THE 10-MINUTE PR CHECKLIST
Earn the Publicity You Deserve
Copyright 2011 Mark Coker
Smashwords Edition
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to my many former Dovetail Public Relations clients for contributing to my knowledge and appreciation for this magic we call public relations. Thanks to Gene Grossman of Magic Lamp Press for contributing copy editing to this book. Nikolai Shevchuk contributed additional copy editing. Cover design by Joleene Naylor.
PART TWO – UNCOVERING TACTICAL OPPORTUNITIES
Application Stories and Customer Case Studies
Blogger and Columnist Campaigns
Speaking Engagements at Industry Conferences
Trade Shows and Booth Meetings
Join HARO, Help-A-Reporter-Online
INTRODUCTION
PR represents your lowest cost, highest impact marketing and communications tool. Is your business taking full advantage of PR?
THE 10 MINUTE PR CHECKLIST offers entrepreneurs, PR managers, marketing executives and CEOs a short, simple checklist to help you take full advantage of all available publicity opportunities.
Learn how to…
* Promote your company, people, products and services
* Earn more press coverage
* Earn more positive press coverage
* Leverage PR as a tool to achieve virtually any business objective
* Improve your existing PR efforts
Even if you already have an in-house PR team or an external PR agency, this checklist will show you how to maximize the results of their efforts.
Are you pursuing all your available publicity opportunities? Are you missing the high-impact, low-hanging fruit? Does your PR convey the proper attitude and responsiveness to the media? Are you undermining your own success?
Because your business is ever-changing, THE 10-MINUTE PR CHECKLIST will inspire new ideas each time you read it. Refer to this ebook often as a brainstorming and auditing tool. You’ll discover new ideas to get out there and celebrate the great things you’re doing at your company.
Few companies take full advantage of the PR opportunities available to them. Do you ever wonder why some of your competitors soak up all the attention from newspapers, magazines, broadcast television and blogs? What are they doing that you’re not doing? Their products, services and people are no better than your own.
The answer: They’re probably running a more proactive, more creative media relations program. Great press coverage doesn’t just happen. It’s earned with proactive effort.
Whether you’re the founder of a garage startup or the CEO of a billion dollar publicly-traded company, this checklist will help catalyze your PR efforts.
WHY DOES PR MATTER? Public relations is all about communication. It’s about controlling awareness and perception. Numerous distinct groups of individuals have the power to nourish or destroy your company. Each group makes decisions based on information. Where do most people receive their information? From the media - or from people who received their information from the media. If you want to influence what people know or think about you and your company, and if you want to drive positive, viral word-of-mouth, you must work with media.
At a basic level, “media” is simply the substrate upon which a message is carried or conveyed. The tongue of your customer, though word-of-mouth, is media. The skin that carries a tattoo is media.
In recent years, the definition of media has broadened, and this presents new opportunities for message delivery. Today it’s not just about working with reporters at the major magazines. Media has gone social. In addition to traditional media, you must also now contend with bloggers, customers, prospective customers, competitors and partners, most of whom participate in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. These social media participants have the power to spread your message.
This checklist won’t teach you how to tweet on Twitter or write a blog. There are dozens of other books that will help you there. THE 10-MINUTE PR CHECKLIST focuses on proven media relations best-practices that will serve you well for years to come across all current and future media outlets.
In this checklist, I’ll draw upon my twenty-plus years experience as an entrepreneur and a strategic communications consultant. I’ve placed my former clients in nearly every major print, radio and broadcast media. I’ve helped build great companies with the catalyst of great PR.
As the founder and CEO of my own startups (BestCalls.com in the late ‘90s and Smashwords today), I’ve personally put my rules to use with great effect. I’ve appeared in numerous media stories in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Wired Magazine, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and others. I’ve experienced firsthand the awe-inspiring power of the press. I want to help you experience it as well.
You can achieve better PR, and it doesn’t require a million dollar PR budget. It all starts with a good story and a solid understanding of how to leverage PR as a tool to achieve your business objective.
PART ONE
THE
SELF-AUDIT
As you review your existing PR program, ask yourself how you can improve in the following areas:
Accessibility: If a reporter clicks to your web site, how many clicks does it take for them to locate a direct email address or phone number for your PR department, or for your authorized PR agency? If they send an email or make a call, will they reach a live person who has the ability to put the right person on the phone?
Responsiveness: When a reporter contacts you, nine times out of ten they’re on deadline. They have a hole to fill in their story, and if you can’t quickly fill it they’ll find someone else. Even worse, if the story is about your company and you don’t respond in time, the reporter will find someone else to tell your story. You NEVER want another party defining your company unless the other party has been vetted by your PR team. Whenever possible, you want to deliver your own message. If a reporter calls during normal business hours, they should always reach a live person who can gather the necessary information (who’s calling, the name of the publication, the reporter’s deadline, the information/spokesperson required) to help connect the reporter with the proper person. Emails to your PR department should be answered in 60 minutes or less. Do you have a weekend phone or email hotline for emergencies?
Attitude: There are two common approaches among PR departments. One is the protective gatekeeper, and the other is the friendly facilitator. If the protective gatekeeper describes the attitude within your company, then you have a serious problem. The gatekeeper mentality yields negative press coverage. These are the PR people who are standoffish to the media, mistrustful, slow to respond, prone to ignore press inquiries, and overly tight-lipped. If you have these people on your team, change their attitude or get rid of them. The friendly facilitator attitude yields the most positive press and builds the best relationships with the media. In instances where negative press is possible, the friendly facilitator mitigates or eliminates the damage. When a reporter speaks with a company practicing the friendly facilitator attitude, they feel warmth, respect and appreciation from the company. Remember, reporters are human, and if they like you they’ll want to help you.
Is your PR proactive?: Do you have a proactive PR program in place? Do you only contact reporters when you have news, or do you seek to develop conversations and relationships outside of news announcements? Do you issue press releases? When you issue a press release, do you conduct advance pre-briefings? Do you contact reporters about the news, or do you wait for them to contact you? Do you carefully tailor your pitch to meet the exact needs of each reporter and their audience, or is your pitch the same for everyone? If you or your team are not proactively reaching out to engage the media in conversations and build real relationships, then your program isn’t proactive.
Honesty: Do you have people on your PR or marketing team that lie to the media? Fire them. Trust is sacred. Never allow anyone within your company to lie to the media. If you ever betray the trust of a reporter, not only will you receive (and deserve) negative press coverage, you’ll also lose out on a future annuity stream of positive PR opportunities. A 100% honesty policy still gives you the ability to manage your message, accentuate the positive, and respond to the most difficult questions. In my entire career, I’ve never witnessed a single instance where dishonesty was appropriate. Yet all too often, bad or lazy PR people reach for the lie first. If you have bad news, be the first to tell it. Acknowledge it, articulate your plan forward, put it behind you, and make it a non-story.
Without a plan, your PR effort is flapping in the wind.
Good PR planning is a process of reverse engineering. It starts with imagination.
Imagine and identify where your business needs to go (business objectives), and then identify the necessary marketplace behavior among your core constituents (customers, prospects, partners, competitors, facilitators) that gets you there, then identify the messages they need to receive to prompt and reinforce such behavior, then identify the PR strategies and tactics that will deliver the messages. A good PR plan will articulate:
1. Long term business objectives, looking out at least five years
2. Marketplace behavior necessary to achieve these objectives
3. Awareness and perception necessary to motivate proper marketplace behavior
4. Messages necessary to create the desired perception
5. PR strategy and tactics to deliver those messages to customers and partners
6. Short-term tactical calendar to guide daily execution of your proactive PR program
7. Micro-plans for individual business units, distribution channels, or vertical markets
Does your company convey a compelling long-term vision for where you think the world is going, and how you plan to take your customers and partners there? Is this vision reinforced by all your internal and outbound communications? Do you regularly communicate how your initiatives and accomplishments tie back into your long-term vision?
Gartner Group, an industry analyst firm focused on technology, has long promoted what they call their Magic Quadrant, where they rank peer companies against one another on both vision and ability to execute. The Magic Quadrant concept is probably the single most powerful guide for how to run a strategic communications program because it models how the human mind compartmentalizes your company vs. its competitors. It’s ultimately a measure of trust and confidence.
Ability to Execute is on the vertical axis of the chart, and Completeness of Vision is on the horizontal axis. Within such a model, you always want to work toward a perception that places you in the upper right corner of the quadrant, ahead of your peers. You don’t need to be a technology company to benefit from this simple yet powerful model of perception.
Consider how your company’s every communicated action influences your standing on the chart above. If your communications don’t assist your climb up and to the right, then rethink your communications.
When customers partner with your company, they want to know they’re hitching their wagon to a healthy horse, and they want to know that the horse has a clear vision for where it’s headed.