Beermat Club:
Ask Mike
Promoting and protecting require planning
Q. I started up my business last October and sell luxury nightwear on-line at www.pinkcamellia.com and through a small brochure. I would like to know more about the subject of blogging and PR as an aid to business and would be grateful if you could give me some help as to where best to look for useful information on these subjects. Are there any blogs where people with their own small business can discuss problems and hopefully find suggestions and answers? Gina Krupski.
A. To get PR for your business, you need to first decide what it is you would like to say, and then decide where you would like the coverage.
Regarding the content of your PR, it should not just be factual details about your website and service. It should be customer stories, written in the style of a novel: "Once upon a time a customer had a problem or challenge, then we intervened and provided some nightwear, and the result was the client was delighted and lived happily ever after."
You should then target the publications that you wish to appear in, a combination of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines as well as various trade journals, which address key opinion-formers.
Sending a press release to the feature editors of these papers is usually a waste of effort - most end up in the bin unless they come from a source that they know.
A much better idea is to target the freelance journalists - the publication will often provide a list of these people. These freelance journalists are always looking for feature ideas, and you can send them a short 'elevator pitch' of your customer story.
The freelancer will provide useful feedback on the merits of your story. If it's not interesting enough, they will tell you why. If they like the story, they will do the hard work of pitching it to the publication.
Blogging is a very useful way of generating PR for your business, which is cheap in financial terms but expensive in your time.
You should be careful in just using public blogs to promote your services as this can be counter-productive. Many sites have a strictly non-commercialattitude.
The best idea is to get your own customers blogging on your own site with their customer experiences. This should be strictly moderated. You should control what is published as a blog - there are some strange people out there - but should include customer problems that you have helped solve, as well as success stories.
A good blogging site is Ecademy (www.ecademy. com) where we run the Trusted Network Beermat Ecademy (www.beermat.ecademy.com) for small businesses.
Soflow (www.soflow.com) is a thriving business networking community with active and wide-ranging mailing lists.
Always On (www.alwayson-network.com) is a site for high-end global business strategy blogs. Finally, Business Bricks (www.businessbricks.co.uk) offers advice and links for small business owners.
Mike Southon, co-author of The Beermat Entrepreneur and Sales on a Beermat
First published in the Financial Times: 20th May 2006