Greetings all.
In my mad quest to attain PR enlightenment, I've been digging deep into all Ryan Holiday related stuff. I found an intro video to PR that I thought I'd share. It's part of a 2 day seminar that's selling for 200 bucks (which I'm considering buying after seeing this). It's pretty basic but I thought some other aspiring PR guys might be able to get some use out of it too:
Main takeaway lessons:
In my mad quest to attain PR enlightenment, I've been digging deep into all Ryan Holiday related stuff. I found an intro video to PR that I thought I'd share. It's part of a 2 day seminar that's selling for 200 bucks (which I'm considering buying after seeing this). It's pretty basic but I thought some other aspiring PR guys might be able to get some use out of it too:
Main takeaway lessons:
- You'll hear a lot of people say, "Just focus on making a great product and the marketing will take care of itself!" which he posits is untrue. You have to make great stuff and be a good marketer.
- A lot of people think they have to hire out a professional PR company to get in contact with blogs - this is untrue, many big PR companies will waste your time and not do things half as well as you can. Do it yourself, build your own knowledge and marketing base.
- Don't waste time going after the monolithic blogs - the old media, CNN, New York Times, etc. They're much harder to get at because you're competing with EVERYONE else for limited space and 99% of the readers probably aren't interested in your niche product...basically, they don't move the purchases like you think they do. Go after niche blogs for press hits, they're easier to get featured on and you will actually see more real purchases from these blogs. You want to focus on the things that work, not necessarily on the things that are status symbols. You want to find the influencers who move the needle in your space, not just go after the things that have been valuable for the last hundred years and we assume they still are. Test everything and only focus on what works.
- Everything Ryan writes about in his new book comes down to this one mindset shift: blogs WANT to write about you. By dropping an interesting product to write about (if framed appropriately) in their lap, you are doing THEM a favor. You've made THEM money. Bloggers are under constant pressure to churn out AS MANY interesting articles as they can. If they don't get a certain amount posted every day, they get in trouble. This isn't newsprint where they have a finite number of pages they can work people into. Ryan mentions an interview he read about George Clooney from when George was trying to become an actor. He'd been going to all of these auditions and never getting a call back, and then one day he realized that the producers are trying to fill a role - they want to hire someone. Basically one day he said to himself, look I'm solving their problem and as soon as I realized that, instead of going in and trying to impress them, he came into his auditions with the mindset that he was solving their problem.
JUST THAT DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD CHANGED EVERYTHING FOR HIM!
- Don't be afraid to piss people off. Challenge things, do interesting things. Know who your audience is so that you can cater to them, and then you can say these other people don't matter so I can use them to my advantage. What you always have to remember is that it's a vicious fight for attention out there, there's all this stuff going on and you have to break through the noise with what you're doing. Putting out a press release about some minor thing isn't going to break through. Don't be afraid to stir up water to catch a fish. Don't be afraid to push people's buttons, because that's how you're going to break through. Find out who your critics are, find out what assumptions you're challenging, and embrace those things.
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