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Max from Yabbyland sent me over a link to this great article about public relations. He also mentioned it in one of his blog entries.

Quote:’Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR. At a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization: instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.’

I spend a lot of my time putting out posters to advertise BetterEdit. I choose this method because it consistently brings in results and it has very good ROI (return on investment). Posters only cost a few cents each and the time and energy to put them up. Max keeps reminding me that I need to factor in my opportunity cost for putting these posters up, or at least calculate an hourly fee to account for my labour. If you look at it that way I perhaps should be investigating in other means to advertise, or at least look to hire someone to poster for me (I’m doing both these things, just not very quickly). I find campus postering is also a good way to get out and away from the computer so I partly do it for the exercise as well.

I’ve always known PR and news in general is a great tool for marketing a business. Reading the eBay story and Napster story reinforced this concept since both companies benefited the most from press coverage more than any other form of marketing. Richard Branson’s antics again show how important it is to have the press spread the word for you (Richard Branson, the brand, is powerful). Even I have used PR a little in the past by getting a couple of articles in local newspapers published which brought in clients and cost me nothing but time to arrange.

I should thank Max again for pointing out that article. It’s reminded me how powerful the media can be. I’ve started to make queries into learning more about the PR industry and make some contacts with some local PR people and firms. Perhaps it’s a waste of time spending an advertising budget on traditional forms of advertising. They just don’t compare to what some good PR can do for you. Even if the PR is sensationalistic and negative it can often achieve results simply by turning the eyeballs to your website and creating awareness.

A news story isn’t perceived by the public as an advertisement. It’s read as content, something of interest, not a sales pitch. An advertisement evokes a knee-jerk repulsion reaction in the mind of the consumer just like you feel whenever a salesman calls you on the phone. A sales pitch is annoying. A news story is interesting. They both may be aiming to achieve the same thing, create awareness of a business, but the public reaction can be quite different.

Due to the current trend of using blogs as content and news resources the PR industry is changing. It’s conceivable that you can manipulate the blogosphere as your PR channel of distribution. Blogs certainly are not looked upon as advertisements. In fact they are even further removed from advertising than normal magazine or newspaper articles are. An article in a magazine is news. An article in a blog is a personal recommendation by the author. It may well be that tomorrows media is driven entirely by the blogosphere and public relations will be about convincing enough bloggers to write about your story and your business.

Yaro Starak
Blogpreneur