February 28, 2010
Five kinds of public relations
I comment about public relations from two different standpoints:
- As a consultant to the technology industry
- As a target of public relations myself
Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.
This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.
There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:
- “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
- “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
- Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
- Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
- Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.