Public Relations

I am reviewing the book Brilliant P R which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. P R stands for public relations & I probably know quite a lot about this topic so didn't find that much new information. The book is only around 150 pages although the information is quite succinct. This book is part of the brilliant series which covers all the essential business skills. The book does advise that you develop relationships with journalists but don't expect them to publish a weak story about your product as a favor. At the end of the day there goal is to sell papers or magazines. Also unless you are a multinational giant of a company you will probably have to settle for coverage in local press and radio. You should obviously market your product on social media & there is an interesting example of P R at work. A couple in Britain fed up with the X Factor winner each year claiming the Christmas no 1 spot each year launched a campaign to get a single by Rage Against The Machine to the top spot instead. The campaign was mostly run on Facebook and did indeed get Rage Against The Machine to no 1. It's a good idea to have a blog separate from the business website that can have a link to the latter. Another trend is having several micro-sites which direct people to the main site. This can be combined with buying domain names similar to yours and if someone types one of these they are taken to your home page. Also focus on getting good quality links to your website and get satisfied customers to give you testimonials and bear in mind too many testimonials on a website actually puts people off ordering. Just display a few. A final item is if you are promoting a company you need to know that company inside out especially if you advertise on social media where you may have to deal with unhappy customers. I did quite enjoy reading this book.