After a glamorous background in PR catering to the likes of girl band Bananarama and top Soho restaurant L’Escargot, I started my own PR company and swapped the glitz for the hard work of creating a business, creating Do Your Own PR to offer practical help to entrepreneurs who want to take control of their own public relations and raise their profile.
What I hadn’t expected was the amount of PR myths I would encounter. Here are five of the top PR myths I’ve had to debunk and destroy over the past few yaers!
1. “I can’t compete with the expertise and collective experience that a PR company can offer.”
Perhaps not, but you are the only one with the expertise and experience of your company so who could do a better job of talking about it than you? To someone working for a PR company promoting you may be just the means to a pay packet at the end of the month, but it’s your livelihood. Who has the most motivation to do a great job?
2. “I’m shy. How on earth can I do PR?”
Ok, so you’re not going to change into Absolutely Fabulous’ Edina but handling your own PR is a marvellously empowering confidence builder. Of course, you’re going to have to overcome some reserve, but you’re probably finding that you’re doing that already as you create and build your business. And, of course, with the proliferation of email, there’s a great deal that you can do over the internet anyway.
3. “I really don’t feel like wining and dining people just to get a story printed.”
If you can provide a good story that will excite and enthuse a journalist then you won’t need to wine or dine anybody. However, as you work on your PR campaign and come across journalists who show an interest in you and your work you’ll begin to feel like cultivating them. This doesn’t have to be in the form of wining and dining – there are plenty of other ways to nurture your contacts, as you can find our on our ecourse. A group business breakfast is just one of an array of ideas.
4. “’ll have to get to know so many publications and people, it will be a full time job.”
One of the things you’ll learn is how to focus and pin-point your market, reducing the amount of potential contacts you need to contact and being able to approach them with quality ideas, rather than some random hit and miss press release. As in most things, the quality of your approach and what you have to say is more important than how many people you include in your mailout.
5.”I have to be able to write well.”
Being able to write does help tremendously. But you can always outsource your writing. Alternatively, you could always just get out there and talk to journalists – something we all too often forget about.
Put together a press release that conveys what you need to say simply and without fuss. Forget flowery language and hype. The journalists have seen it all before a million times. Keep it simple and succinct.
To learn more about this author, visit Paula Gardner's Website.
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