Differentiate! Know Yourself. Know Your Customer.
Posted on August 11, 2011 | Tags: online public relations, Personal Branding, Reputation Management
Do you know your prospect or customer well enough to capture his attention? Do you know enough about your message to know what to say?
Differentiating is just as much about you as it is about your customer. You actually need to know yourself (your products/services) as well as you know your customer. Why? You need to be able to select just the right messages.
In the early ’90s I started to work with talk radio show producers. Early on, I had the opportunity to be at CBS National Radio headquarters in New York. The producer I was visiting had a desk that was literally stacked several feet high with press packs and releases.
It was in those CBS offices where I discovered why it was our fledgling PR firm was getting such great response from talk stations around the country: my headlines were concise and spoke to the need of the producers. I knew my client’s subjects and I knew the mindset of the busy and overwhelmed producer and host.
Wading through the press materials from other firms and big publishing houses was …. well .. boring! Their headlines, written in 12 point, would often read something like:
John Doe Releases New Book About XXXX
Compare that with 36 point font headlines screaming a question, followed by smaller sub headlines, followed by short paragraphs that promised not to drone on.
I figured if I didn’t have ‘em after those three points .. it probably wasn’t a subject they’d be interested in anyway.
National Enquire-ish? Sure. Effective? You bet.
I KNEW the mindset of the talk show producer and host. I’d been a talk radio junkie in Boston since the early 80s and I listened to how subjects were introduced on the air.
Eventually, I applied the same principles to local tv. I watched how they introduced a story. What was the teaser? How did they talk to the audience? Once I understood that, writing to tv producers became equally as effective. They wanted to book our clients.
The same principles apply to your prospect. How do they want to be communicated to? Are you imposing what YOU believe to be interesting without really consulting their interests?
Know Yourself. Know Your Customer.
Get into their head. Imagine their mindset, their wants and frustrations.
Upcoming articles will delve into: The 3 Steps to Differentiating Yourself; How to Match Your Messages to Your Marketing; When Differentiation Matters Least; 5 Ways to Attract Your Prospect’s Attention, and How to Deploy Your Differentiation Strategy.
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Top 5 Reasons to Switch to WordPress
Posted on January 7, 2009 | Tags: online pr, online public relations
First time website owners or those looking to upgrade their older site won’t go wrong using the WordPress platform. Here’s the Top Reasons to Use WordPress. I’ve avoided the use of tech-speak, so for those tekkies, pardon our avoidance of terminology.
1.The search engines will recognize your site much faster. With other platforms, it can take a while for a new site to be found by Google, Yahoo or MSN. Not so with WordPress. Right out of the box, your site is friendlier to search engines. That means your prospective customers will find you much faster.
2. You can change and update content easily. In the old days, you had your tech person put up your site and considered it done. That doesn’t work today. You need to constantly add fresh content to keep up with the game and WordPress is so user friendly that you can do it yourself. Our clients get a one-on-one orientation tutorial with Trevor, our wordpress wizard. From that point on, adding or deleting content from their site is as easy as using a word processor.
3. Free Training and Support. Unlike the static website platforms that require “html” knowledge, if you want to become independent of any technical help to maintain your site, there’s all the free help you can get online. You can find documentation and online forums where you can post just about any question and get help. Most of my clients don’t have the time for this, so we offer ongoing maintenance support and/or tutorial with Trevor, our wordpress wizard.
4. The design capabilities are unlimited. If you have a static html site right now, we can switch it over to the more search engine friendly WordPress format and keep your same design. The only difference is you’ll have the ability to update it more easily and your site will play better with the search engines. No matter what you want your site to look like, it can be done in WordPress.
5. It’s versatile. Websites have come of age with regard to their ability to influence your offline business. 75% of people now say a company’s website influences their buying decisions. Video, audio, written word, pictures …. all of these convey the message and image needed to influence your prospects. With WordPress, all of these mediums are possible.
Limited Offer ‘Till Jan 31. Right now Online Offline PR is offering a custom designed WordPress site that’s got all of the search engine ready gadgets and tracking gizmos already loaded on it for $1197. That’s like buying a laptop with Microsoft Office pre-loaded. It also includes a walk-you-through- the-site tutorial over the phone with Trevor and the guidance of a twenty-year veteran PR (that’s me). Contact me before January 31st if you’re interested.
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Authenticity Isn’t Outsourced
Posted on January 5, 2009 | Tags: online pr, online public relations
To create a sticky website, you need content.
To create press releases that generate traffic to your site, there’s got to be news.
To write an article that attracts visitors to your site, it’s got to teach them something.
To effectively use Twitter to get people to your site, it has to compel an idea in a limited number of characters and the link you send them to has to maintain that interest and not betray the interest by bait and switch.
That’s a PR function. It’s why one friend of mine was disappointed with the company he hired to generate online press releases and articles. They’re very good tekkies. But they’re not PRs. They didn’t “get” him and so what they wrote wasn’t authentic. It was churned out copy that made him appear trite.
Like any display of originality, authentic content is hard to outsource.
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What Doesn’t Work Online Won’t Work Offline Either
Posted on December 22, 2008 | Tags: online pr, online public relations
In the world of getting publicity offline, you have to have something to say. Otherwise, the media doesn’t care about you.
The online world takes it a step further: it’s personal. To keep up pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, continue blogging, keep up on Twitter and nurse Squidoo pages, you have to invest the time. Most of these require personal communication that’s hard to outsource – unless your PR knows you so well that he/she can speak for you.
So … what do you do? If you’re doing it yourself, pick one or two that you can actually keep up with and make those great. Skip the rest. If you’re not going to nurture them completely, don’t bother getting involved. Seth Godin recommends this in his post The Sad Truth About Marketing Shortcuts.
Think of it like doing publicity offline. If you just wrote a non fiction book and have a limited budget, do talk radio interviews by phone or concentrate on getting magazine articles, if your subject is appropriate.
When you go online, time is your commodity, unless you’re paying an online PR to represent you. Don’t waste it doing things halfway. Slow and steady wins the race applies here.
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Is Your PR Responsible For Everything Said About You?
Posted on December 18, 2008 | Tags: online pr, online public relations, pr, public relations, Reputation Management
It’s one thing when your client makes a fool of herself in front of the camera. If you agree with your client’s statement or behavior, then back her up all the way and repair any misunderstanding afterward with the media. If you think your client’s a fool, then you have no business representing her.
But when a PR is just plain careless or lazy, they’re inept.
A blogger in a niche industry asked my opinion of a situation.
He had requested an interview with a high profile person in the niche industry that he blogs about. The “celeb” had referred his request to her publicist. The publicist told him her client was too busy to interview with him and blew him off.
He wrote something about the celeb anyway … a little humorous banter about a tournament she was playing in.
He learned indirectly that the publicist is quite angry with him, although she has not contacted him.
In this internet age in particular, a PR representing any type of celebrity must be pro-active in managing what’s said. After all, that’s what you’re hired for. If you’re not managing the media contacts on behalf of your client and you don’t like what’s said about your client, then you better raise the bar on your performance.
As far as I’m concerned, this publicist displayed poor manners. If someone is influential enough for the publicist to be concerned with what they write, then nurture the relationship on behalf of your client. If you mistakenly mishandle a media person or blogger in your industry, then amend the blunder with good old fashioned honest communication.
The same holds true, in my estimation, of John McCain’s PR person who cancelled his interview in October with David Letterman. That was a flap of major proportion. Anyone who watches Letterman (as a PR in this position should), would have known the liability of canceling a scheduled interview with him in favor of another. Big mistake. It wasn’t McCain’s place to fix that PR kerfluffle with Letterman … it was the PRs job. And they messed it up pretty badly.
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Why Do You Need PR Online? PR is the New SEO
Posted on December 17, 2008 | Tags: online pr, online public relations
Many of my readers are professionals unfamiliar with the online world. So, for their purposes, I’ll define “SEO.”
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” That means what you have to do to make sure your website is found by the people who are searching for your service or product using a search engine. To “optimize” your site means to make it findable by search engines. Since Google is the most used search engine, they’ve set the standard of optimization.
And that is a short answer to a very involved industry.
Ten years ago all you had to do to get found was mainly have lots of your “keywords” all over you site. This practice was called “keyword density” and it placed more importance on writing web copy for the robots to find your site than copy intended to connect with your visitors.
Today all you hear about is “linking.” In the offline PR world, that’s getting people and media to talk about you. In the online PR world, it’s getting other sites to link to yours using words and phrases that reinforce to Google that your site is actually what you say it is.
Like all tricksters looking for a quick way around something, the quest to get lots of incoming links led to “link exchanging” and link spamming by using software to distribute the same article on multiple article directories so there would be lots of incoming links to your site.
As will happen with any trick that doesn’t serve the market, Google catches on. They caught onto this. Now you really need to have income links that are of high quality. That means authentic articles on sites relevant to yours that are themselves legitimate.
So, Google forces quality. Quality content, quality articles, quality information.
If you approach a website editor to post an a quality article and the site is a suitable fit, the editor will post it and give you links. If you find twenty websites that are naturally relevant to yours to accept authentic articles, what are the chances that those webmasters will all select the exact key phrases to link back to your site? That’s right – slim. Google knows that too, according to James Martell.
I haven’t bought any of James Martell’s courses, but he was part of a small group of speakers and panel members at an internet marketing weekend intensive hosted by Ken McCarthy. James has been earning income online since 1999 and is a publisher who thrives on building websites with quality content.
He stressed that, to succeed in the long run, you needed something authentic and valuable to say and let others know about you so they can talk about you too.
I call those the New Rules of SEO. That’s what a good PR does for a client with offline press. Sounds to me like PR has come of age online.
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What Makes an Expert an Expert?
Posted on December 16, 2008 | Tags: online pr, online public relations, pr, public relations
Coaching and “Mastermind Groups” are all the rage.
Marketing gurus tout “build a list by being an expert.”
That’s fine, IF you happen to have some very valuable expertise.
If someone doesn’t really have anything valuable in an industry to contribute, why should I listen to that person? Won’t that person have to be dishonest to some degree to their customers about their expertise?
I commonly see limited experience being packaged and sold in courses, tapes and coaching.
I’ll give you an example. There’s a speaker on PR who appears at some of the marketing events I attend. He’s an incredible speaker and salesman. He sells a course on “do-it-yourself PR.”
What qualifies him to sell a course on the subject? Many years ago he had a huge success getting media coverage for himself.
Having gotten media coverage for over five hundred different types of subjects, experts and corporations, I’m impressed with how he has packaged his expertise and credentials. Truly impressed.
But I know enough to know that getting PR for yourself … even national attention … doesn’t qualify you to write the definitive manual on it that “anyone can use …” yadayadayayda.
Lesson? Examine the actual track record of whoever is selling you something.
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