Make an Invoice for Public Relations with Ease and Efficiency

Make an invoice for Public Relations

Love talk radio are you ready to take a bite out of the competition are you looking for ideas to make your business better welcome to the Core Business show with Tim Decay sponsored by Apple Capital groups at the core of every successful business you'll find people making a difference and with each episode of The Core Business show we talk with those people examine those ideas and explore the strategies that make them special now the host of The Core Business show Tim jackay [Music] good morning and welcome to another episode of The Core Business show I'm Tim jakaya host today our topic is public relations 101 for the entrepreneur and my special guest today is Greg pitkov he is the owner and CEO for his company grip Communications in Brooklyn New York if you have any questions I invite you to call in at 347-324-3460 or pose a question in the chat room and I'll read it on the air Greg welcome to the program uh thank you it's so wonderful to be here great I guess to start off with can you tell us about yourself audience like get a personal view about the person themselves then versus reading the bio so if you might just go take a minute here and share us who you are that sounds great I've actually been in public relations now for just about 16 years following a 10-year period when I was in trade publishing writing about a wide breadth of small businesses including convenience stores and pet stores and liquor stores gas stations car washes tobacconists a pretty a pretty wide range of small businesses I did that for about a decade and then I made the jump across the desk as I like to say into public relations where I have for the last 16 years actually continued largely to focus on that same audience the small business operator well tell us in a nutshell what is public relations and why is it so important for businesses today I think public relations is a really great tool for any business that's looking to establish and build on its business it really it lets the world know and in particular your potential customers and their key influencers uh that you exist why they need what you offer why they need it from you and why they should come back for more on the other side it also hopefully in cases that are infrequent can help you set the record straight during times of confusion or controversy whether those are about your company in particular or perhaps the industry that you work in or your market so it's a great tool to help communicate with the people a who will ultimately be your customers and be including the media but also broader than that those people who will be influencing your potential customers do you think it is a need for we look at PR we look for the big boys or the celebrities or the someone's on Alliance do you think that also for the entrepreneur they need to take that in part of the consideration as they grow their company and come to the marketplace do they need PR is that what you're asking yeah if they well not necessarily an epr how should I take PR for the small owner company who makes a million dollars a year like you just mentioned a few minutes ago regarding crisis management sure someone to address that how can a business incorporate this even if they have a limited budget PR into their program sure I like to look at PR in two ways one proactively and two reactively so certainly in many cases when you're dealing with crisis Communications it's going to be on the reactive side no you should try and take as proactive as stance as you possibly can but PR can really be an effective tool for a business of any size and of any age I think the most important things to to realize are number one understanding what PR is and I always like to point out for instance when I talk to my custom my potential clients or even my existing clients that there's a big distinction between public relations and advertising advertising and they're both very effective tools and I also think in many cases they're more effective they're done in tandem with one another advertising tells typically your message in your word you've created that message you are finding places whether it's an air commercial or a printed you're finding places where you're paying to place that message and it's essentially being broadcast in your own words on the other side of the table public relations Endeavors to get your story told by an objective third party that audiences might be more inclined to believe and while there are an increasing number of sites out there that will post your press materials verbatim fortunately there are still a lot of sites out there where there's reporters who are going to take the time to dig deeper and tell the story in their own words and the result of that's going to be a more meaningful story but one in which your story is subject to their interpretation so I think that any company can embark on an effective public relations program and it really involves just understanding what public relations Is and going in prepared one of the first things I always like to ask my clients and Prospects when we're initially preparing to do a program of public relations Is do they understand what their objectives are what they specifically want to achieve with a PR effort for small business some of the options could be location awareness that's not always going to be the important it depends on the nature of the business some businesses for instance that might be more web driven are not so location specific and that is not a key objective of their campaigns but awareness particularly to let potential customers know that you exist and what you offer appreciation of what you offer and why you know your business what you have to offer is better than the one down the street you can also use public relations to promote special events for greater results or introduce a new service if you have an improved facility you've appointed somebody new into the company who's going to be an asset both to you and to your customers there's a lot of messages that can be communicated effectively through public relations wow so if you take public relations and you take your marketing is it a branch of marketing or is just I think it's okay I have clients for whom public relations is the primary if not exclusive means of communicating with the outside world in more cases and if you look just within the the marketing Community you'll see that more and more agencies are becoming what's called an integrated marketing agency meaning that they have multiple concentrations and multiple Departments of services that they combine to work not independent of one another but actually uh come together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and so it's definitely a component of an effective marketing campaign it has the landscape a change within the last probably the last 30 years from the last century to this entry what are the major changes in PR is it still the same or is this is a lot different today than it was I wouldn't even look back that far I would look back the last 12 months and say that the landscape has changed drastically wow I mean you look at the proliferation of of the digital world and all the different ways that has opened up for us to communicate with one another you have several things happening number one you have the ability much greater ability for for companies to go directly to their customers and at the same time you have the ability for other people to go directly to those companies customers so you have both kind of a blessing and a burden you have the opportunity to speak more directly with your customers but you also have to be aware of and in some cases very Vigilant of what other people are saying about you so that you can effectively manage image the communication of correct information the other side of that is that traditional media as we know it as we have known it for quite some time has changed a great deal you're seeing a nutrition within the categories fewer daily newspapers fewer fewer broadcasts and you're starting to see even on the staffs of those companies fewer full-time staff people so a lot of times you'll be working with a freelancer and in some cases they may not be they may not have as in-depth knowledge of your subject matter as somebody who's been on staff for a long time you see that a lot more for instance in cases for instance of trade magazines where they one time may have had an editor associate editors assistant editors and there were a lot of people there who were writing different types of stories but they were all very very narrowly focused on a particular category of business and they really know it quite well and now they may be hiring Freelancers who might write about that subject for a lot of Publications but in other cases they may write about that subject for one publication and a completely different subject for another publication so they're often learning with you and it kind of makes it more incumbent upon either myself as the public relations representative or the company if they are working directly with that reporter to hopefully communicate the information accurately do you think we're gonna Roy the Advent or are we in the the sense of we can't really control what things are said tonight we don't have these primary resources like we had before all these editors as newspapers clothes and this go all viral digital is that really skewing the way we actually learn our information about the product because you can have part of this product maybe an outline of is not really true then you have to pull these pieces together to make the holes doesn't make any sense absolutely I mean you have to be and it's difficult obviously a small business operator only has so much time on their hands so that's why a public relations agency if they're large enough to support having one can help in that regard but there are things that they can do as well to monitor what's being said about them and try to manage it to a certain degree some of those things include tools like Google Alerts Google allows you to go in and set up what's called an alert where you're essentially entering keywords and telling Google that every time they come across those keywords to notify you I do that for all of my clients and so I will typically put in the name of the client and just like you're doing a Google Search and perhaps the a keyword or two about what I would typically be talking about that client so as an example one of my clients the green turtle which is a sports bar and casual dining restaurant I would put the names of green turtle and since I typically work with them to help promote franchise opportunities for them I might put the green turtle and franchising and I would be notified every time something like that comes up but I also would want to track just generally about what people are saying about the green turtle so that I can make sure that that's that I'm aware of that and addressing it properly similarly you can enter keywords in I use tweet deck for my Twitter feed and I can I have columns set up where I can monitor what people are saying about my different clients you know do Google searches at will basically to see if there's things out there so that's kind of how to be at least aware of what's being said the best thing that a company can do to try and get the right thing said is going back to what I said earlier going on the proactive approach to try and get the message out there so I'm certainly still focusing on traditional media Outlets getting together press materials and making sure that you have a good open dialogue wherever possible with the media so that they're receptive to your information if they for instance get a hold of a story that they're hopefully contacting you for your side of the story but also if you are looking to send them information you'll have a new announcement or you're simply trying to promote a specific aspect of your business that people may not be as aware of that they're going to be receptive to you sending that information and the best thing you can do is to take the time to write it down in a press release or the just a fact sheet so that you've had a chance to really review those messages make sure they're what you want to say and you know that you know if you have successfully reached them via fax or email or mail that you've gotten you know your words into their hands and that's your best foot forward okay so it's the proactive approach get yourself out there ahead of time to build yourself some Equity out there before something actually comes up in one sense it's traditional me there is a still effective today I think so absolutely you have plenty of people out there who are stopping to read papers and even if they're reading them online they're still reading them you get for instance local news broadcast news I you see a lot more of the local Broadcast News becoming more feature oriented and so they're doing more stories about specific subjects and that's a good opportunity for some businesses that are looking to promote themselves because if you can position yourself either position yourself as an expert in a particular area or using your expertise trying to draw their attention to an issue that's important it might be an opportunity for you to get a story onto your local news as an example one of my clients which is a healthcare advocacy Network called i-core a lot of times one of the one of the areas of specialty that they have is a deal of cases of Elder Financial abuse where somebody has abused the right of one of their family members or someone they're taking care of and perhaps taking money that should be in control of that individual and redirecting it for their own benefit and so we've been able to approach members of the media and say we have this is a case that a situation that is becoming more rampant we're hearing more and more about it in the media we'd love to offer you our expert to talk about how to identify the situation and how to try to address it so that's you're seeing more opportunities and I think the traditional media for things like that to happen as well okay so the business owner kind of educate themselves on how to manage a PR firm like yours because it's just can't be one-dimensional he can be on his own world and say okay I'm gonna leave everything up to the big boys let them handle it and I won't do anything is anything that the business owners need to be involved and keep be mindful of because it's a two-way communication if that's making sense because some of you know I think that uh hey just go the uh I I always tell my clients this is not a situation where you you are going to hand off some information or a particular objective to me and then disappear and come back in a month or six months or whatever it is and see what I've done this is going to be where I am going to take the information from you and I'm going to need you to have a spokesperson who I can go to and I want to put the media in touch with that person because the media doesn't want to speak with me in most cases they want to speak with somebody who represents the actual business and they want to hear the people who are at the front lines talking about how this is really affecting the world that we live in or the world that media is covering so it's really important that the client or that a company has designated a spokesperson who is going to be available to to talk to the media and along those same lines some of the important things to do to make that an effective uh tool for you is a to establish key messages that you want to try to deliver every time you can that are all directed at achieving a particular objective and B taking a step back before any interview and look at several factors to see how you can optimize the outcome of that those factors include where are we today what are we trying to achieve what is this media Outlet who do they reach what are of our several potential objectives which are the best objectives or the objectives we can most likely achieve by working with this particular media outlet and then what are the key messages we want to therefore deliver to this audience in order to achieve those objectives perfect we're going to be back in a moment we're going to take a station break again we'll be listening to the Core Business public relations one-on-one for the entrepreneur with Greg pickoff we'll be back in a moment you're listening to the Core Business Show sponsored by Apple Capital group Apple Capital group in Jacksonville Florida is a commercial lender that specializes in asset-based loans equipment leasing and financing invoice financing commercial real estate loans and asset-based financing in the U.S and Canada Apple Capital group is a direct lender that lends on their private Equity Investment Portfolio ninety percent of most loans are decided within two hours and vendor funding within 24 hours after documents are completed with a one-page application no slow no's just a quick decision and a fast yet to get more information about lending from Apple Capital group call 866-611-7457 that's [Music] 866-611-7457 to speak with one of our loan Specialists or visit us right now at applecapitalgroup.com [Music] welcome back to the core once again here's Tim Japan well welcome back everybody again public relations one-on-one for the entrepreneur with Greg pikoff hey I guess the next part of this is really before we talk about your company is Crisis management for a company when there's a crisis out there if a person gives a bad review it I mean it's electric it goes across the internet if a few people say something bad about you and like for example this is now five o'clock you're gone for the day you don't know what's going to happen even Google Alerts won't kick in for a while and all of a sudden you have a huge problem when you walk in your door on Monday all these bad reviews over the Internet how can a company protect themselves do they have to be on lurk 24 hours a day I think certainly if they're a small business they yeah most people as an operator of a small business myself I know that I I am open 24 7. I am constantly I have my iPhone or by my side I'm monitoring what's happening every waking hour and I mean you do need to step back obviously but you know if there is if you're in a situation where the type of business you have is one that is liable to five o'clock Friday crises you definitely need to be monitoring for that I think some of the important things that you can do to help kind of hedge your bet in situations like that is to have a crisis Communications plan in place among the key components of that would be for every person who is a potential representative of your company to be aware of what the crisis communication chain or what the chain of communication is meaning you do not want somebody down at the front lines whom may not know all the information talking to the media and everybody in your company needs to know that should they be approached by the media they need to let the media know this is the person I'm not authorized to speak about this subject if you would like information about this here is the person to contact and everybody should have the ability to give that information out immediately so that the media do gets directed to the right person who can give the correct information you don't want misinformation going out there the other thing is to make sure that you have if you know about the situation in advance definitely prepare statements that do not go so much on the defensive but really do address the truth and get it across appropriately but really focus in on the facts that are important for people to understand in order for you to have again your side of the story told you want to make sure that I've had situations for instance where one of my clients had which is a franchise chain had a an individual location where one of their customers had launched a huge smear attack against them they had created a Facebook page a website email chain you name it every means of communications that they could find they were sending out information opinionated information about this company to try and get back at the company for what they felt was mistreatment and I was brought in at a point where the operator of that location was planning to defend himself by addressing every item that this person was putting out there on an item by item basis and I counseled them that that is absolutely not you don't want to get into that type of a battle because Battle of words in Prince you just never can win because someone will always continue to turn it and twist it and you'll just not be able to get your message across the most important thing to do is to look at the city situation overall and put forth your standard policies your state of policies and talk about whatever steps you are taking to address the situation if in fact it is something that you are responsible for okay so a plan needs to be in place and should now most people just refer to attorney for to an attorney so you really need to have an attorney and APR person on your team I like to if it's depending on the type of situation I will often ask my client if they have a situation arise whether they have spoken first to their attorney and what they've been advised by their attorney is the appropriate course to take and once they have defined what that is then what a public relations firm can do is help to make sure that that you stay that course that you get the message out that is in ance with that Council from your legal representation perfect okay let's talk about your company and the services you provide if you don't mind kind of give us the type of products and services you offer and some of the projects you worked on sure I have developed a specialty over the last 16 years working with a lot of franchise companies in fact I've worked with more than two dozen different franchise systems in that time everything from food companies like Dunkin Donuts and Baskin-Robbins and Krispy Kreme and Buffalo Wild Wings to Automotive chains like Texaco Valvoline and children Car Care and some retail chains like 1800flowers.com Partyland and Fannie Mae chocolates and for those types of companies all of which would pretty much fall into the small business category at least in terms of their units obviously some of these companies also have large business big Corporation type Communications challenges as well but on the front lines they have a small business Communications needs and that's where I often come in and for most of those companies what I have done is help them get exposure that enables them to attract a very specific type of customer being those people who might be interested in opening up additional locations becoming franchisees but in addition to that in many cases two other areas that I often go into are helping those individual locations establish awareness that they've opened or that they exist in a particular Market with their local communities or whoever their immediate Target audiences may be and continue to maintain that type of exposure and build on it over the course of their life as operating that business and then in addition to that hopefully again not not too often needed but where it does arise helping them address crises those crises may be internal where there might be a situation with an employee they may be external where there's customer who's not satisfied with the with the value of the product or the service that they receive or it might be just kind of community oriented I even had a case one time where I was contacted by a client who operates a children's fitness program and the media we're contacting them because in a business in the commercial real estate Development Across The Street there was going going to be a a strip bar basically that was opening and the media wanted to know if my client was aware of that and what concerns they may have and so they needed to come up with a statement about that and so that had nothing to do with their operation and even the fact that they were there first meant that it wasn't that they had chosen poorly but nonetheless the media was coming to them for information so all types of crises can arise I also work with companies that are business to business type clients where we focus much more on the business media and trade what we call vertical media so it might be specific types of businesses that we try and get exposure in front of and in addition to writing press releases and coming up with stories that we can pitch to the media that show the clients in the positive light some of the other things we might look to do are get speaking engagements for my clients help them look at trade shows that they might want to go to and maximize the opportunity he's there by trying to reach the local media or publicizing the fact that they're going to be there certainly more and more today I do a lot of work on the internet and with social media so that includes things like helping them build establish and build their networks on Twitter and Linkedin in certain cases Facebook advising them on things like Foursquare if they're a location-based business Foursquare is a very useful tool and so helping them understand how they can use that helping them understand the nuances of doing business on LinkedIn for instance it's much more than simply creating your own profile and leaving it there but it's trying to be active on there and creating new connections yourself but also trying to have a voice there by for instance belonging to various groups that LinkedIn allows you to join and participating in the conversation because that will reflect hopefully positively on you and draw attention to you in a lot of cases you really just want to do enough to get somebody interested in Who You Are by virtue of what you've posted so that they go either onto your profile or perhaps onto your website from your profile and then you've got them kind of more as a captive audience and you can do convey more information to them through those more controlled venues that you've already set up okay I have a question here which is the best news service PR web or PR wire well I've found more people a lot of people have been using PR web for various reasons I have clients who I think on one hand it really depends on who you're trying to reach I have clients who work very closely and get all their messages out via Business Wire I have other clients who prefer to use PR newswire I have for my own clients chosen to to get the message out via PR web I also use another service which is a social media release service called pitch engine I find that to be very effective I love that service actually because it enables me to not just put a press release up there but I can put all types of multimedia content in conjunction with that press release so video photos links tagline tag words and so it really creates a very effective housing for all the information relative to the to the announcements that I want to make so I think it depends on the nature of the business and more importantly I think the nature of the announcement the particular announcement not every announcement is for instance wire worthy it depends on how broadly you want to go with the announcement so what's what would be wire worthy and European major news announcements certainly would be so if you have a CEO change if you're if you have signed a major client if you are you know of nature that you are looking for funding and you've closed on a significant funding round that was something that would go over the wire if you introduce a new service some people would do that if you've gotten some people like to send things out when they've gotten accolades if they receive a third party endorsement of some kind where they have a very high ranking in a third-party industry listing or something like that people might send things out but you know if next Saturday you're holding a fundraiser or something like that's a very important message to get out but I don't know necessarily that it's something you need to use the wire to get out you would maybe want to in that case it could be very local for one thing so you might want to use other means to do that okay and the last question that when it comes to a if a small business only has a certain amount of money as a within a budget what should be the priority and if they're looking at hiring somebody or trying to build up to hire somebody for a PR to do APR well I think I think PR can often be a more if you're on a limited budget I think PR can be a very effective tool for you I have clients who have made the decision to forego spending money on Advertising other than for certain specific kind of one-time big opportunities and instead to spend the money on prpr can really help you the two different outcomes I guess that you can see from advertising and a lot of times advertising will get you immediate response although it can also help to continue to create the buzz PR is much more focused on creating a buzz and building on it and so you have long-term results so that's potentially that's a positive that the potential reluctance that some people have to go into PR is that they don't necessarily see as immediate a return on the effort so you may not see somebody picking up the phone and call your business after the first story comes out but if you haven't effect of public relations campaign and you're starting to get a lot of stories out there or you're doing more with each story that gets out there for instance I often like to post links to the stories that have already been out there to other places then you're going to start generating more and more interest and ultimately your client is going to or your company is going to benefit from that so I also think that some people can do certain things by having somebody in-house handle it a lot of companies that I work with have somebody who I work with who is an in-house person whose efforts I complement as an outside agency because I simply can't do everything themselves okay we have another question here regarding free press releases are they really effective I think they it can be if you've like I said there are places where you can post your press releases for free and they there are more and more places where that will just pick those up and run them verbatim uh I think that no matter how you get the press release out there the important thing to do is to at least establish a short list of key media that you would like to get exposure in and try to give them more than what would be available on that free press release so contacting them a lot of times for instance when I send out a press release I will send a covering email with it calling out a couple of key points from the press release to try and pick somebody's interest and offering to provide more information in the form of other materials or artwork or video or hopefully an interview with my contact so I think that they can be helpful I certainly would not rely on them solely because one of the things you really want to do as a small business operator wherever possible is to establish a good rapport with certain key media and you only are going to be able to do that by having a direct contact with them and showing them that you have something meaningful to offer as well as a really important point to make that you respect who they are and what they what they are attempting to achieve in communicating with their audiences so understanding what their outlet covers what their particular beat is what their deadline is so that when you're contacting them they're receptive to it and they can start to continually see you more and more as a reliable source well and social media plays a part of your public relations plan as it should be Forefront or it needs to be taken into consideration it definitely needs to be taken into consideration I think that I definitely use it often as I said I like to try and use things like Twitter LinkedIn and Facebook many times to take something that's already been out there and get more exposure for it by posting links to it sometimes you can use those things proactively as well to try and draw attention to something but I don't think that they can operate in a vacuum okay any last comments you have Greg I think it's really important definitely to look at public relations as a tool that that can be effective for you in trying to reach your mark your marketing and your audiences I think one of the most important things I try and tell my clients is don't expect a full front page story every time understand that your news is often most important to you and your job is to try and make it interesting enough to initially the media or the the person who's in charge of whatever Channel you want to use to communicate with your ultimate audience that they want to tell that story and then ultimately what you want to do is not just look at this as a one-off situation but try to establish a rapport with all as many good media Outlets as you can so that you can continue to go to them when you have something that you want to say and hopefully have them come to you when they need someone like you to provide interesting content for for something that they're working on perfect and lastly how to contact you your website your contact information I am at grip g r i p c o m p r.com I am on Twitter at gripcom PR that's g-r-i-p-c-o-m-p-r look me up on LinkedIn under Greg pitcoff and my email is Greg Greg at gripcompr.com and I would love to talk to anybody who'd like to learn more all right of course I got a Skype account as well right I do I actually talked to several of my clients via Skype and it's just Greg pitkov right well thank you Greg I really appreciate you coming on the program it's been a pleasure and I'd love to talk to you more at any time great Take Care thank you very much okay bye-bye again there's been another production of the Core Business show with Tim Decay everybody thank you for listening you can download this episode on iTunes or Blog Talk Radio or particle and there's several other outlets you can also get this episode from thank you for listening everybody have a great day great weekend and take care thank you for listening to the Core Business show with Tim jackay for a free quote on equipment leasing and financing visit our website applecapitalgroup.com that's applecapitalgroup.com and fill out the information to receive your free quote we hope you'll join us for our next episode and remember you can always get to the core via iTunes you'll find all our previous episodes there thanks again for listening to the Core Business show with Tim chicane [Music]