Defining Good PR Strategy

There has been a lot of discussion recently in both the traditional media and the blogosphere about corporate blogging. I’d like to talk a bit about how blogging fits, and doesn’t fit, into corporate communications and public relations strategy.

Before we can do that, however, we need to define a sound communications strategy. Caveat emptor: my professional experience has mostly been with technology companies, so this discussion may be more relevant to that arena. Nevertheless, I think the four principals I’m going to put forward can be applied pretty broadly.

First Principal: The audience isn’t stupid; don’t make the mistake of thinking they are.

PR can’t help you if your products are awful, poorly positioned or don’t meet market needs. Don’t waste your time or money on PR until you’ve fixed the product and your business. Seems self-evident but there are a lot of folks in this world who think you can fool reporters. You never could, and in this day of grassroots journalism, everyone’s a reporter. It has never been more true: you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Second Principal: In a nutshell, a good PR strategy focuses on finding out what reporters want/need to know and fitting in with the news of the moment if you can. It is NOT about flogging your products and multi-page press releases that cover every last feature.

Don’t confuse PR with promotion or publicity. You can do those too. Public Relations is something different, and you need to do PR right.

The first step to doing it right? Understanding that nobody but you really cares about your product in and of itself. Not even your customer. Your customer has a problem to be solved or a desire to be satisfied. Your product or service is only valuable to her in as much as it solves the problem or scratches the itch.

The media is a conduit to your customer, so reporters will care about the same exact things your prospects do. Problems. Issues. Desire. Needs. Not products.

So, be smart. Don’t try to engage reporters about the newest product features or your great new pricing strategy. Instead seek to understand what their problems are, what stories they are interested in or writing, what trends they are following. And if your product fits the story or you have data that informs the trend, tell them about it. By all means, talk about your product or service when it is relevant to the reporter’s inquiry. Create material that will interest reporters. But stay in the context of the reporter’s inquiry and interests. Don’t waste your time trying to jam your product features into his story. He won’t write about it if it doesn’t fit, and you waste the opportunity to build a good relationship with a journalist.

Third Principal: Invest in a good PR person. If you can afford it, get BOTH a good agency and hire an in-house person focused on corp comm. If you have to make a choice, start with the agency and add in-house resources as you grow.

Why agency first? Three reasons. First, you get access to a depth of resources that you probably can’t afford to bring in-house, at least in the early days. Second, agency staff are talking to reporters all the time, for both you and other clients. A story opportunity for you could come up during a conversation about another client, just as a by-product of a conversation. Finally (and obviously): you can control your costs, dialing up the spend as you grow.

Don’t assume you have to have a big name agency. There are scores of small boutique agencies that have terrific media relationships. I have always found it better to be the big fish in the small pond than the small fish in the big one.

Fourth Principal: Never forget that you are doing PR to get the word out about your products to the audiences that might buy them. Don’t get seduced by the number of website pick-ups or column inches you got. Measure your results, but measure the right things.

Evaluate your PR strategy, and your PR team, on how well they get the word out in the media vehicles that matter to your audiences. It might be The New York Times. But it might just as easily be a blog or an industry newsletter.

Stay focused always on your marketing strategy and the results. When I worked for a software company that offered a free trial download, we always saw a spike in downloads after a flurry of stories that mentioned our products, even when the mention was simply in passing.

Next post: We’ll delve into how blogging fits into our good PR strategy.