Eric Yaverbaum, Robert Bly, Ilise Benun. Public Relations for Dummies, 2nd Edition

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Before running any promotional contest, run all the copy and materials by

your attorney. Contests and sweepstakes are regulated by laws, and noncom-

pliance can give you the kind of PR you wish you never had.

Figure 6-1:

Message-

in-a-bottle

release for

Jose

Cuervo.

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Working for a Worthy Cause

If you’re going to help others, do so creatively. Merely giving sums of money

to charity — even if you’re giving large sums — gets you little PR bang for the

buck. It’s best to avoid commonplace charitable acts and invest your time

and energy creating other, more unique ways to give that can help a group or

cause and provide a great benefit for the recipient while promoting your

brand or corporate image.

Here’s one example: Domino’s Pizza in Washington DC wanted to raise money

for, and awareness about, the growing homelessness in that market. The

main tactic used in their PR campaign was to print — directly on the pizza

boxes — educational information about homelessness plus contact informa-

tion to encourage donations to several large shelters in the area. But that

effort alone was not enough to generate mass media coverage.

We also recruited the late Frank Meeks, the local Domino’s franchisee who

owned and operated 60 extremely successful franchises in that market, to

spend a couple nights in one of these homeless shelters. The media covered

that, every night and morning he was there, raising both funds and awareness.

Rhinotek, a manufacturer of ink cartridges for laser printers and fax machines,

based its brand on the rhinoceros. Rhinos are featured on product packaging

and promotional giveaways, such as rhino mouse pads. Even when it comes to

charitable donations, Rhinotek reinforces its brand by donating a percentage

of the profits from every product purchased to help preserve the rhino as a

species. By detailing its charitable contributions in brochures given to deal-

ers, not only does the charity benefit, but the brand benefits as well.

If you choose a worthy cause because you really do want to help, not because

you want the publicity, you may wonder whether you should follow through

with publicizing the donation. The question to ask yourself is this: Will the

media exposure help the charity? If so, then you should follow through. Often,

a charity values the simple exposure it gets, because it’s more exposure than

it would receive otherwise.

Tying In to a Holiday

Relating your campaign either to a holiday (Valentine’s Day, Halloween,

Thanksgiving, Christmas) or to an event (National Secretary’s Week, Elvis

Presley’s birthday) works because it increases your odds of getting coverage.

You must be talking to the press at a time when the press cares, is looking for

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material, and will listen. So if you reach out with an idea related to Valentine’s

Day on February 12 (not the 17th) you’re more likely to be covered.

The aphrodisiac survey campaign (reprinted later in this chapter) tying in

with Valentine’s Day for AllHerb.com, an herb and nutritional supplement

e-commerce Web site, is a good example of a holiday tie-in. We also did a

tie-in for AllHerb.com with Cancer Awareness Month called “Stop Smoking,

Mon, for Pokémon.”

Conducting a Survey

By definition, the news media are interested in news above everything else.

And it’s not always easy for PR people to come up with something that is

news — or even new. Surveys are my secret weapon in PR; they’re one of the

easiest ways to provide the news media with the news they crave. The reason

is simple: There is very little new information in the world. But a survey, by

definition, always creates new information. If you survey 1,000 business exec-

utives and 87 percent answer yes to your survey question “Do you feel stress

on the job?”, then you have created a fact — “Eighty-seven percent of 1,000

executives surveyed by XYZ Company say that they feel stress on the job” —

that you and no one else owns.

For a trade association of pet manufacturers, we did a survey showing that

pet owners were more successful than those who didn’t own pets at keeping

their New Year’s resolutions — promoting the value of owning a pet. Another

survey for the same association promoted pet ownership by showing that

73 percent of companies surveyed said that having pets in the office increases

productivity.

For Calyx & Corolla, a direct marketer of flowers, a survey indicated that cor-

porate CEOs like flowers, and sending flowers to your CEO may help you land

a raise.

We also did a survey for a client who sells nutritional supplements over the

Internet. Again, we tied in with a holiday. The holiday was Valentine’s Day, so

we used the theme of romance. How to relate nutritional supplements to

romance? By linking foods (which are nutrients) to their roles as aphrodisi-

acs. Figure 6-2 shows the press release for this campaign.

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Contact: Marisa Milo

Jericho Communications

212-645-6900 x126

THIS VALENTINE S DAY, DON T SAY IT WITH

FLOWERS, DIAMONDS, OR WORDS FROM THE

HEART SAY IT WITH GARLIC???!!

Figure 6-2:

Valentine’s

Day aphro-

disiacs

press

release.

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Staging an Event

Create news worth covering by staging an event. But first, you must decide

what your goal is for the event. Is it all about awareness or sales? Do you

want to get a thousand people in attendance, 5 million to read about it, or

5,000 to buy? And if you don’t get any ink, but you get 1,000 people to show

up, is that enough exposure for the price of the event? (By the way, you don’t

have to have a big budget to do this. Sometimes it can cost you only the price

of the product you provide.)

The National Hockey League (NHL) hired the PR firm I founded to create

excitement around the playoffs. To accomplish this objective, we worked on

an event called the “Cup Crazy” traveling festival. The event was like a travel-

ing carnival show. It included a range of hockey-related and other games,

such as an in-line hockey tournament, slap-shot contests, and ticket raffles.

The event, which was capped off by the appearance of the Stanley Cup in

each playoff city, was covered in Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Newsweek

and on Hard Copy and Extra. More than half a million people attended the

event during the playoffs.

For more information on using events as PR promotions, see Chapter 19.

Making Them Laugh

Don’t overlook humor as a source of PR inspiration and ideas. If you can play

off something familiar in a fun and different way, you can get people smiling.

Many editors and producers look for light material and filler to run between

harder news stories, and you can gain a lot of media coverage by providing

material for this feature.

As an example, several comedians joked in their routines about removing the

O NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW tags from furniture. To announce a bed-

room furnishing sale for IKEA, we created a campaign in which we offered a

discount to anyone who removed and brought us the D

O NOT REMOVE tags

from their pillows. As an added creative element, the tags became entry tick-

ets to a sweepstakes, the grand prize for which was a trip to Alcatraz. The

campaign received extensive media exposure nationwide.

Humor is often an effective way to make a serious point, too. In a campaign

for Empire Kosher Chicken, for example, the objective was to communicate

how carefully the company inspects its chickens. In the campaign, people

who sent in proof that the IRS was auditing them got a free chicken. We said

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that if the IRS audits you — an excruciating process for most consumers —

you have some idea of how Empire’s chickens feel after they’re inspected!

The campaign got wide media play, and even the Wall Street Journal ran a fea-

ture on it.

Waging a Trade-in Campaign

As Chapter 15 outlines more fully, trade-ins — while clearly a gimmick — can

catch the media’s attention if you do them in a clever way.

For British Knight, for example, the objective was to promote its shoes to the

youth market. We created a special promotion to encourage kids to play out-

doors rather than watch television. If the parents sent in a TV remote control

(which we actually returned, so they lost nothing), the child would get a pair

of free sneakers. In another campaign for British Knight, we had consumers

trade in smelly socks for new sneakers.

To promote Domino’s Pizza as comfort food, we offered a free pizza to anyone

who turned in a pink slip (termination notice) or layoff notice from work or a

rejection letter from a college. The tie-in with pizza? The creation of “Eat Your

Rejection Letter” month. Pizza sales soared the day after Johnny Carson

started his monologue with this story on the Tonight Show.

Creating a Character

Who doesn’t know and love Mr. Whipple, Aunt Jemima, Sam Breakstone,

Colonel Sanders, Ronald McDonald, or the Dunkin’ Donuts “Time to Make the

Donuts” guy? Creating characters has proven successful in advertising for

decades. Now we’re finding that it can work in PR, too.

Empire Kosher Chicken once asked us to stimulate sales during the winter

months. We created a character named Bubby and dubbed her “America’s

Jewish Grandmother.” Bubby offered people a chance to treat their colds by

trading in their modern cold medicine for a free soup recipe and a free kosher

chicken. Thousands of people wrote in to Empire Chicken to take advantage

of this offer, putting the chickens (and the attitude of an Empire Chicken

being nourishing and even medicinal) in the households of many first-time

users.

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Using Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a term used to describe techniques that harness the power

of the Internet and existing social networks to produce exponential increases

in brand awareness.

It’s called “viral” marketing because it spreads like a virus, mostly through

e-mail (sometimes called word-of-mouse), and can be used to reach a large

number of people quickly — if you’ve targeted well and have creative ideas.

Much of what gets spread is the printed word — jokes and letters — but

video clips and games are being passed around the Internet more and more

and have become hugely popular for corporate PR.

How it works is quite simple: one person sends it to everyone in their address

book, maybe 10 or 100 people. They, in turn, do the same. It’s organic, not

manufactured, so there is no list of names that the marketer can access. For

example, Road Rage Rendezvous is a videoclip from IKEA Home Furnishings

that spread exponentially around the Internet and hit the top of the viral mar-

keting charts. People passed it along because it was so clever.

This tactic is popular because, compared to other tools, it’s relatively inexpen-

sive. Anyone can do it. One weakness, however, is that the messages, deliv-

ered via e-mail, can be mistaken for spam, which can put the brand at risk.

One way around that is to make sure the From and Subject lines are recogniz-

able to the recipients so they know the message isn’t unsolicited.

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Part III

Putting the

Wheels in Motion

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In this part . . .

large part of PR is creating the variety of documents

that deliver your story to your various audiences,

including the media, the public, customers, and employ-

ees. One of the most versatile of these documents is the

company newsletter, and Chapter 7 shows how to pro-

duce a newsletter and use it to promote yourself. Chapter 8

shows how to write and format the most commonly used

weapon in the PR arsenal, the humble but powerful press

release. In Chapter 9, I give you complete instructions for

writing and placing articles that promote your business,

as well as getting the press to write articles about you or

quote you in their pages. But PR isn’t all paper; sometimes

you’ve got to get on the phone or even dress up and go

out of the office to sell your story to the media. Chapter

10 deals with delivering your message in person through

public speaking.

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Chapter 7

Creating a Company Newsletter

In This Chapter

! Knowing what to include in your internal “employee newsletter”

! Keeping close to your external audience

! Figuring out the size and frequency of the newsletter

! Compiling a mailing list

! Attending to all the nuts and bolts of production

! Making the newsletter work as a marketing tool

ven a regular, frequent program of public relations, as described through-

out this book, cannot guarantee consistent exposure of the target audi-

ence to your key messages. There are several reasons for this: Not every

effort is certain to yield equal results, you cannot control the exact timing

and placement of PR pickups, and the media outlets are widely dispersed and

read by different people, so not every prospect will see every pickup.

There is one marketing communications tool that you can use to assure regu-

lar, repeat, consistent exposure for your company name, message, and infor-

mation: the promotional newsletter.

These newsletters, magazines, tabloids, or other regular publications are

published primarily as marketing tools. They range from simple sheets pub-

lished in-house to elaborate, four-color company magazines with photogra-

phy and professional writing rivaling the quality of newsstand magazines.

More and more newsletters are published electronically, due to the vast sav-

ings on printing.

In this chapter, find out how to create a newsletter that addresses different

audiences, internal and external, how often to send it, how to send it (both

printed and via email), plus how it should be designed and marketed.

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