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. 

Public Relations

The book I read to research this post was Public Relations For Dummies by Eric Yaverbaum which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Katherine Hepburn once said she doesn't mind what the newspapers say about her as long as it's true. A lot of Public Relations is about being true and sincere. A big corporation might have billions of dollars to spend on Public Relations including tv campaigns and advertising in the tabloid newspapers. A small company can compete with a big company without spending anything like their amount on advertising. They can use social media where a lot of customers can be obtained for little outlay. If you run a small company you might want to handle Public Relations yourself rather than bring in a PR Agency. If you are tempted to bring in a PR Agency consider how important your companies account is to them. If they are a corporate PR Agency and you account for 0.01% of their business they are unlikely to pay much attention to promoting your company. Also ask to see previous work by the agency and compare what they told other companies they could achieve with what was actually achieved. You may find that rather than paying for advertising you can get stories out like a product launch which will still get coverage in media like magazines and newspapers and for free. Whatever you do if their is a crisis, don't bury your head in the sand, answer it and do it politely. Obviously if someone is really irate about your product offer to discuss it away from prying eyes, either by phone or email etc. This book also looks at promoting your product using podcasts and blogging etc. Another thing you ought to look into is social bookmarking with sites Technorati which can send you a lot of traffic. I did really enjoy this book which is also on quite an interesting subject.