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Why Not PR That Gets REAL Results
Written by: Bob KellyArticle Overview: What managers really need are results that come from a public relations effort that creates the kind of key stakeholder behavior change that leads directly to achieving their managerial objectives.
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Why Not PR That Gets REAL Results
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Why Not PR That Gets REAL Results?
But not results you can measure only in terms of magazine
circulation, TV audience numbers, or news release pickups.
Rather, results that come from a public relations effort that
creates the kind of key stakeholder behavior change that leads
directly to achieving your managerial objectives.
In other words, results that come from doing something positive
about those important outside audiences whose behaviors most
affect your operation. Particularly as you persuade those key
external audiences to your way of thinking by nudging them
to take actions that allow your department, division or
subsidiary to succeed.
When you think about it, public relations boils down to these
realities: the right PR really CAN alter individual perception
and lead to changed behaviors that help you win. But your public
relations effort must involve more than parties, videos, booklets
and column mentions if you really want to get your money’s
worth. What you need is a basic schematic that gets everyone
working towards the same external audience behaviors insuring
that the organization’s public relations effort stays sharply
focused.
Coincidentally, here is such a schematic! People act on their
own perception of the facts before them, which leads to
predictable behaviors about which something can be done.
When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching,
persuading and moving-to-desired-action the very people
whose behaviors affect the organization the most, the public
relations mission is usually accomplished.
Look at some real results that can come from this approach
to public relations. Membership applications on the rise;
customers making repeat purchases; capital givers or specifying
sources looking your way; new proposals for strategic alliances
and joint ventures; prospects starting to work with you; and
even bounces in showroom visits.
You may be forgiven for wondering how such managers deliver
those kinds of results.
They take the time to analyze who among their most important
outside audiences behaves in ways that help or hinder the
achievement of their objectives. Then, they list them according
to how severely those behaviors affect their organization.
On the point, just how do most members of your key outside
audiences perceive your organization? If paying for professional
survey counsel isn’t in the cards (or in the budget!), your PR
colleagues will have to monitor those perceptions themselves.
Actually, they should be quite familiar with perception and
behavior matters since they’re already in that business.
So you meet with some of those outside folks asking questions
like “Are you familiar with our services or products? Have you
ever had contact with anyone from our organization? Was it a
satisfactory encounter?” And if you are that manager, you must be
sensitive to negative statements, especially evasive or
hesitant replies. And watch carefully for false assumptions,
untruths, misconceptions, inaccuracies and potentially
damaging rumors. When you find such, they will need to be
corrected, as they inevitably lead to negative behaviors.
Big job now is to pick out the actual, offending perception
to be changed, and that becomes your public relations goal.
You obviously want to correct those untruths, inaccuracies,
misconceptions or false assumptions.
The toughest part of this exercise is that a PR goal without
a strategy to show you how to get there, will taste like
hot sauce on your yogurt. So, as you select one of three
strategies (create perception or opinion where there may
be none, or change or reinforce it,) what you want to do
is insure that the goal and its strategy match each other.
You wouldn’t want to select “change existing perception”
when current perception is just right suggesting a
“reinforce” strategy.
With your strategy in hand, you and your PR staff must
create a compelling message carefully written to alter your
key target audience’s perception, as required by your public
relations goal.
An idea to keep in mind: remember that you can always
combine your corrective message with another news
announcement or presentation which may give it more
credibility by reducing the apparent need for such a
correction.
The art in preparing such a message lies in the fact that the
message you convey must be not only compelling, but
quite clear about what perception needs clarification or
correction, and why. Of course you must be truthful and
your position logically explained and believable if it is to
hold the attention of members of that target audience, and
actually move perception in your direction.
It’s understandable when some folks refer to the communications
tactics necessary to move your message to the attention of that
key external audience, as “beasts of burden.” In reality, they
must carry your persuasive new thoughts to the eyes and ears
of those important outside people.
The good news is that you have a really wide choice of
communications tactics because the list is a long one. It
includes letters-to-the-editor, brochures, press releases and
speeches. Or, you might choose radio and newspaper
interviews, personal contacts, facility tours or customer
briefings. There are scores available and the only selection
requirement is that the tactics you choose have a record of
reaching people just like the members of your key target audience.
By the way, you can always speed up things by adding more communications tactics, AND by increasing their frequencies.
Around this time, someone is bound to mention progress reports.
But you will already be hard at work remonitoring perceptions
among your target audience members to test the effectiveness
of your communications tactics. Using questions similar to
those used during your earlier monitoring session, you’ll now
become cross-eyed looking for signs that audience perceptions
are beginning to move in your general direction.
You need actual changes in behaviors among your most
important external audiences, and that’s no small matter. In my
view, the quality of your public relations results will, and should
be directly dependent on whether you spend your PR budget
primarily on communications tactics, or the creation of key
stakeholder behavior change that leads directly to achieving
your managerial objectives.
end
Bob Kelly counsels, writes and speaks to business, non-profit and
association managers about using the fundamental premise of public
relations to achieve their operating objectives. He has authored 245
articles on the subject which are listed at EzineArticles.com, click
Expert Author, click Robert A. KellyHe has been DPR, Pepsi-Cola
Co.; AGM-PR, Texaco Inc.; VP-PR, Olin Corp.; VP-PR, Newport
News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.; director of communications,
U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press secretary,
The White House. He holds a bachelor of science degree from
Columbia University, major in public relations.
mailto:bobkelly@TNI.net Visit:http://www.prcommentary.com
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- Interesting topic, GT.
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Run a major competition
- You beat me to the punch LoveInventions! I was just on my way to post this!
The idea is simple: run a competition for a major prize to get people posting. In this case Darren put up a $729 Nikon DSLR up for grabs as the top prize. The winner was selected randomly and each post you wrote gave you another chance to win.
[quote:1nc4sv0r]The Goal - the aim of the exercise was simple. To sign up new members to my forum and increase page views. My hope was to have a bumper month but also get new members signed up to have an ongoing impact on overall activity going forward.[/quote:1nc4sv0r]
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[quote:1nc4sv0r]
The Downside
So far it’s sounding fairly rosy isn’t it. Increases in traffic, members, activity and even earning are all good. However there was two downsides.
1. Moderation Workload - I have an amazing team of moderators to DPS but the month of April was the hardest that they’ve ever worked. I totally underestimated the extra load upon them in setting up this competition. It has made me reconsider how I run future competitions.
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What do you guys think? Is it worth testing out? Considering we already give out over $1,000 in month prizes, what would be the ultimate prize that we award at the end of the competition?
$3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO
- $3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO
Content and Community Driven Pet Websites
________________________________________
Profile: Two Pet Related Websites
Price: $65,000 OBO
Age of sites: 2 years 4 months
Monthly revenue: $3300 (plus or minus a couple hundred)
Key details:
Growth Year over Year: 641%
Uniques: 200,000 per Month
Page Views: 1 mil + per Month
Referrers: 10,000+ Monthly
Search Engine Traffic: 61%
Members: 7500+/-
Articles: 318
Blog Posts: 189+
Forum Posts: 256,000+
Topics: 19,000+
Adsense Revenue: $1500-$1700 per month
Kontera Revenue: $900+ per month
Direct Advertisers: $90 - $300 per month
Monthly Server Costs: $100
Monthly Advertising Costs: $0
Total Profit Per Month $2500 - $3000
Organic Growth Month over Month: 10% +/- (Zero spent on advertising – all word of mouth and search engine)
Software Licenses: All Open source and thus free: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Zen Cart, PHPLIST, WordPress, SMF, and the rest Custom Programming.
Software Editions: All software running latest releases.
Uniques Last Month: 200,000
Page Views Last Month: *2,000,000+ per month
Referring Sources: 1,000 different referrers
Referring Keywords: 60,000 Search Terms
First Page Results: Thousands of keywords and keyword combinations
Indexed pages (Google): 65,000+
Indexed pages (Yahoo): 26,000+
Google page rank: 5-6 (Lots of 3’s and 4’s throughout the sites)
Pages of Content: 60,000+/-
Alexa site rank: 124,000 (way off the mark due to audience profile)
Compete Site Rank: Much closer but still off.. See image
Brand Value: All Original Creative and Content including Logo, Forum Template, Front-end, CSS, Code, Images etc. Extremely well made to render fast as well as accessible, to both humans and search engines. Search optimized throughout.
Description:
I actually posted this for sale almost 11 months ago but didn’t take any offers. Since then traffic has increased almost 650% and revenue has increase by almost as much, closer to 600%. Revenue comes from direct advertising ($150-$350 per mo) but primarily Google Adsense ($1500 - $1750 per mo) and Kontera Links ($700-$900 per mo).
Letting go as I’m working full time and just started Business School… I just don’t have the time. However, these sites are ripe for one to build a better business direction.
I started these sites as the pet industry happens to be exploding, exponentially and almost parabolically. Google “pet spending” to find a glimpse. Some articles you’ll find:
“The Growing Pet Industry Is One Trend You Can Bank On”
"In the past 10 years, pet spending has more than doubled to an estimated $38.4 billion for 2006."
"According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the pet industry is now the seventh largest retail segment in the country."
“We have only begun to see the tip of the spending iceberg"
“Pet Spending at All Time High”
"Pet ownership is on the increase in the US, and the amount of money spent on pets is dramatically increasing too."
The two sites are content and community driven websites with 350+ health related articles on pets, a pet blog that discusses current issues, and a very active message board and community. They compliment each other perfectly and as such are being sold together as a package. The templates are completely custom designed and CSS powered. They would be XHTML Strict Compliant however we’ve included a couple of things that just wouldn’t let it pass. There are almost 8000 members between the two sites. Several hundred more between the blog subscribers and the email list subscribers. At one time we had a store (its all still there however it’s been shut off) and we had about 200 customers. The store lasted only about a month and a half as our careers just didn’t allow us to provide the customer service this site deserves. We also had a drop ship company that worked out really well, (and we still do if we want them). Much more work than our careers had time for. The logos are custom. I’ve got the logo in vector version for Signs and tee shirts. The Design is custom. All software front-ends are custom and running clean - open source applications. Runs extremely well.
The entire 2 sites run on a dedicated server that runs about $100 a month.. The sites run on a LAMP environment, meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. All of the software is open source and requires no fees. We run PHPLIST, Zen Cart, and SMF Simple Machines Forum. The blog is Word Press. The article system is completely custom however the back end panel is ran simple from phpMyAdmin – straight to the database.
I think there is enormous potential with the two sites as the brands have a very loyal following and is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been mentioned in 10 or so online and offline newspapers (that I am aware of) as well as a magazine – all of which will be provided. The site was featured as Yahoo’s Site of the Week. The site was forever (and perhaps still is) the number one pet site viewed on StumbleUpon.com. The blog also has 177 links from 56 sites according to Technorati.com and ranks 52,000. The database is huge. It’s full of fully owned content, images, customer data, subscriber data, members etc etc. The brand really sells when it comes to tee shirts and calendars. We have a drop shipper when needed that we buy tee’s at 4 dollars a shirt. Each shirt sold for $20 so there was a great margin.
The two sites have a solid existence and are trenched well into all the major search engines with perhaps thousands of first place results for keywords and keyword combinations. The majority of traffic is all organic from Google, Yahoo and MSN and it will stay that way forever. The site was built solidly by SEO pros with Search Engine Spiders in mind as every part of the site is search friendly. All pages have been correctly and lightly coded. The database powers the meta tags, title tags, h1’s, h2’s, image titles and bold tags. The site has tens of thousands of dollars put into the design and functionality.
petsite4sale@gmail.com
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