Recently, Kathryn Landers of Felber & Felber Marketing interviewed me on public relations and how knowledge businesses can best plan, use and profit from PR

Andy, how do you define public relations?

To me, PR is the promotion of one’s expertise and value through non-advertising traditional and electronic media and editorial outlets.  When your “smarts” are independently and objectively published by third parties, so your audiences can read and see your value endorsed by others; that is effective PR.  The best PR usually includes examples of how your clients have benefited from your value.

Andy, how do you look at PR?

I think of PR as falling into three categories: Reactive, Active and Proactive

• Reactive PR consists of responding to preexisting stories and inquiries from reporters who need experts.  Websites like www.prleads.com and responding to other’s blogs is a very low-commitment way to demonstrate your expertise
• Active PR is using the wire services like www.prnewswire.com or www.expertclick.com  to circulate press releases on your firm’s progress or value.  They work best when there is a direct “hook” between your news, a current trend/event and your unique spin on it.
• Proactive PR involves creating both the content and the venue to broadcast it.  Your own blog is a great way to start as I have on www.birolsblog.com. Traditional, Internet and satellite media tours, speaking at trade shows and press conferences and “dog and pony” all work if you have the right story to tell.

Andy, what advice would you give to a business owner just beginning to use PR??

• First determine your firm’s Best and Highest Use. 
• Second, define who is your target audience, and third what information they will value.
• Then determine which media and editorial resources they watch and read.

The final step is to continuously create valuable, unique information that provokes your target audience to contact you for more.  So you need to become disciplined and regularly:

• Develop content in the form of articles, write papers and ideas
• Create and use case studies, results statements, testimonials showing how others have benefited through content
• Any time you can involve your clients in the PR effort it is much better.  Reporters, and conferences just love it when a client stands beside you and talks about your value and how it helped them

What do you think of business owners hiring  PR firms?

Writing and self promotion doesn’t come naturally to many owners so there is a trade off of doing it yourself or hiring specialists like my firm of Felber & Felber Marketing.

• In my case, I develop the content myself. 
• Together we decide how much reactive, active, proactive PR I need to get my messages seen and heard. 
• Finally, I turn over the execution of proactive, active, reactive PR to Felber & Felber Marketing to efficiently deliver my message to the media. 
How each business owner should implement their PR is a function of their Best and Highest Use, time, budget and personal preferences

Conclusion
PR is the most efficient marketing any business can do.  When established third parties are publishing your expertise you earn a great payback on your investment of time and money. Start with your inherent value and figure out who needs learn about it and where they are.  Then go tell the world.  You will be glad you did!

I’m back from a twenty day cruise on the Holland America Line’s Rotterdam (HAL) where my family sailed by Antarctic glaciers, explorer’s outposts and penguin colonies. Besides the hazardous grandeurs deftly navigated by our ice pilot, I saw a fascinating contradiction. The crew and staff of HAL worked nonstop to create a consistent onboard experience while the Antarctic researchers we saw spent all their time adapting to survive as they studied how the climate, nature and animals themselves are adapting. In watching this, it occurred to me how often we entrepreneurs struggle with these same conflicting forces of the need for consistency vs. the need to adapt.

First let’s look at Antarctica versus our ship. Despite its inhospitable and dangerous climate, Antarctica has drawn explorers, heroes and fools to its shores for centuries. Ernest Shackleton, the most famous, survived over 130 days under a rowboat eating blubber ultimately only to earn a $20,000 fee for the film rights. After Shackleton, thousands of explorers have adapted their lives, dreams, and studies to explore and learn about Antarctica. Their success demonstrates the very human spirit to innovate and adapt as much to survive and learn.

Compare this to the centuries old tradition-bound Holland America Cruise Lines whose consistency and standardization are keys to their success. As the oldest premium brand, HAL appeals mostly to the 60+ market offering a consistent experience delivered over seventeen ships. From the centralization of decision and policy making to the tight allocation of human resources, HAL runs cost centers with legendary attention to detail and tradition. My only big beef is the lack of contemporary music or other progressive entertainment for the still-rocking crowd. Still it seemed bizarre to watch the ship’s Hotel Manager chastise our waiter for a crooked place setting while we passed the spot where another cruise ship sank last month!

So as an entrepreneur, how do you reconciling consistency with the need to adapt? Unlike the explorers or the cruise ships, you really don’t have the luxury of choosing one.

One of my close colleagues, and a national manufacturing expert, Becky Morgan, helped me with this.  She, along with Carmella Calta, CEO of multiple process-driven companies, pointed out that without first creating consistency in your business, progress cannot be made let alone innovation.

For both consistency and innovation to work, my colleagues recommended that autonomous employees must take responsibility for creating and embracing process. Only with clear standards in place, can innovation turn into practical results. The challenge of a company adapting to progressive innovation and demonstrating “out of the box thinking” relates more to business strategy. To create strategic change, leaders of organizations must define themselves as innovative by allowing “out of the box thinking”. Most companies don’t gamble on their proven successes despite indications that their marketplace is moving and changing. As Becky says, “If you don’t move with your customer base and change your business strategy your operations strategy and what you measure in the form of standardization won’t change either.”

In Shackleton’s case, his ability to adapt and survive led him on to be refinanced for future expeditions to both Antarctica and elsewhere in the world.

And Holland America has the choice of reinforcing its traditional appeal to its aging customer base or innovating more to appeal to its younger, non-retired clientele like me. Only time will tell which is the right bet as with increasing life spans and sellout cruise ships, Holland’s core market shows no signs of declining.

Here are some key guidelines for managing your way to consistency and adaptation.

1. Don’t use innovation or anything else as an excuse not to create consistency and standardization.
2. Empower your employees throughout your firm to create better ways to get work done and hold them responsible for results.
3. Don’t use standardization and consistency as an excuse for not creating a clear business strategy that recognizes shifts in your marketplace and their preferences.
What does this mean for your business?

Unanticipated demand, aging infrastructure, competing jurisdictions, and inadequate funding!  These descriptions best describe our country’s highway bridges. But for those of us who live to travel, we roll our eyes at infuriated amateurs who blame highway workers for delayed trips.  Yet how many of us blame the symptoms rather than root causes of business technology problems.  After thirty years of watching marketing dreams meet technical reality, here are some observations of why it is so hard to translate marketing programs through technology.

Today’s typical scenario
• A goal-driven entrepreneur or marketing manager defines a program they wish to implement using technology
• Next a project manager is assigned to translate these needs into a project work plan and
• Finally, a programmer is assigned to write the code and connect it to the needed databases and communication/delivery systems to bring the project to fruition. 

If it’s so simple, why doesn’t this work?  Here’s why. 
• The entrepreneur/marketing manager has been promised that in this day and age anything is possible and all they have to do is ask. 
• The project manager, especially if he/she is billing the client for their time, eagerly attacks a complicated project arriving at an enormous work plan and budget accommodating every need and want they heard. 
• The programmer, formerly a $100 an hour domestic worker, and now often a $20 an hour third world programmer, is presented with a giant work plan hopefully leveraging his or her ability to generate accurate code at break neck speed. 

Inherent in this virtual relay race are missed handoffs. 

• The marketer assumes the project manager understands his or her business. 
• The project manager quickly realizes the marketer doesn’t understand or care about the complexity of what they are requesting or the sophistication of the technology that it will take.
• Similarly, the project manager faces translation challenges on the coding level with a volume-driven technician who increasingly has to overcome a language and cultural barrier. 
Isn’t it a miracle that programs are ever completed satisfactorily or to return to our highway bridge metaphor, most don’t collapse? 

Looking forward

After decades of watching capabilities increase, costs drop and expectations soar, successful marketing through technology is as tough as ever.  Here are a few lessons I’ve learned the hard way.
1. Entrepreneurs and marketers need to understand when and why their requests are easy, hard, time-consuming and unreasonable.
2. Project managers need to understand how and why the marketing manager and his/her program is successful
3. The programmer needs to understand what the project really has to accomplish.

In summary

There is more pressure than ever on all parties to communicate, understand and translate what they are trying to do into what someone else is depending on being done.  Like “smart” bridges that absorb, convert and transfer weight, seismic shifts and weather, successful entrepreneurs, marketers, project managers and programmers have to be as good as handling similar “shocks” as they are at doing their specific jobs.

Recently I was hosting a session of my Rainmaker Roundtable, a select group of entrepreneurs who sell services to other owners, on the topic of professional integrity and ethics. With their input and my further thinking, here are my three conclusions.

1. Know exactly who your client is and always serve them best. For example, if your client is the firm and the owner is a destructive influence as its president, you have the duty to do what is best for the company up to and including removing the president so the owner and the company will thrive.
2. Be true to how you make money and don’t compromise. For example, if you make money dispensing unbiased advice, don’t take a commission recommending a vendor who provides what you just prescribed
3. Always practice transparency unless it compromises confidentiality. For example, if you will make money, benefit, or be placed in a compromising position by learning or knowing some information, tell the person providing the information why, beware ,or to stop. And when the information comes from your client, (See #1 above) it is absolutely confidential.

What do you think?

In October, a long and tempestuous relationship between the owner and coach of the New York Yankees came to the breaking point. Even if you aren’t a baseball fan, or hate the Yankees, what lessons can we all learn on managing the leaders of our businesses?

To review, Joe Torre, with only a couple of years left before retirement,  expected to remain with the team he took to twelve (12) playoffs and four (4) world championships. With his track record and penchant for managing to the highest standards of integrity, respect and consideration for his players and fans, Torre felt he was beyond evaluation or a performance-based contract. George Steinbrenner, the owner, was in complete disagreement. As the boss of baseball’s most storied team, he and his sons have a singular expectation–World Series Championships–and pay the price for victory at any cost. As we all know, the opera of Joe and George had its finale when Torre rejected Steinbrenner’s victory-based one year contract out of hand, leaving both without a contingency plan.

As business owners, what we can learn and avoid from this sudden ending to one of baseball’s greatest successes?

If you and your president:

•  Personally or professionally disagree on objectives, get on the same page now for your organization’s sake.  Otherwise your people will try to reconcile your differences and in the process waste everyone’s time, money and energy.
•  Have to compromise on how your objectives will be met, determine your personal threshold of acceptable disagreement that you will not only tolerate.  Never fight in front of the “children” whether they are customers, employees or vendors.
• Create a contingency plan or go-to resource for resolving differences, you can avoid needless escalations that can bring you to business divorce.
• Prepare a doomsday scenario and a triage plan if you have to eject your president or if he/she walks out.  Understand that the more you have prepared for a crisis, the less it will be seen as one

Managing a talented, capable leader can be one of the most trying challenges for you as the owner. And if your president becomes respected by your customers, employees or vendors, you may have created a peer who threatens you.  But if you recognize you cannot lead your business all by yourself and have found a talented second in command, managing through your two egos, testosterone and quirks will be a lot easier.

In October, I had the pleasure to address my home town, Solon, Ohio’s Civic Club, on regional growth.  The local press covered it here and if there is any truth to rarely being a prophet in one’s own land it was thrilling to be so well received. Solon Ohio is a great suburb, balanced commercially, relatively integrated, and in great shape given the decline of Northeast Ohio which surrounds it.  The big issue in Solon right now is which billion dollar development project the town should choose to replace its lack of a downtown with a high-end lifestyle center like NYC’s South Street Seaport or Columbus’ Easton Center.

With Cleveland’s gang shootings only 4 miles away and an intractable struggle between city politicians unwilling to give up their fiefdoms and share power with redundant suburban governments and services whose residents (e.g. Solonites) decreasingly work in and enjoy Cleveland, the new developments are a real flash-point for debate.

• Does Solon need such a showcase when there is so much destitution and redundancy nearby?
• While the new development will raise the retail and restaurant standards, it will put local incumbent retailers out of business.
• Bringing such additional wealth into Solon, in terms of a new tax base, employment and opportunity will only siphon more away from other less fortunate neighbors.

 Regardless of these good points, Economics 101 says that the strong need to get stronger because it is unlikely the weak will do so.  Cleveland is the most charitable city in the country yet is invariably one of the poorest.  I wrote an article about this titled Doing Well vs.Doing Good which lays out my premise that it doesn’t help anyone to help others until one can stop being a burden him or herself.  Giving charitably is great but our region has a knack of producing one hit wonders in the form of entrepreneurs, who after scoring one business hit, devote themselves to a life of charity and non profit work. Instead of taking their talents to higher levels and employing more people, paying more taxes and building more wealth, they start yet another redundant charity, non profit which only contributes to the cycle of Cleveland staying the most charitable and poorest.

So, when asked why should Solon raise its standards even higher, after even after just being named the best suburb in North East Ohio?  I say, because it must.  Excellence draws more talent and dollars towards it, raising margins and profits as it does tax dollars, employment and social services.  If mediocre retailers, restaurants and services fail in the face of increased competition, their customers were obviously willing to pay more for better quality and the incumbents blew it.

A good suburb, can no more rest on its laurels than can a good business or rock star.  Life is a competition and there are winners and losers.  When the flight attendant says, “Put Your Own Face Mask on Before Helping the Person Next to You,” she is not kidding.  We all owe it to ourselves, our clients, employees and our vendors to make ourselves healthy and as successful as possible.   Tell me what you think below.

Dear Clients, Colleagues and Friends,

Do you need a jolt to shake out of your ownership doldrums? Use the virtual world to generate some of your own buzz. Recently, I was bemoaning what a boring and challenging a month October had been when:

• My business was named a HB100 winner here  where I ranked 7th!
• Last month’s www.birolsblog.com post was featured by Carnival of the Capitalists, the web’s premier reviewer of business blogs
• A clip from my recent NYC speech appeared on YouTube Link
• I was contacted by a Vietnamese publisher who wants to translate my book, The Five Catalysts of Seven Figure Growth and market it in his country.

(WITAFYB) What’s In These Anecdotes For Your Business?

With and through Web2.0, if you share your message and value, the Internet continuously and economically promotes your expertise and your business.

Are you interested in a new idea for doing this in your business? Ask me below and I will respond with an idea for you!