Gurgaon Chapter Meet – July 25th, 2013
PR is the need of all businesses. A good PR can help take the business to a new high. While we all may be aware of that, no many entrepreneurs have the insight into how PR works. In this month’s Gurgaon session, we were in the company of Megha Sharma, Senior Advisor, Cohn & Wolfe India who took us through inside workings of public relations and marketing communications.
Here are some tips she shared during the session and while interacting with participants:
She urged participants to never think of their business as “small” – ever. Not only from the creative visualization point of view, but also thinking your business small leads you to projecting your business as small and therefore, not very significant. If you don’t think very highly of your business, it is almost certain that the PR person you are talking to will not, either. Also make sure that your business is scalable, because if it is not, no tool is of any help anyway. Size of the business is the size of your idea, and your ‘big’ idea is exactly what should come across when you are briefing to your promotion partner, she emphasized.
There is no substitute for a good story. And you know your story the best, no one else does. Be sure of your USP or differentiator.
Your story, apart from being useful to your target audience, has to be appealing to your “target media” as well. Having knowledge of what’s going on in the media world and what kind of stories they are working on goes a long way. Storytelling is all about context. A great story out of context has no significance. So, include media in your target audience as well.
The good news is magazines, radio and other media like doing stories on entrepreneurs. Reach out.
A common mistake inexperienced entrepreneurs tend to make is to jump into media at the first opportunity they get. Her advice is to wait, get your product, tagline, USP together, make a strategy and then go ahead. Nothing hurts a business like giving a great story and then not living up to expectations later.
Work with your PR partners closely. Tell them your long term vision. If you can’t afford a big contract right away, work out a quarterly execution plan in sync with your vision with them and then cost it out based on what you need essentially.
Ask them to give a one-day training to your team or spokespersons. They will also give you media handling tips like what needs to go on record and what doesn’t.
If in doubt, always buy time from the journalist and think it out, especially when you are asked to share data or financial information. Record the conversations ideally and send the summary through mail so the journalist is sure of what you want to say on record.
Work on your crisis management strategy way before you happen to need it. Think of all possible scenarios where something can go wrong in your line of business. Keep your responses ready along with who to bring to fore and action to take.
PR is all about relationships. Nothing can beat good relationships in media. Make friends with journalists, do send them thank you notes when they write about you. Also you may keep sending relevant updates once in a while, taking care you don’t bombard them with information. Find out who is writing what. Who is the journalist who is writing about your topic in mainstream media. Connect. He/she may not want to write entirely about you but may be interested in getting bits and pieces from you to fit into the story they already have in mind.
While you are at it, find out around 20 publications that write about your line of business. Target those. PR is totally content driven. Work on your content, review it position yourself the best.
It is sufficient to have one PR activity a month for recall. You may do your PR briefing in a quarter.
Giving real examples, Megha shared that the good news is that media universe is expanding. With the ease and affordability of social media, things are a lot easier for entrepreneurs now. They have to be active on facebook, twitter and linked-in for required visibility and connections.
So much more stimulating information flowed in Q&A session that ended in a networking mingling over coffee and snacks.
Here is what some of the participants shared about the session:
A very informative session. An eye-opener on various aspects of PR, something which startups find difficult to gather. Thank you for putting this together. – Mallika Goenka Dalmia, Co-founder DeNovo Creations.
A very much needed sesion for entrepreneurs, worth the effort. Megha is a pro at what she is doing and has been very communicative. I benefitted a lot from the session as well as networking. – Shephali Kasliwal, Founder Knotty Angels and Pitaara.
