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We can't all have our own PR Shills, so sometimes we need to shill for ourselves. There are actually a host of problems with being your own PR person, but most of them come down to one key fact: you are not a PR person. Generally a PR person is formally trained, in some way, to be the public face of your company. At the very least, a good PR person will spend some time learning from others before they become the face of your organization.
Unfortunately, it's expensive to have a public relations person, even if they aren't full time. So, you need to do the fairly critical job of promoting your company to the world on your own. A big way to do this is to be pushing out press releases. My boss here at Bargainmoose did her own PR, and press releases, for a long time. I got her to give us a little blurb (not unlike a PR person would) on press releases:
From time to time, we would put out a press release for Bargainmoose. We do this whenever we launch a new product or service on our site, or just want to tell people about an achievement. For example, when we launched our Bargainmoose app it reached the top 10 free apps in Canada on iTunes - we thought this was a good enough achievement to write a press release about. Or, when we launched our Boxing Day dashboard collating all the Boxing Day best deals, we put out a press release to try and get a bit of buzz going about it. The aim of press releases - ideally, you want it to be picked up by the main media outlets, be that newspapers or the TV news channels, but that's very hard to achieve. :) You can just be lucky and someone popular will spot it and cover the story.
So, how do you, the hapless business owner, learn to release to the press like a press release pro? Well, starting with a free copy of the Beginner's Guide to Writing Powerful Press Releases from eReleases is not a bad step. The book is by Mickie Kennedy, the founder of eReleases, and contains 160 pages of tips on writing press releases. At the end of the book, there is a coupon code and a chance to get a ten minute consult with Mickie about your PR situation. They also give you the PDFs of what they call "reports" on various PR subjects. Well, there are five "reports" that add up to over 200 more pages of PR goodness, so the bonus material is more than the actual book. Pretty good bonus, if you ask me. The book, were it not free, would retail for $29.
(Expire: Unknown)
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