Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Andreea Ayers founded LaunchGrowJoy.com in 2011 after selling a successful t-shirt business, and realised she had plenty to share in terms of selling products successfully online. Her blog focuses on her experience with ecommerce and selling online, moving into PR and teaching product entrepreneurs how to get their products featured in print media and on influential blogs.

Andreea has some tried-and-true strategies for building a buzz around your blog or business through media promotion, both traditional and online. She walks the talk, with her blog being featured in more than 500 media outlets since she started five years ago.

I asked her what her non-negotiables are when it comes to seeking publicity as a solo blogger or entrepreneur....

Apparently, there are 4.6 of you for every one of me, and yet most of the time, I can’t get a call back from a communications person to save my life.

I am a newspaper reporter who covers county government, but my paper is fairly loose with beat restrictions, so I also write about a lot of random things that interest me (recent examples: the plight of the public-health dentist, employee retention rates in law enforcement).

Writing outside of my beat requires that I spend a healthy chunk of my daily reporting life reaching out to PR pros, the vast – vast – majority of whom refuse to communicate with me.  

It happens often enough that I cringe when I have to contact a rep I don’t know, because it almost always results in me sitting at my desk moaning, “But I’m a nice person!” while staring at the phone and hitting refresh on my inbox. (You may notice those two stories above do not quote a representative from a state or national agency. This is not for lack of trying.)...

In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.

We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....

The question he feared most looked something like this:

“What would you say to one of your customers who purchased one of your older—and therefore less safe—products?”
To help the executive develop an answer, I asked whether he viewed the older products as unsafe. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Best in the marketplace. But the new ones are even safer.”

Based on his response, I immediately categorized the question as a “false frame” question, because it contained a logical-sounding but incorrect assumption. The question’s frame was wrong, meaning we’d have to create a new and more accurate one.

To do that, I advised him to quickly rebut the false frame and then immediately make a positive and confident case that looked something like this...

It was unbelievable news. And reporters shouldn’t have believed it.It turns out that the Institute of Diet and Health is just a Web site with no institute attached.

Johannes Bohannon, health researcher and lead author of the study, is really John Bohannon, a science journalist. And the study, while based on real results of an actual clinical trial, wasn’t aimed at testing the health benefits of chocolate. It was aimed at testing health reporters, to see if they could distinguish a bad science story from a good one.In many cases, they couldn’t....

Words are hard.

Whether you're a published author or just getting started with blogging, it's not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write -- and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It's just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing. 

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section....

You’ve just delivered the perfect media response. Your answer is on message and perfectly quotable. It will accomplish everything you had hoped.

Then…you say more.

It pains me to see an answer that was brilliant in its first 15 seconds become diluted when it lasts for another minute. An extended answer also risks introducing secondary and tertiary points that offer reporters the ability to quote something relatively unimportant. And sometimes, those unnecessarily long answers lead to a “seven-second stray,” an off-message line that becomes your only quote from the interview.

When I see our trainees deliver a great answer—and then keep going—I tell them this: “When you score a touchdown, get off the field!”...

The prevailing wisdom in PR has been that you should keep hammering away at the key messages you're trying to get across in a media interview, no matter what.Is the reporter asking you a completely unrelated question? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.

Do they want to speak to you about an issue or topic your key messages don't even cover? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.Is the interview a fairly relaxed conversation about your company's strategy, rather than a reputation-destroying crisis?

One size fits all—just repeat your key message.If you do this enough, this line of PR thinking goes, your points will stick and the reporter will repeat them. The industry even gave this approach a name of its very own: "block (the reporter's actual question) and bridge (to your key message)."

Great—except it rarely works....

We suppose it is possible for the Department of State to screw up the handling of questions about whether they lied to reporters even worse — but it is hard to figure out how.

The video below from CNN’s Jake Tapper today nicely lays out the series of offenses — but here is our quick summary:

In February 2013 Fox News correspondent James Rosen asked then State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland if there had been direct talks between the U.S. and Iran.  She essentially said “NO.”

In December 2013, Rosen points out to Nuland’s successor Jen Psaki that the correct answer would have been “YES” and asked if State routinely lied to reporters when they found it convenient. Psaki with a smirk said there are times when diplomacy needs privacy to succeed. (Translation: yes, we lied)....

Plus, if you haven’t got the time to read articles or watch videos during your busy day, podcasts are extremely accessible – listen during your commute, or even on the treadmill. And get this: according to Edison Research, people who listen to audio listen to podcasts almost as much as they listen to the radio.

But why is podcasting important to PR and marketing professionals? Besides the wealth of knowledge it can provide us on a daily basis, its a piece of content marketing we can use to reach our audiences: 67 percent of podcast listeners don’t mind sponsorship messages and occasionally find them useful, compare to 6 percent of TV or radio listeners.

So, if you’re looking to get a daily dose of valuable info from the experts or get inspiration for starting a podcast of your own, here’s our top 50, ranked in order of Twitter followers...

"PR is an insanely valuable activity in early-stage companies," wrote venture capitalist Mark Suster on his popular blog for startups.

The problem is that most companies focused on growth are almost allergic to public relations: It takes a ton of time, it doesn't easily lend itself to metrics, and the people who work in PR are often big picture, strategic—or, if you'd rather, "fuzzy"—thinkers.

In other words, PR people don't fit easily into the world of the bootstrapped or venture-backed growth company.

Yet, founders and investors alike will acknowledge that a company's perceived lack of credibility is one of the silent killers of great sales opportunities: Big potential clients can circle and circle, but they are famously risk-averse. In this era of transparency, social proof, and infinite-pages-on-Forbes, a company that doesn't have great coverage or exposure is almost questionable—and that's enough to kill big deals.