Setting up a Shingle

I’ve written before about the hit that marketing, advetising, and public relations takes during a recession. I serve on the Board for PRSA-MD, and half of the Board members have gotten laid off this year. This statistic is also high for our members. With a plethora of talented advertising, marketing, and public relations professionals glutting the workforce, hitting up against a limited number of available jobs, particularly for senior-level professionals, it’s no wonder that more and more advertising, marketing, and public relations mavens are deciding to set up shop on their own.

Some advice:

Find your niche. Have you dealt with alot of restaurants? Maybe a larger percentage of your past work has been with automotive? Do you have alot of experience planning large events? Small events? Whatever it is, find your niche, and market it. Just like any large company, you need to differentiate yourself from all the other sole practitioners out there.

Professionalism. Answer voicemails and e-mails promptly. Put together a slick Web site. Have business cards made up. From day one, put your best foot forward - after all, in this industry, more than any other (other than the straight beauty industry), impressions have a huge impact.

Hit up your contacts. Hey, it can’t hurt, and it may even help. Get the word out that you’re providing your considerable knowledge and experience under your own name. You never know who knows who, or who has heard of what opportunity.

Network. Join a professional group, join a local networking group, attend career educational events. Come armed with business cards.

Elevator speech. Have your standard ‘elevator speech’ - a one or two sentence description of what your company does, and why you do it better than anyone else - down pat.

Essentially, start out with how you want to finish. Take the time to put together a business plan - it will guide all your decisions.

Good luck!

Social Media Guidelines

We’ve all heard about the companies whose social media policies reek of Big Brother - no blogging, tweeting, posting, e-mailing about the companies, its clients, or its products. The most recent induction into this group is ESPN.

ESPN recently established new social media guidelines, outlining that their employees are banned from discussing anything related to ESPN or sports on any social network. While companies do need to be aware of the legal risks their social-media-involved employees invite, broad-sweeping policies like ESPN’s are more often than not considered detrimental.

Banning employees from talking about ESPN or sports is harmful for employee moral and it hinders employee professional growth. Looking at the bigger picture, restrictive social guidelines hinder the company from benefiting from all that social media has to offer. They can’t use it to promote themselves or their product, develop relationships, or invite feedback or ideas.

While putting social media guidelines in place is a necessity today, it is important to weigh the pros and cons of these tools when determining how strict those guidelines should be.

How to Pitch Your Story

Check out the post I wrote on PRSA-MD’s Chesapeake Conference page on this topic (repeated below).

A successful pitch is the key to any public relations effort. After all, your goal is to receive free publicity for your client, product, or company. To do so, you need to be a pitch master.

Below are some tips on how to provide a successful pitch. However, if you want to practice your pitching skills, be sure to attend the Chesapeake Conference. This year, the Chesapeake Conference will feature a Speed Pitching session.

What is that, you ask? Well, it is an awesome opportunity for Conference attendees to ‘test out’ their best pitches on real, live journalists and receive feedback (and maybe even a story!).  Each pitcher is given 10 minutes with the journalist of their choice; this gives you time to present your pitch, and receive feedback.

Here are some pitching tips to help ensure your pitch is a success:

Frankly, be prepared. Have your story set, your ‘elevator speech’, if you will. Since you won’t have much time, know the main selling points, and have them up front and center as part of your pitch. Though it may not be needed, be sure to have back-up facts, or any additional material, handy (especially facts and figures).

Have a press release ready. Don’t rely on a phone conversation alone – not only may you not be able to get one, but you want your targeted journalist to have all the information possible. Plus, the release is a handy way for them to find your contact info, or more info about your client, product, or company than you were able to get out ‘in person’.

Research the reporter and his/her beat. Be sure to look through recent articles/stories by that journalist, to ensure you’re not giving ‘old news’. If it does sound a bit like a repeat, is there any way you  can provide a new angle? Plus, you don’t want to pitch a travel client’s success story to a courtroom journalist – it’s not a good fit.

Follow-up. Be patient, be considerate, yet be a bit persistent. Follow-up with a voicemail or e-mail, possibly with a resent of your press release.

To put these tips into action, attend the 2009 PRSA-MD Chesapeake Conference and take part in the Speed Pitching session. What other time do you receive a reporter’s undivided attention, along with their candor on how to make your pitch better so it is deemed more newsworthy? I haven’t come across such a time – if you have, please let me know!

This year, the journalists participating in our Speed Pitching session are:

• Rob Terry, The Baltmore Business Journal
• Liz Farmer, The Daily Record
• Dave McHugh, WMAR, producer of “Good Morning Maryland”

We are adding new pitchees daily, so check back often!

For more info on how to successfully pitch your story, check out these additional resources:
How to Pitch Stories for Media Placement�
How to Pitch Stories Like a Journalist
How to Pitch a Story to the Media

Legal Risks of Social Media

The Twittering of President Obama’s off-the-record comments regarding Kanye West’s performance at the VMAs may hit home to many of us the unforeseen ramifications of the Big Brother, 360-degree ramifications of the social media world we live in.

It’s time we adress some of the legal risks of social media.

Employees’ Tweets and posts about your company, your product(s), your clients, and your employees. That’s right - even if you’re unaware of what they’re saying, or even of whether they’re saying anything at all, your company may be held liable. Let’s say you send samples of your product to your ad agency, or friends, and ask them to send messages out to all their contacts about how great it is. Well, their e-mails and social-networking messages may be subject to the federal law regarding sending unsolicited commercial e-mail.  

Free swag to bloggers and the like. Yes, it’s an awesome idea (and time-honored) to send free swag to people with the wherewithal to then proclaim about the goodness of said product to their readership. However, bloggers and other social media users need to follow the rules as well - the FTC requires that they disclose the free swag.

Not telling the truth. Just as making up testimonials is not only morally wrong but also illegal, so is making up positive reviews, posts, blogs, and the like and attributing them to fake customers. In fact, per the FTC, it’s illegal for an employee to endorse its own company’s product on a message board without disclosing that he/she works for the company.

Now, you don’t want to go off the deep end and ban your employees from using ALL social media to talk about your company, employees, or clients ALL the time. Rather, you need to take some control. A solution? A social media policy. Not only does it begin to address this gray area, but it also could give you some legal legs to stand on.

Advertising in a Recession

It seems that when a recession arrives, the first things to go are marketing, advertising, and public relations: the staff, the budget, the strategy. However, this is probably the worst move a company can make in a down economy.

This is proven fact. The companies who continued to advertise during the 1980 to 1985 recession had a 256% growth by recession end over their competitors that had stopped or decreased ad spending, per a study by McGraw-Hill Research.

By ’staying in the game,’ you’ll be the lone gunman, so to speak. You’ll be the voice the customer sees, versus your competitors, who have all stopped advertising. Talk about cutting through the clutter!

Plus, not only will you be able to attract more customers by 1) being the only ones advertising and 2) offering them deals, but you’ll also be able to get some deals yourself on ad spending. When no one else is doing spending ad money, the radio stations, TV stations, and print publications cut their costs in the hope of attracting customers - you.

Don’t fall victim to the lure of saving money by cutting your marketing, public relations, and advertising budgets. Rather, keep that budget in place, and actually earn more money - and  more long-term customers - for your business by keeping your brand in the forefront of your customers’ mind.

School Starts

No matter how old we get or how many years separate us from the last time we sat in a classroom, the fall always seems to bring the promise of a new start. New learning, new opportunities, new commitments, or even recommitments.

September rolls around, we put away the barbeque after Labor Day, and we seem to buckle down into work, refocus, and recommit to our job and whatever projects we’re working on (or that we’ve been avoiding).

For some reason, many of us also take advantage of the fall to learn some new things. Maybe we attend a seminar or a conference, or even go so far as to sign up for a class or two.

Heck, why not. Life’s not worth living if you don’t keep learning new things and taking advantage of new opportunities. So sign up for that conference, attend that seminar, and even take that class. You never know what good it will bring you, both professionally and personally.

Gain an Advantage in the Tourism Marketplace

Attention, all travel and tourism PR practitioners!I don’t know about you, but I’m always interested in hearing tips and tricks from industry insiders. Thursday morning, September 17, is the day I will be hearing from three of the region’s premier travel and tourism marketers and PR practioners!

For this Travel and Tourism PR session, PRSA-MD is gathering Margot Amelia, Executive Director of the Maryland Office of Tourism, David Warschawski, CEO of Warschawski, Inc., and Tom Rowe from Visit Baltimore to discuss the best practices and innovative approaches they are utilizing in today’s hypercompetitive domestic and international travel market.

With today’s economy affecting both corporate and leisure travel, an opportunity to hear tips firsthand from three of the region’s premier travel and tourism PR experts is a true advantage.  I’m looking forward to taking advantage of this extremely rare opportunity for an intimate “secret sharing” conversation with three of the area’s top travel and tourism public relations experts.

Want to join me (it’s only $20!)? Visit the PRSA-MD Web site for more information, and to register.