With over 20 years background working with top leaders from all industries … from internationally acclaimed musical artists to unknown brilliant experts … I’ve helped hundreds of experts, authors, entrepreneurs, executives, mavericks, non-profit groups, politicians, musical artists reach millions of people through the use of non-advertising means.

I hope you find my musings on pr, marketing, influence, publicity and current events useful in your own mission to expand your influence by creating a buzz.

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The Importance of Differentation

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Tags: Personal Branding

No two dentists are the same.

No two marketing approaches are the same.

No two shoe brands are the same.

No two individuals within the same profession will deliver the same service.

The ability to tell one from the other is the key to successful communicating.

When you’re communicating about yourself to a marketplace, your words need to resonate with your prospect. Your prospect needs to say “hey .. that’s for me!”

Whether you’re writing copy for a postcard or creating phrases for a Google Adword campaign, how do you verbalize what it is that your market is looking for that differentiates you?

A Gucci bag in the end isn’t much different in quality, design and construction than many other less expensive brands. It’s got a reputation. It’s got a “perceived value” over and above the mere materials and design.

Building your reputation is what differentiates you. It’s not an overnight process, but it doesn’t have to take long. Part of it is creating a “perceived value” over and above the actual service or product.

You want to be the Gucci or Nordstrom’s of your industry? Differentiate. It’s not complicated, nor does it require diabolical genius. It’s a process of examining what you do, analyzing what your customers have said about you, and your competition and identifying what’s different. The perceived value is often not something you might recognize yourself. Sometimes I discover it from reading testimonials or talking to my client’s customers.

When you differentiate, you lose a lot of concern over competition. Why? Because when you do it right and define how your company or product is different, and the value that’s perceived about you, you have a strength you can build on. You’re different.

Further, when you identify which market will appreciate and pay for your difference, you’re attracting the customers you want.

What makes one dentist a better service provider for a woman over fifty who needs rehabilitative work? When the dentist who has years of experience working with that exact demographic with rave results is being compared with a dentist just learning, there’s no contest. As long as she knows about the more experienced dentist, she’ll choose him, right? She’ll probably even fly across the country to get the experienced service provider.

Differentiate. Make it real. And then promote the heck out of it.

That’s personal branding.

Will KFC’s Tweak to Their Image Attract New Customers?

Posted on May 16, 2009 | Tags: Personal Branding

KFC, along with other fast food chains, is hopping on the health bandwagon ….as best a fast food restaurant can. T’was a time when no one thought twice about eating fried foods, but today there’s an entire strata of folks, myself included, who will never see the inside of any restaurant that’s got the word “fried” in its name.

With more people flocking to fast food restaurants during leaner economic times, my bet is KFC will win big and attract customers who normally wouldn’t patronize its stores. The company’s challenge is to “unthink KFC”. That’s’ right: forget what the “F” stands for and try it’s grilled chicken (which actually isn’t grilled, but baked in a convection oven and then stamped with grill marks.)

Pretty bold. But then again, what else do you do when the word “fried” is in your name that you’ve spent so much to advertise? Worth tracking this one to see how this experiment in altering your personal branding impacts the company’s revenues.

PR at its Worst

Posted on April 16, 2009 | Tags: pr, public relations

There’s a dark side to PR that no one talks about. And probably, you’re the victim of it every day and don’t even know it. But I believe there’s a lesson here to learn about the power of PR, even when used to manipulate.

I remember as a teenage student moving to Boston and witnessing the skill of a playing-card sleight of hand expert in Boston Garden. For a few dollars you’d play the game of selecting a card and guessing which hand it wound up in after it moved back and forth before your eyes. At a speed faster than the eye could track, what was there one moment was gone the next. What I thought I saw was only an illusion.

In the world of politics, this technique is used to sway populations into believing one set of ideas represents another. It’s PR at its worst.

Take the recent example of the National Tea Party that took place last night at hundreds of venues around the country. In downtown St Louis thousands of people gathered to protest the tax burden being created by the proposed federal budget.

Days before the event, a report was issued by the Department of Homeland Security warning of a growing movement of “right wing extremists.” A footnote attached to the report defined “right wing extremists” to include “groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority or groups and individuals dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

In other words, anyone who understands that the Constitution calls for a limited federal government that doesn’t usurp state authority or someone exercising their right of freedom of speech is a possible “extremist.”

Without ever referring to the group, this report set in place a chain reaction to discredit the Tea Party movement. It was intepreted on major news outlets and in the end, the uninvolved viewer or reader swallowing their daily news prescription without question, would associate the Tea Party rally with extremists.

In actuality, attendees at the Tea Party in St Louis spanned every ethnic and generation. There were men and women in professional attire, grandparents dressed in button down sweaters and a youngsters in jeans. There were Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Middle-Easterners. As we navigated the crowd, people smiled at one another. These were people you’d find living next door, working at your bank or servicing your lawn.

This was mid-America. Now redefined as “right wing extremists” if one is to use the definition in the DHS report of a group “dedicated to a single issue.” In this case, the issue is tax reform.

This technique to discredit favors no political party. Pitting one group against another is old enough to read about in history books. Its outcome, of course, is to allow power brokers to exercise their agenda while the masses fight each other. Similar tactics were used under the Bush Administration to quell those in protest of the Iraq War by casting anti-war sympathies as unpatriotic. Conservative media icons took the bait and passed the message far and wide. And even what is referred to as “the liberal media establishment” went along. Today, liberal media personalities slander those not in favor of government debt and largesse as out of touch radicals or poor losers. Under Ronald Reagan, these ideals were considered patriotic. Today, they’re “extreme.”

PR tools used at the top of the food chain manipulate press, leaders and populations. Define the strategy, create the messages, publish the messages, ally opinion leaders and repeat the message in as many ways and on as many channels as necessary to change behavior.

The Right does it to the Left and the Left to the Right. Just the other night I watched a conservative talk show host represent his own interpretation of a national news story as fact. The same occurred watching a liberal talk show host do the same. I stopped watching both of them.

It was interesting to note that the one local St Louis network news channel I saw last night carried no coverage of the Tea Party event. Thousands of people peacefully demonstrated on tax day but their lead stories were of a small fire and the flow of traffic at the post office.

Does the “Budget Rolls-Royce” Need a Little PR Help?

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Tags: pr, public relations

Some press are reporting Rolls-Royce’s new smaller, less expensive model is the company’s response to the world-wide recession, even calling it the “Recession Rolls.” The facts are that current economic circumstances have nothing to do with the development of the 200EX.

Rolls-Royce has been working on the smaller, less expensive model for the last few years and announced in 2006 that it would be released in 2010. The car will sell for around $250,000, about $100,000 less than its standard model. Its designer predicted the car would be purchased by those who owned the larger model but preferred to also drive a smaller one, comparing the ownership to having a tuxedo and a business suit.

Since tracking media consumption by ultra high net-worth individuals is difficult, the brand’s PR firm has engaged non-traditional advertising and customer events for its strategy. Fine, but when a company like Rolls-Royce releases a brand new model at the Geneva car show, the PR needs to ensure major press like the Wall Street Journal

have the story straight. After all, the section reporting on the car in the WSJ was The Wealth Report, who dubbed it the “budget Rolls-Royce. And that readership and publication does reach high net worth individuals.

The poor coverage probably won’t affect sales to that market. But hey, why not have Rolls-Royce PR coverage?

Panic-Driven News Offers No Solution

Posted on January 29, 2009 | Tags: Commentary

I subscribe to Dan Kennedy’s marketing newsletter each month. For those who don’t’ know him, Dan’s the author of many books on marketing, sales and business. This month’s issue opened with a partial list of retail store closings slated for this year. Ann Taylor, 117 stores; Gap 85 stores, Foot Locker 140 stores, Bombay 384 stores. And the list goes on, totalling nearly 2,000.

However, in the spirit of American entrepreneurship that Dan embodies, he points out the opportunities presented by this news.

First, Dan predicts a “renaissance of the independently owned, local business.” Secondly, the epic shift of retail distribution to ecommerce will simply accelerate, presenting massive opportunity for online retailers (affiliates?)

Rather than react to the constant diet of bad news offered by mainstream media, Kennedy offers a different perspective to the entrepreneur-minded. After all, before the days of easy credit weren’t we all just a bit tougher? Toughness, and ability to sell and seize opportunity rather than wallow in defeat is the American entrepreneurial mindset that that is the backbone of our economy. Listening exclusively to the mainstream media exclusively would defeat that mindset.

If the news reports are to be believed, there’s just no hope and we’re heading for bread lines. But wait: aren’t these the same folks who stood by and said nothing while subprime mortgages were handed out like candy at Halloween? Aren’t these the same folks who supported the administration’s march into war with nary a word of question? And aren’t these are the same folks who exhaustively covered escalating gas prices and then ignored gas prices as a story when the plummeted?

True journalism no longer exists in most mainstream media coverage. So, like the “friend”, family member or employee who constantly relays bad news, news media should be taken with a grain of salt. There’s no denying the statistics of layoffs, unemployment and tougher economic times. But a steady diet of bad news only creates panic. Panicked individuals own businesses and make bad decisions.

Fortunately, there are CEOs and small business owners who choose to find solutions rather than panic. My friend, Joy Gendusa, CEO and founder of the Inc 500 company PostcardMania, is one such business owner. With over 160 employees, rather than panic, Joy has retooled her services in order to better compete and not laid off employees.

Shouldn’t stories like Joy’s be covered as well as the bad news?

The Seven Traits of an Expert

Posted on January 22, 2009 | Tags: Commentary

As someone who has worked with more than five hundred experts, authors, CEOs and opinion leaders from all industries, I’ve rubbed elbows with every type of expert and pr personality. Over the years I’ve observed them all to share some fundamental traits. You’ll find these traits summarized below. Read more

Writing an Ebook?

Posted on January 13, 2009 | Tags: Book Promotion

My publishing company and pr firm has a few ongoing ebook projects. In looking through the work of scores of ebook designers, the best I found is by Doug Eymere. Check out his post here at http://greyote.blogspot.com/2008/12/this-aint-no-sausage-factory.html

Why Is a PR Firm Doing Website Development?

Posted on January 12, 2009 | Tags: online pr, online public relations, pr, public relations

Back in 1998, Dan, a very successful business associate who’d retired early in life, called our PR firm to tell my partner and I about an epiphany he’d had.

“You guys have to get into website development,” he said. “Website development will eventually come to a crossroads where the PR people will be the first ones involved with the technical people when putting up a site. Though that’s not recognized right now, it soon will be.”

He described the “disconnect” between the technical and marketing departments which we know is not as much of an issue today as it was in 1998.

Despite Dan’s premonition of how website development would change, when we established Online Offline PR we never intended to get into website development. I wanted to bring the expertise of handling hundreds of campaigns for clients in every conceivable profession to the online world, with the obvious difference that the channels are quite different.

Fast forward to 2009 and we are involved in developing sites for clients. Why? Most of the reasons are in my previous post about the Top Reasons to Use Wordpress.

The most obvious reason to discourage clients to set up a site in html is that unless you have html knowledge, you need a programmer for every change and input.

Wordpress was designed for the non-tekkie. It was originally used for blogs and as recently as six months ago you could spot a site built in Wordpress as readily as a Texan in China. Today, we build sites in Wordpress that look no different than an html site. Since Wordpress is SEO friendly right out of the box, you’re already getting noticed faster than an html site owner.

Our in-house SEO and technical experts predict that building sites in html will go the way of the horse and buggy. Some large companies now using Wordpress, such as the Post Office and Ford Motor Company, to name a few.

Top 5 Reasons to Switch to Wordpress

Posted on January 7, 2009 | Tags: online pr, online public relations

First time website owners or those looking to upgrade their older site won’t go wrong using the Wordpress platform. Here’s the Top Reasons to Use Wordpress. I’ve avoided the use of tech-speak, so for those tekkies, pardon our avoidance of terminology.

1.The search engines will recognize your site much faster. With other platforms, it can take a while for a new site to be found by Google, Yahoo or MSN. Not so with Wordpress. Right out of the box, your site is friendlier to search engines. That means your prospective customers will find you much faster.

2. You can change and update content easily. In the old days, you had your tech person put up your site and considered it done. That doesn’t work today. You need to constantly add fresh content to keep up with the game and Wordpress is so user friendly that you can do it yourself. Our clients get a one-on-one orientation tutorial with Trevor, our wordpress wizard. From that point on, adding or deleting content from their site is as easy as using a word processor.

3. Free Training and Support. Unlike the static website platforms that require “html” knowledge, if you want to become independent of any technical help to maintain your site, there’s all the free help you can get online. You can find documentation and online forums where you can post just about any question and get help. Most of my clients don’t have the time for this, so we offer ongoing maintenance support and/or tutorial with Trevor, our wordpress wizard.

4. The design capabilities are unlimited. If you have a static html site right now, we can switch it over to the more search engine friendly Wordpress format and keep your same design. The only difference is you’ll have the ability to update it more easily and your site will play better with the search engines. No matter what you want your site to look like, it can be done in Wordpress.

5. It’s versatile. Websites have come of age with regard to their ability to influence your offline business. 75% of people now say a company’s website influences their buying decisions. Video, audio, written word, pictures …. all of these convey the message and image needed to influence your prospects. With Wordpress, all of these mediums are possible.

Limited Offer ‘Till Jan 31. Right now Online Offline PR is offering a custom designed Wordpress site that’s got all of the search engine ready gadgets and tracking gizmos already loaded on it for $1197. That’s like buying a laptop with Microsoft Office pre-loaded. It also includes a walk-you-through- the-site tutorial over the phone with Trevor and the guidance of a twenty-year veteran PR (that’s me). Contact me before January 31st if you’re interested.

Is Your Website Killing Your Sales?

Posted on January 6, 2009 | Tags: pr, public relations

Using PR tools like positioning and being real to your intended customer is part of ensuring all that effort and money spent to drive traffic isn’t wasted on a site that’s turning away would-be customers.

Per actual survey 75% of web users are making judgments about your organization’s credibility based on your website alone. This is so much easier to see in a brick and mortar business. A furniture store that has inventory set out randomly with no predesigned flow for you to walk and no intended ambiance won’t convey credibility, even if the quality of their furniture compares with Ethan Allen. Today’s website now have the same demanded of them.

The excellent book Web Design for ROI tells much more of the story.

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• Recent Posts

  • The Importance of Differentation
  • Will KFC’s Tweak to Their Image Attract New Customers?
  • PR at its Worst
  • Does the “Budget Rolls-Royce” Need a Little PR Help?
  • Panic-Driven News Offers No Solution
  • The Seven Traits of an Expert
  • Writing an Ebook?
  • Why Is a PR Firm Doing Website Development?
  • Top 5 Reasons to Switch to Wordpress
  • Is Your Website Killing Your Sales?

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