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Archive → February, 2010

February 17th, 2010

4 PR Tips to Consider Before You Sell Your Business

This post coming–once again–from a reaction to John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing Blog, where Jantsch interviews author John Warrillow (who has written Built to Sell) posits that your business is worthless if it “depends on you.”  Obviously, Mr. Warrillow is approaching this from the point of view of someone who looks to develop businesses that will be sold, along the road, as their principle money maker for the owner and founder of the business. I’d take exception to some of his points; I don’t think that you need to plan for your business to 1) employ people after you’re done with it or even 2) employ you forever.  The simple fact’s that, over a 5 year period, most small businesses are going to go belly-up anyway. It’s part of the nature of owning a small business.  That doesn’t make it worthless. If you’ve gotten along in your business, helped out other businesses or organizations, and paid your bills for the duration of the run, I’d say you did pretty well. If you’re looking to turn a one-man shop into a national (or multinational!) empire, I’d say having an exit plan in mind is probably a good idea, then. Especially if you’re looking to take the company public, since investors are much happier when they’re putting money in a business that doesn’t depend on one person to run.

So why is a PR Blog writing about this? If you intend to run your business such that it can be sold off one day and still operate as well as it ever did, there are some public relations implications that you need to consider.  Let’s list ‘em:

  1. Consider Your Brand’s “Face”: It’s ironic that John Warrilow is writing about the necessity of building a business that you can sell on a blog like Duct Tape Marketing, because John Jantsch is so tied up in that business that it’s impossible to think of DTM without him. If your brand’s “face” is you, the owner, then when you leave, the company’s going to suffer. Put your strength behind your brand instead of putting it behind yourself.
  2. Consider Your Brand’s Culture:  Small, quirky, and plucky work well for any number of companies, including some of my favorites; if that culture is a big attraction to your clients, your sale just got a lot harder, not just because fewer people want to buy businesses run in a “quirky” fashion, but also because you will quickly find that your business customers realize when they aren’t getting the same experience that they had been.
  3. Consider Your Brand’s Presence: I counsel my clients to follow a social media regimen that’s roughly 30 minutes a day (Here’s a breakdown of my recommended daily social media workout). If you’re doing anything like that yourself, you can bet that suddenly vanishing off the social media space will alienate a sector of your customers.  If you’re managing your brand’s social media presence, you’d better have good documentation on what it is that you do so that you can pass that along to the next guy.
  4. Consider Your Business’s Customers: What happens to them? While you might not care too much what happens to the customers of a business that you no longer own, having a string of companies that stop servicing customers once you’ve sold ‘em will eventually catch up to you. Further, it’s going to impact your ability to sell your business, if your model’s sustainable for someone else or not.

All of these relate to how your business’s public policy decisions influence your ability to sell it and move on, so think about those things if you pick up a copy of “Built to Sell” in the future.

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By Trevor Longino • Posted in Uncategorized • No Comment
February 11th, 2010

Lose the Flab From Your Social Media Regimen

WEIFANG, CHINA - JULY 24: Overweight students...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since the holidays, I’ve been on the South Beach diet to lose some of those 20 extra pounds that magically appeared on my midsection this year (wonder how that happened!). That’s inspired me to start providing my social media clients with a lean, mean regimen for their social media program. It’s worked for them, and you can use it, too. While this is a post that’s more appropriate on my social media business blog (where it will get to eventually), it’s valuable PR strategy, too. It is lean, mean, and anyone can do it to get more out of their social media efforts.

Here’s your new social media workout plan:

  • Hit up your social media services 3x a day for about 10 minutes each time. Identify which services are most effective for you and use those more often. I generally say 10 minutes before work, 10 at lunch, and 10 minutes after the day is done.
  • If you’re using an analytics program like Google Analytics, use your natural search queries to tell you what phrases people are finding you for. Are those phrases you want to be found for? Then use them in your social media. Is your audience coming from keywords that don’t convert? Use better keywords in your social media.
  • If you aren’t measuring analytics, go to Google.com/analytics and do so.
  • Basic morning routine for Twitter:
    • Identify two or three twitter personalities that always have something interesting to say. Each morning, retweet something they’ve posted.
    • Find a blog or two that writes in your space. Tweet links to the interesting articles that they’ve written
    • Write a blog yourself? Make sure that you put your content in your tweets.
    • Look over your replies and DM’s and answer all appropriately
    • Finally, using a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, set up searches for words or phrases that are pertinent to what you do. Reply to other twitter posters who post using those terms.
    • This should take 10 – 15 minutes every day, once you get it to a system.
  • Basic afternoon routine for Facebook;
    • Check out your wall. Have you gotten new fans? Welcome them with a quick message.
    • Have you had any kind of event recently? Post pictures / video / whatever on it.
    • Run Facebook searches for terms that are pertinent to your organization. Have your fan page become a fan of other organizations that have similar interests.
    • Look over your wall for comments and reply; empty out inbox and reply as well
    • Post 2 -3 links to interesting information that is related to your organization
    • This takes 10 – 15 minutes when it’s done
  • LinkedIn Evening routine
    • Look for questions on the groups that you belong to. Answer two that you can legitimately offer an interesting and informed opinion on.
    • Been to a networking event? Run searches on people who’s cards you have. Find them on LinkedIn and follow ‘em.
    • Has anyone in your network changed job positions or posted another important status update? Drop ‘em a note commenting on it.
    • This is 5 – 10 minutes of work.
  • Blogging / Internet Evening routine
    • Set up Google Alerts on keywords that are pertinent to your interests. Get emails daily and check the links that Google sends you out. Generally, I recommend an alert on your brand, on your market, and on yourself as well.  Read the alerts for links / ideas for the other social media outlets and click through on the interesting ones.
    • Leave comments on any blog post that you actually read. Yes, every single one. They have to have something interesting to say, but don’t need to be Shakespeare.
    • This takes 10 minutes or so.

There’s your daily workout. Stick to it for 3 months and come back for a checkup.

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By Trevor Longino • Posted in Articles, OvernightPR • 3 Comments
February 9th, 2010

For @jesselamb

…because he was so politely insistent about it:

The Feb 9, 2010 Daily Rundown.

Click on the stunningly good-looking man above to listen to the audio clip.

By Trevor Longino • Posted in OvernightPR • 2 Comments
February 8th, 2010

5 Ways to Use Automated Alerts to Slow Pitch the Media

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing (which is an awesome blog you should read right now if you don’t know about it.) hits on a topic that hits close to home for me, so let’s chat:

In “The Right and Wrong of PR Pitches“, he discusses what is probably the perfect example of what good PR should be from the journalists perspective. Since it’s Yelp that did the PR work (and they get social media) it doesn’t shock me to hear that they impressed John. He talks about what he liked from the PR outreach side, there, but let me go into a little detail one of the points that he quickly sketches over because he probably assumes that you know what he’s talking about:

First PR lesson – track, filter, and engage brand mentions.

In my articles on the sidebar, I go into using Google Alerts to track mentions of your brand (and that’s a great start), but you should also look into using some other services on top of that now.

  • TweetBeep or TweetAlarm are both  good services for keeping on top of Twitter mentions of specific phrases or words, but I’m personally fond of the Seesmic Desktop to keep running searches of the phrases and words that matter to me.
  • If you’re like me and follow roughly a hojillion different blogs, a service like FeedRinse can be invaluable, letting you search and organize your feeds so that you only read what interests you.
  • Filtrbox is an excellent paid solution for someone who’s looking to maximize his or her brand engagement across blogs, Twitter, and other social media.

That said, I promised you 5 ways to use these tools to slow pitch to the media as John Jantsch recommends. Here you go:

Continue reading →

By Trevor Longino • Posted in Articles, OvernightPR • 1 Comment