factual nuggets stripped of all the marketing BS.

It's really important that people can find their way round the information in the news room, so it has to be searchable. A recent survey of journalists in the US showed well over 90% needed news search-ability on a site. At the most basic level you can put up a list of headlines with jump links to the release text below, but that will only cover a screen-shot sized list of headlines. Anything more needs to be properly searchable, but it is not rocket science as Google has a 'search this site' option you can highlight. I'm sure your web designer will come up with something more elegant if you wish.

And good PRs should be able to come up with an inexhaustible supply of ideas for releases to keep your newsroom fuelled.

The Magic of Integrating PR, Marketing and Sales for Business Success

Research shows that PR boosts sales and marketing by up to 50%.
But 50% of zero sales and marketing is still zero.
You need to get PR, sales and marketing working together to boost business brilliantly.

Trouble is: sales, marketing and PR have become so complex, they have evolved into different disciplines, where the people are all trained and accredited separately by different institutions. Each practitioner knows a little about the others, but often views them as competition for the promotional budget, instead of an ally to deliver better results.

Go round the marketing and communications professions and you'll find it's a classic case of asking a man with a hammer what the solution is. 9 times out of 10, the man with a hammer will suggest a nail. So it is with sales, marketing and PR professionals.

The sales man will point out that without sales, there is no income, but few salespeople would relish selling if they were not backed up with good marketing communications materials. And most would find their job a lot easier against a background of reputation-enhancing, profile-raising PR to drive traffic to the sales channels on and offline.

The marketing man will demonstrate that without researching the market, finding the right niche in terms of features, market, packaging, distribution and price, you can have great sales teams but no-one will know anything about your offering.

And PR people will argue that without a reputation, you can't trade effectively (just look at what happened all those years ago when Gerard Ratner claimed his products were c**p).

And of course, they are all right.

But what's interesting is that, with the advent of online PR, the distinction between PR/marketing/sales is breaking down.

Traders can directly interact with their buyers online. Especially if they can create content that actually interests people. That's opposed to reeling off lists of features & benefits expressed in the second person in a forlorn hope than one might strike a chord with a potential customer ....

And nowhere is that activity hotter than on the front page of Google. Almost all major purchases nowadays start with a Google search online.

Despite being a small agency, since the start of this year we've been getting clients onto the front page of Google's natural search results with a combination of PR, journalism and marketing techniques. What's interesting is that the results have been persisting, sometimes for months. And clients report their website ratings have also been boosted on Google.

PR and the truth about 'free' publicity

I keep finding people equate PR with 'free' advertising in the media. While I can see why, the trouble comes when they think a few press mentions will perform the sales, marketing and PR miracle all on their own.

In truth, you'll get some sales enquiries sparked by media coverage, but many small businesses fail to use the coverage they do get to boost their sales and marketing.

Research shows that PR boosts sales and marketing by up to 50%, but 50% of zero sales and marketing is still zero.

Just like winning an award, where you can claim to be an award-winning business for life, getting good media coverage allows you a major claim to fame forever.

What's better than getting good media coverage online & offline)?

Getting lots of it! That creates a real buzz that builds business success on and offline, provided that the marketing shapes up to the hype and the sales process is effective.

But what's even better than lots of media coverage? Multiplying it!

We always tell people to give their PR coverage 'legs'. Make the most of any coverage you get by using it in all your marketing materials. It's so simple to lift a short attributed quote or phrase from the article (like they do in West End shows - "the solution" Joe Smith, The Times).

Why not lift a quote and:

• Put it up on your website
• And on your email signatures.
• Add it to your social media profile.
• Blog about it.
• Include it in your newsletter masthead or credentials piece.
• Add it to your sales proposals and letters.
• Pop it on the back of your biz card, on a card at reception: anywhere you can.
• Include a link to the article or programme online and when the link breaks because the piece is archived, take the link off, but keep the quote.
• And online PR coverage of your news, if you've included the right search terms (but not too often) will ensure that the search engine keep sending you targeted new business enquiries long after the initial buzz has settled.

If it all sound great, but you haven't got the time the time to do it all, that's where we help.

Budgeting for PR

Have you ever wondered how you get from the small business to the large business marketing effect? If you have the vision to accelerate out of the end of this recession, understanding the synergy between sales, marketing and PR and budgeting for them, will enable you to do just that: accelerate your business.

We work with businesses of all sizes and over the last 22 years. I've noticed the main difference between the smaller and the larger business is that many small to medium businesses don't think they have a marketing budget. And they rarely admit to having a sales or PR budget.

In reality, most small businesses have made a substantial investment of time and money.
If you add up all the money and the time you spent in the last 12 months on any of these, you have the makings of your budget:

• the website,
• taking a 'special deal' in a directory or an advertising feature,
• your membership subs & meeting fees plus time for attending networking events,
• the online directory listings and forums, plus social networking sites,
• writing sales proposals
• PowerPoint presentations
• responding to sales enquiries
• encouraging referrals from customers or complementary businesses
• signage for a building or vehicle
• maybe some Pay Per Click experiments?
• or a promo item?
• marketing materials - folders, leaflets, brochures?
• a mailing list?
• email flyers?
• a newsletter?
• a blog?
• photos, videos or podcasts?
• local sponsorship in kind?
• stalls at trade fairs
• other sales, marketing, PR promotional activity

Chances are you have already made a fair investment of time and money in some aspect of the golden promotional trio: sales, marketing and PR. But you may be struggling to know what's effective? The standard advice is to monitor what works, then do more of it! And of course there's a lot of truth in the saying: "you can't manage what you haven't measured". But it's easier said than done.

If you ask customers at the point of sale how they heard of you, most people will stop after one answer: probably the most recent thing that brought them to you. Now that is an important clue, but would they have bought if you hadn't come recommended (word of mouth, or in the media, or online)? Would they have bought if your website was out-of date or the branding wasn't attractive and the brand values consistent?

In most cases the 'buy' decision is a complex balance between:

• Your profile and reputation (PR), plus
• A clear understanding and attraction to what you are selling (marketing and branding) plus
• A good sales process to ensure lots of referrals and to clinch the deal efficiently.

Plenty of people will offer clever tools to monitor what works for you, but you'll only really find out by talking to customers and getting their feedback on all aspects of your sales, marketing and PR.

Plus you'll pick up invaluable feedback and ideas for developing your products and services in response to demand and for new markets.

More about the golden synergy between on and offline PR, marketing & sales next time.