CHAPTER FOURTEEN

PUBLIC RELATIONS

Man Bites Dog; Man Gets Famous

 

 

Two men walked into a small restaurant in Nebraska. They sat down at the counter and ordered hamburgers. When their check came, one of the men paid it and put money on the counter to pay for everyone else who was eating there that day. The bill came to about $2,000.

When the waitress asked him why he was being so generous, he sheepishly replied that he had just won the lottery. “What lottery?” she wanted to know.

“The Powerball Jackpot,” he said.

“You mean the Powerball Jackpot?” she said. “The one for $365 million?”

He nodded.

People gathered around him. They wanted to know how he had been so lucky. He held up the book he had been carrying. It was called The Attractor Factor. “I owe my success to this,” he said. “I found the winning numbers in the book.”

Local media immediately picked up the story, and then passed it on up the chain until it went nationwide. In each interview and news report, the man talked about The Attractor Factor.

But when lottery officials were finally contacted by fact-checking reporters over the next couple of days, they refuted the man’s claims. He hadn’t won the lottery after all. The entire thing was a hoax. A hoax designed to make The Attractor Factor a nationally recognized title.

The ruse worked, and subsequent news stories continued to talk about the book and its author, a Texan by the name of Joe Vitale. Vitale himself was interviewed several times, and pictures of the book’s cover were included in many of the newspaper articles.

Vitale admitted that he had hired a pair of professional pranksters to pull the hoax. He admitted it was a very unusual way to promote a book. But, he pointed out, it was also very effective. The Attractor Factor was talked about coast-to-coast, and featured by major news outlets such as Good Morning America and the Associated Press. And it became a best-seller.

Vitale’s stunt was outrageous, but it was far from unprecedented. The history of modern public relations (PR) is full of such theatrics. Think of John and Yoko’s sleep-in. Or Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl. Or just about anything that Howard Stern does in public.

Being outrageous (even a little duplicitous at times) is a good, quick way to get on the airwaves. But more traditional PR marketing tactics can work as well.

Of the many channels of marketing, public relations is one that no business should ignore. That’s because it is nearly free (the only costs are the events themselves), and when it works, it can work like wildfire, going from local to regional to national—and even to international audiences—faster than it takes to write up a marketing plan for a conventional advertising campaign.

And because PR is nearly free, it is an ideal channel for small and start-up businesses. Its huge potential, however, makes it a viable option for larger businesses, too—especially those that have big ambitions.

PUBLIC RELATIONS IN ACTION

In our own businesses, we have used public relations campaigns to promote a variety of information products, including books, special events, and seminars.

To boost the sales of Automatic Wealth and Ready, Fire, Aim, for example, our publishing partner, John Wiley & Sons, employed a public relations expert to generate dozens of reviews in magazines and newspapers, in-flight publications, and online business reviews. Both of these books became best-sellers on all the major listing services, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and The New York Times.

We routinely use public relations campaigns to boost attendance at regional seminars and sales events by sending out press releases to local publications.

Daily Reckoning, an Internet-based investment advisory publication, used PR to promote its brand and one of its products, a book titled Empire of Debt. Addison Wiggin, Daily Reckoning’s publisher, accomplished this by producing a documentary film (IOUSA) that premiered to critical acclaim at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

On a smaller scale, to promote his ballroom dance instruction business, Paul Lawrence, an entrepreneur in South Florida, got to know local entertainment reporters and began inviting them to dance events that he hosted. Most declined his invitations at first, but when one reporter did a story on him, the others followed suit. In a few short months, he was featured in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Miami Herald, and several local newspapers. He went from teaching eight lessons a week to over 50.

There are all sorts of clever strategies for getting free publicity for your company and your products. But they are all guided by a few commonsense principles:

UNDERSTAND WHAT THE MEDIA IS LOOKING FOR

You start a new company, launch a new product, hire a new marketing director—but that’s not news. News is “Britney Spears Shaves Her Head” or “Hillary Clinton Throws a Gutter Ball.” It’s pathetic, but that’s news.

It’s unlikely that the media will be interested in any sort of news about your business. Yes, you may be able to get news about your company published in an industry trade journal, but what good is that? Your customers aren’t reading trade journals. They are watching TV and reading USA Today.

So how do you get on television and in the newspapers?

You start by understanding what they are looking for. Generally speaking, they are looking for two things:

• News about subjects their readers are already interested in (i.e., Paris Hilton—not you).

• Captivating and/or curious tidbits to fill in the gaps.

 

It is only into this second category of “news” coverage that you can hope to find a welcome place for your public relations campaigns. Just keep in mind that by taking advantage of America’s obsession with lottery winners, Joe Vitale’s trickery propelled his book into national prominence in a matter of weeks.

So begin with this: What you won’t do. You won’t waste your time and resources sending out press releases to the national media about company news. And if you do announce corporate news in industry periodicals, it will not be with any hope that it will boost your sales.

What you will do is figure out, first and foremost, which news media you want to be in, and then figure out how to create curious and captivating stories that relate to your business.

A GUY IN A WEDDING DRESS

One way to get free publicity is to be totally outrageous. A big, burly guy wearing a wedding dress might fit the bill.

In 1997, Dennis Rodman, the 6-foot-8-inch bad-boy basketball player, wore a wedding dress (and blond wig) to a book signing at a New York bookstore to promote his autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. Did we mention he arrived at the signing in a horse-drawn carriage? Pictures of Rodman flooded national and international news outlets and helped fuel book sales.

WHICH NEWS MEDIA DO YOU WANT TO BE IN?

Ask 10 entrepreneurs which news media they want to be in, and nine will give you the same answer: “That’s easy. I want the major media—the biggest newspapers and television news programs.”

Trouble is, the national news media are not going to run “news” about your company. And they have reams of curious and captivating filler stories already. They don’t need the story you will send them. The chances of having them pick it up are slim to none.

You have a much better chance with local or specialized media (both television and printed publications). They favor local and specialized coverage, and if your story is good enough, they might run it.

When you get some local coverage, you can hope to see it extend itself naturally. The regional media look to local media for human-interest stories. And the national media look to regional coverage for the same. A good illustration of how a good local story can organically expand is the story of Alex Tew, a once-struggling college student from the United Kingdom.

Tew was having trouble paying his college tuition bill when he thought of a novel solution. Sell ad space on a web site for $1 per pixel, in bundles of 10. His goal was to sell $1 million worth of space. MillionDollarHomepage.com took 48 hours to build, and Tew started selling ads on it immediately.

Family and friends were his first customers, attracted by a sales letter he sent to everyone on his personal e-mail contact list. Then he sent a press release to local media. Those stories generated more visits to his site and more orders for ad space. He sent out more press releases and media coverage increased.

Soon the story was national and then international. Within a month, Tew sold $40,000 worth of ads. Five months in, he had sold enough ads to individuals and businesses around the world to reach his million-dollar goal.

Tew had not only made more than enough money to pay for college, he had learned a valuable lesson about unconventional PR.

FIGURE OUT HOW YOUR COMPANY OR PRODUCT CAN MEET THAT DEMAND

To figure out how to create successful stories, you have to know the media you want to reach and understand what kind of stories their audience delights in. That’s actually pretty simple to do. Just see what they have used in the past.

If you want your story to be picked up by USA Today, for example, you might consider coming up with one that ties into a current trend. If you study USA Today, you will see that most of the smaller, human-interest stories are angled that way. The editors at USA Today know what they are doing. They can’t compete with The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal in terms of serious news, but they tend to overtake them when it comes to social fads of almost every type. In the health area, for example, USA Today keeps tabs on all the trendy diet and exercise programs. They don’t care so much about the scientific import of diet and exercise, but they do care about the kind of diet and exercise that’s growing in popularity.

If your media target is specialized periodicals—maybe about golf or electronics or office furniture—you will have to study the best-read publications that go to the consumer you are trying to reach. If one of those publications likes to run stories about industry statistics, for example, you could do your own industry study and tie that into your product in some creative way. The study needn’t be exhaustive in terms of research. Such publications are seldom as concerned with the quality of the research as they are with the interest it will create with their readers.

So it’s very important to target your press releases to the specific publications and media outlets whose audiences you want to reach. Rather than sending out 1,000 general press releases about a story that has general appeal, it’s much more effective to send out a dozen or so targeted press releases containing stories that are exactly right for the intended consumers.

And while we’re on the subject of targeting your press releases, let’s observe a parallel truth about successful publicity today: Sending your releases to an individualized list of 100 people with whom you have talked or corresponded is infinitely more effective than buying a list of 10,000 people who don’t know you from a hole in the ground.

Public relations today, like marketing and advertising, is much more effective when it’s done with intelligence, personalization, and individualization.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE INTERNET

The rise of Internet communications has changed much of the world of marketing, advertising, and public relations. The fundamental rules of selling still apply, but many of the rules of marketing and PR are different now, because of all the ways there are to reach consumers online.

When President Clinton entered the White House in 1993, there were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web.¹ Today, there are hundreds of millions. What that means, in terms of public relations, is that there are literally millions of ways to promote your company and product for free!

As David Meerman Scott points out in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, old-fashioned press releases issued impersonally to large lists of PR agencies—in print and online—are much less effective today than they were in the past. The omnipresence of blogs and web sites and e-zines has made it much, much easier for information providers to locate and distribute interesting stories to their audiences. People in charge of deciding which stories get published and which don’t are deluged with impersonal press releases. They just don’t have the time to review them—or the need to.

Scott says that, as a contributing editor at EContent magazine, he receives hundreds of broadcast e-mail press releases each week from “well-meaning PR people who want me to write about their widgets.” But in five years of working there, he has never published a single one. “I’m not the only one who doesn’t use unsolicited press releases,” Scott says. “I think about a subject that I want to cover in a column or an article and I check out what I can find on blogs and through search engines. If I find a press release on the subject through Google News or a company’s online media room, great. But I don’t wait for press releases to come to me. Rather, I go looking for interesting topics, products, people, and companies. And when I do feel ready to write a story, I might try out a concept on my blog first, to see how it flies. Does anyone comment on it? Do any PR people e-mail me?”²

Essentially, the new rules of Internet publicity are the same as the new rules of print and media publicity:

• Target a very specific audience.

• Find out exactly what kinds of stories they enjoy.

• Create a story that they might be interested in.

• Tie that story to your product in a clever way.

• Develop a list of personal PR contacts.

• Focus 80 percent of your energy and resources on the 20 percent of the media market that you know well, especially the people in the business who know you and are likely to help you.

 

And finally, if you have it in you, put on a wedding dress and get yourself photographed.