Why "no one cares about your business" and how to get PR anyway.

Hello, my name is Jim James, and this is the Speak PR Podcast. This is for fellow entrepreneurs who'd like to release the value in their own business by using effective public relations. Today I'm going to talk about Karen Marooney, who thinks that no one really cares about your business unless you're running a big one. Now, Karen Marooney is the co-founder and CEO of the Outcast Agency, And was then the Vice President of Global Communications at Facebook. And there's an article that just came out this week in TechCrunch where she was interviewed by a reporter called Lucas Matney. And Lucas says that the, really the subtext of Marooni's comments were really that the media really don't care about your business unless it's big enough. So I'm going to talk about that today because I think having worked with founders of businesses and large companies for over 25 years, and having run my own businesses that were not public relations agencies, I think that it's true. We've got to face up to the fact that what Marouni is saying is true, that in order to get into the media, into especially tier 1 media, and by that we mean the Wall Street Journal or the Times or the Straits Times in Singapore, one has to have a company that is going to be talking to about 2/3 of their readership. And that's because very simply for the media, they have 2 business models. One is from subscriptions and the other is from advertising. So if our business is not big enough to be appealing to enough of the readers, it's just not going to get covered. Now, what this lady, Karen Marooney, says is that Founders need to ask themselves a couple of questions. One, why should anyone care about what their business is doing? And second, is there a purchase order existing for this business? Now, there was a third question and answer, but I have to confess, I didn't pay for the subscription to TechCrunch in order to see it. But I think the third question could be, are you the first Or the best, and how can you prove it? But I think having launched and and helped to introduce new products like Yahoo Shopping, for example, or even the intelligent text entry for mobile phones back in the late 1990s, that unless something is particularly innovative or a media has a particular interest in a in a sector, and you have a particular story, for example, an investment from a local country. That might give the local media a good local investment story. It's extremely hard for businesses to get into mainstream media. But I think that actually this isn't the end of the world. I say that because although I run a PR firm and we help large companies, in truth, most companies are actually not that large. In America, for example, there are some 18,204,679 companies registered apparently in 2018, but 92.47% of all companies are less than 24 people, and 99.63% of all companies are less than 249 people. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're a business owner, how many staff do you have? And the, the next part of the question is, what kind of turnover do we all have? Now, the average earnings, for example, in America is something like $200,000 per employee. That's the average. And running consulting firms, My experience is that it's about three times the employee costs become the revenue as an example. So obviously there are there are different industries with with different multiples on earnings. But if nearly nearly 100%, all but the last point four seven percent of companies are less than 249 people, the real question that I would. Ask is how many customers do we really need? And then more importantly from that, how much media coverage do we really need? So myself, I send out newsletters, I send out tweets, I do the podcast and have a website. Actually, we put a lot of time and effort into all the media work and media-facing work But I have a very small team. In fact, it's me and a group of virtual consultants and employees, or rather they're not virtual people, but they're real consultants, but they work virtually. So this leads me to the question and the answer that I'd like to share, which is that the question is, how much media coverage do we really need? And the answer probably is not that much. And that can be actually reassuring. Because there are different kinds of public relations, and this is really why I started the Speak PR podcast, because most companies cannot afford a public relations agency. Most business owners find that working with an agency doesn't give them a return on investment because they might get covered in the media, but the media is read by a lot of people that are not actually going to become customers. Most companies that I know have only maybe 30, 40, 50 customers. Even restaurants and so on probably maybe have a mailing list of a couple of thousand, but then in reality they probably have a couple of hundred regular clients. Now this is, I think, just taking a reality check on public relations because in the Speak PR program that I've put together, We're really looking at how there are 3 different kinds of media relations. One is the earned media, which is really what public relations companies and agencies do, which is to get companies into the mainstream media. Then there is the bought media, which is buying, for example, advertorial space. And the third is owned media. In other words, proprietary media, media that we can control. And this is, I think, where we as business owners should concentrate. I started the Speak PR methodology and also now have it as a course that if you're interested, I'd love to take you through. And I'm starting to take my first cohort of entrepreneurs and business owners through the Speak PR methodology. And it's really about building a brand using your owned media. When we look at our audiences, we have 3 audiences: internal, our partners, and our external. And often in companies, we think about public relations and we think about trying to communicate to lots of people generally. And we often take for granted the internal communications and we often ignore the partner relations. And we focus very much on what we call sort of customer-facing or external relations. But I think that actually this isn't a recipe for a profitable business because what we talk about in our Speak PR program is that there is a need to get customers and partners and clients into alignment with the vision of the founder of the business. So in the original comment that Marooni said that people should ask themselves, why should anyone care, and is there a purchase order existing for this service? If we identify who our key customers are and who our key partners are and who our key staff are, either full-time or part-time, my, my view and my experience is that we need to focus on the short-term horizon with our communications rather than always looking into the distance. So the short-term horizon, I like to start to create this sense of a customer journey where someone that has never heard of my company before goes from ignorance to awareness to engagement to participation to evangelism. Let's take ignorance. You know, they don't even know that East West PR exists. Maybe you don't know that this agency that I've run for 25 years exists. Well, I would like for you to become aware of my agency, to know that we offer business-to-business consulting across Asia. Like for then you to engage with my agency if it's for your company, and it may not be. And then to start to participate. Participate is when companies start to get involved in how I run my services towards them. When customers start to share feedback, when customers start to give encouragement, where customers say, look, I'd just like to tell you this, this member of staff did a particularly good job, or this table or this section of the restaurant wasn't clean. And then if they move to evangelism where they start to tell other people about my business, well then I've got a business that becomes more profitable because I'm spending less time doing marketing. But I'm actually encouraging and engaging with my existing customers to generate more revenue for me. The same can be said of our internal and our partners. How many of us are running companies and we have had referrals from business partners? For me in East West PR, referrals are one of my greatest sources of, of new clients. I've mentioned this before, I think, but how many of us really could do with our partners either? For example, I was talking to a finance company the other day, and they offer a complementary service to a legal firm, but they don't communicate with any legal firms, even though they're both professional services companies. Why would they not do that? Why would they not make sure that every legal firm in the market would understand about them and the services they offer, and even engage with them and talk about how they could share best practices or share clients or share events, for example, and then to participate and to find ways to improve that service, and then to actually start to even promote and to announce that this other company has a service of comparable value And comparable quality that existing customers could go to. And of course, staff are often given short shrift. They may be given a Monday meeting, maybe given a payslip, but as we run our businesses, we're often so busy thinking about new customers that we're forgetting the people who are closest to us. Often it's the case when we're looking for new friends and we forget the ones we've got now, or we spend more time with people socially than we do with our own family. But in public relations, we often focus as business owners on what lies ahead on the horizon rather than what lies within, within our control. And within our control is the owned media channels. The Speak PR program has Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and To Know— 5 stages that are within the control of the business owner. I've been speaking in the last couple of weeks with a number of young business owners and entrepreneurs, and they found the simplicity of this 5-stage methodology quite liberating because it gets the business owners to focus on, on why, you know, why should anyone care? As Maruni is saying, such a common theme, but I also like to talk about who that founder is. I like to talk about who, because I actually think that before why, there comes who, who is the founder? Why have they started this business? But who were they before they got to this place in their journey? Under the personalization at scale, it's about making sure that everybody that is being communicated with has a message that's relevant to them. And as I mentioned, 92.47% of all companies in America are less than 24 people. So how many customers can they possibly have? How difficult can it be to communicate with each one of those customers and the potential database of customers, which may be, say, tenfold the actual customers. How difficult can it be to personalise that message at scale? And then with the engagement, it's about creating content that's relevant to those people so that when they're reading it, they know it's for them. They know what action to take. And I've talked earlier on about how Sainsbury's has made COVID a testing ground for the relevance of their information. And I think I've done a brilliant job on that. The amplification side is also about automation, so that when we have our customer base and our partner base and our internal, that it's not taking a disproportionate amount of time to send everybody a personal message because we're using technology to automate the distribution, but also to know through our Active Communications Index, the productivity levels of the team so that we can ensure there's consistent communication. And this is important because business fundamentally is done on the basis of trust. And we trust those people that we learn about and who behave in a consistent way because consistency shows some kind of reliability. And if we're parting with our money, or with, for example, our children into a school or going into a hospital or any kind of service, when that provider demonstrates that they've got themselves in good order, we feel reassured that they're going to have the service they provide to us in good order as well. So providing consistent and compelling content over time is the focus then of Speak PR. And the plan with the Active Communications Index is not to worry so much about the volume of likes or the volume of page views, but to ensure that we're consistently sending information to people and that we're able to have a complete loop. So I think the next part of public relations is also about Ensuring that the actual customer experience is in alignment with the promise from the PR. For all of us that have dealt with companies that on the outside look fantastic but the experience was disappointing, we know that creating a great public facade is, is not easy, but it's not the hardest thing to do. And anyone that's seen some of the fraudsters and the gamesters at the moment on the internet understand how easy it is to create a public persona, especially with digital. But public relations all the way through to customer service is going to lead to having a profitable business. It may be small, and as I've said, you know, only 1.5% of all businesses are greater than 249 people. So most of us are running small businesses, and there's the old saying that revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. Public relations can help us to run a profitable business, and a little bit like the revenue is vanity and profit is sanity, page views are a vanity, downloads are a vanity, customers are a sanity. Happy team members are a sanity. Supportive partners are a sanity. So this is a Saturday podcast, and therefore I like to just reflect a little bit on the business, whereas during the week I tend to focus more on the functional activities and technologies that we can use as business owners. But I've been running a business now, multiple businesses, for 25 years. And most of the businesses I've, I've managed and all the ones I've worked with have been smaller. In the public relations field, I run with clients at a billion dollar and above revenue, but they operate entirely differently. But also, as we've seen today, they're the exception and not the rule. This podcast is for you if you're running a business like 99.63% of the rest of us. And the hope is, and the promise is, and the positive message here today is that there are technologies and tools that are very simple to use that put us as business owners in control of communications, and we can use them. And on Speak PR, I like to share those here on this podcast, also on my website at eastwestpr.com, but also through the Speak PR program If you'd like to participate in the Speak PR program, do please reach out to me on jim@eastwestpr.com. And with that, I wish you the best of health, that you're running a profitable business regardless of size, and that you keep on communicating. And if tomorrow is your Sunday or your day off, that you enjoy it.