Customer and Client Relations

Five Things Every Small Business Should Know About Public Relations

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are great, but the basics of public relations remain. You still need coherent messages, valuable networks and great stories. Here are five must-haves for successful PR.

Write Well. All the tools in the world won't help if nobody reads your tweets, posts, pitches or press releases. Josh Ochs, a social media guru in Los Angeles, says, "Great messaging is the key to everything on Facebook and twitter. The more time you spend perfecting your messaging in social media, the more you will make friends and make money." He suggests creating all messaging in a tone that is "light, bright and polite."

Bonus tip: when pitching a story, aim for the "Wow" factor. I just placed a nice feature about a litigation attorney who represents major banks in class action defense. It was a dull story until I mentioned her hobby, collecting Buddhas from around the world. Stress at work, Zen at home. Think about what makes your story or business unique to others.

Network. Press the Flesh. Meet customers. Meet media. Meet friends. Check out your competition. No one exemplifies this better than Bob Gold, a public relations pro from Torrance, Calif. He speaks at or attends more than six major shows in his specialty, technology and cable TV, with appearances at the Consumer Electronics Show, Cable and Television Association for Marketing, the National Association of Broadcasters and more. At the Digital Hollywood event in May in Los Angeles, Gold created a super-panel of speakers including someone from Google, and lined up a prestigious moderator's gig, increasing his profile in front of important business contacts.

Learn the Tools. Eric Schwartzman, author and social networking expert, follows the latest research and learns quickly. A Gartner Research study found 80% of smart phone users are using purchasing decisions within a 10-20 mile radius of their location. Schwartzman suggests capitalizing on this by telling entpreneurs "You need to register your biz with Google Places, Bing Local, and Yahoo Local and you should also register with paid services like Universal Business Listings and LocalEze." And don't forget Yelp! Stay local, stay relevant and keep digitally connected with your market. Bonus tip: If you're going to plunge into Twitter and Facebook to reach customers, learn some strategies. Andreas Ramos, Director of Global Consulting at Acxiom, recommends only 2 books: "Social Media Marketing" by Liana Evans and "Inbound Marketing" by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. "Quick reads, very relevant," Ramos says.

Bonus tip: Drive editorial coverage before the events. Gold suggests obtaining the media list in advance and pitching reporters and setting up meetings before the show.

Make Friends with Media. Always return calls, always help with reporters on deadline, even if you can’t be quoted, consider helping with background or “off-the-record” assistance. My clients who are quick and helpful in this manner always seem to get chosen for “Top 100 Attorneys” or “Best Business Schools” or earn feature stories in the future. Those that don’t help the media usually get left behind.

Pick up the phone. A great way to start a grassroots movement is via phone calls. Don’t assume your clients or the media looks at every email. Do you? Probably not. Josh Ochs provides a good example on how to fill seats for his social media boot camps. “We start with personal phone calls to our best customers and ask them to retweet or post our event on their Facebook wall. We follow up with a quick email to each individual customer with the exact messaging we want them to share. This quickly drives a small movement that is seen by thousands of people at the same time and is extremely effective.”

Article Source: www.forbes.com

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