Now the huge advantage of PR
is that there are no direct cost as you face in advertising.
In advertising you pay for an audience.
With PR you don't pay directly for that editorial coverage.
It's nominally free.
Secondly, it's highly credible.
So when Wired magazine writes an editorial piece about Terrapass, somehow that's much
more credible, and I think rightly so, to the potential customer
than if they were to see an advertisement in Wired magazine by Terrapass.
Third, you have instant reach.
So because your content appears in a media outlet with an existing audience,
you're able to automatically reach that large existing audience, and
that's also a huge advantage.
And lastly, you have very high engagement with the target of the media.
Think about this, if somebody spends the time to read an editorial article,
read a piece of content in a magazine, they might engage for 20 minutes.
Compare that to the two seconds or less
that they'll give to an advertisement that appears in the pages of that magazine.
So those are the reasons that PR is fantastically useful
as a key tool for an entrepreneur in growing his or her business.
Now unfortunately, there are two negatives to PR.
The first is, that it's very hard to scale it reliably or easily.
You can't just turn on money and expect to have PR happen.
And a closely related negative is that it's relatively unpredictable.
So you can put in resources, you can do your best to build a PR campaign, and
you might not get results or you might not get them when you think you'll get them.
And furthermore,
you don't have direct control over how the content actually appears.
So on balance, the pros drastically outweigh the cons.
Nevertheless, it's unfortunately not something you can just scale
automatically, and you do have to deal with some intrinsic uncertainty.
Now, there are three main benefits to having PR, to state the obvious.
The first is direct customer awareness.
Those targets of the media, who read your content or
who view your content or who view editorial content that mentions you,
become aware of your product, and that's typically your goal.
And so that's the primary benefit, is that direct customer awareness.
But almost as important, mentions in the media and
the resulting documentation on the Internet feeds other media.
It feeds both professional media, that is, other journalists who are looking for
content and who find initial ideas for
that content online, but it also feeds social media.
So the fact that you appear in an article in a magazine or online often becomes
the subject of Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, WeChat posts, Twitter posts.
And so it serves as fuel for social media, that is, for nonprofessional media.
And then the last reason it's so valuable is for
search engine optimization and organic search on the Internet.
Having your content published online increases the domain authority
of your own web properties to the extent that those publications linked to you.
And it enhances the reputation of your brand and your products and
your domain from the perspective of search engines.
So for those three reasons, direct customer awareness, feed in other media,
and search engine optimization, PR is tremendously valuable.
Let me make a few comments about PR, and about caveats and
issues that you need to consider as you think about PR and your PR strategy.
The first is that there's a kind of a media food chain out there,
meaning there are some media outlets that are much more valuable than others.
And then there a lot of less valuable media outlets that feed
on the output of the high-prestige media outlets.
So at the very top of the food chain are publications like the New York Times,
the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal.
These are media outlets with tremendous credibility in the minds of the public and
tremendously large subscription bases.
Maybe more important than their direct subscription bases are the fact that
all the smaller media outlets follow the top of the food chain.
And if something appears in the New York Times,
it will either be directly syndicated in other sites, or
other journalists and content authors will contact you
because they want to cover things that were covered first in the New York Times.
Next on the food chain are influential bloggers on the Internet,
influential and authoritative Internet-only publications.
A good example of this would be the Huffington Post.
Blogs that appear on the Huffington Post are viewed as highly credible,
highly influential.
Next down would be Internet sites like product review sites,
magazines that do product reviews, that so-called curate new products or
services, that build awareness for new companies in the broader readership.
They're sort of next on the food chain.
And the very bottom of the food chain would be what I would call the click
bait websites, that is, the websites that are out there on the Internet
whose primary purpose is to attract people who are searching for
search terms and to get them to click on advertising.
Those in general are not too valuable for you.
They're the very bottom of the media food chain.
The second point I want to make about
PR is that if you put yourself in the perspective of the journalist,
what the journalist most cares about is that the story is interesting.
The journalist is looking for readers, and the journalist wants his or
her readers to be highly engaged and interested.
So let me give you an example.
I recently became aware of a startup called Sword & Plough.
The founder of Sword & Plough is Emily Nunez Cavness.
And Emily is an active duty military officer in
the US Army who has served in Afghanistan.
And what Sword & Plough does is takes extra
product that's used in US military, so typically extra fabric
that would be use to produce military apparel and military gear.
And Sword & Plough turns that surplus fabric into consumer goods,
into apparel and bags.
Thus the name Sword & Plough, which refers to the biblical reference of turning
swords into ploughshares, or turning military uses into domestic uses.
Now what's more interesting than a story about an active
duty woman in the US Army who served in Afghanistan,
who's looking for a way to take surplus military fabric and
turn it into consumer goods and who has founded a company called Sword & Plough?
That is an irresistible story for a journalist, because it has an interesting
narrative flow, it has an unexpected twist to it, and it has this integration
of the concept of the business Sword & Plough and the background of the founder.
The story is intrinsically interesting, and
Emily is going to have a much easier time getting PR than someone who is selling
enterprise software that's incrementally better than the existing
products out there and who doesn't have such a similarly engaging story.
The next point I want to talk about is PR firms.
I think the knee-jerk reaction of most people when they think about PR is that
they need to hire a PR professional, and there are many such professionals.
But I want to just alert you to the reality of that.
First of all, PR firms are quite expensive, and
they work on retainer typically.
So a small company would typically expect to pay between $5,000 and
$10,000 US per month to retain a PR firm.
That typically makes that cost somewhat prohibitive for a new startup.
And so using a PR firm often has to wait until you've
got sustainable revenues and/or venture capital funding.
What you're buying with a PR firm is relationships.
You're buying a relationship that the PR professional already has with journalists.
And that PR professional will essentially use that trusted relationship to introduce
your company to the media outlets that are likely to be most receptive to the story.
I personally wouldn't bother with the cut-rate PR services out there.
There are some cheap plans that maybe will charge you a few hundred dollars
per month.
But I think in this case you do get what you pay for.
Those firms are likely just going to send a lot of junk email to media lists,
and you're not likely to get a great response in terms of the quality of
the outlets where they reside on the media food chain.
Now the exception to that would be in some cases you can find a solo practitioner,
perhaps someone who's gone out on his or her own after leaving an established PR
firm, who is scrappy and resourceful and would perhaps welcome a retainer
of a few thousand dollars a month from a startup in order to build a portfolio.
That might work out for you.
But by and large, I think most startups, particularly in the early stages,
are going to end up having to do the PR on their own.
Now the good news is that doing the PR on your own isn't an entirely bad thing.
And I want to just give you my own experience as a radio host.
So I've had the somewhat unusual experience of both trying to pitch PR
stories to journalist as an entrepreneur and being myself a journalist as a radio
host on an entrepreneurship show that we broadcast on Wharton Business Radio.
