Business and Finance

Most businesses understand the benefits of good PR. If you raise your profile and get your good news stories out in the media then people will remember you, associate you with a good product and go on to become customers.

But sometimes things go wrong and your reputation, or that of your business, is in danger. This should also be a time when you turn to PR, and use its tools to avert disaster and get a better result for yourself and your business.

So, what do you do in a crisis? What if you have a journalist ringing you for comments about a bad news story? How to you handle the fall-out?

Each situation is different, and calls for a different response but one thing you should never do – NEVER do nothing. If you bury your head in the sand, wish the reporters would go away, batten down the hatches or simply hope for the best, the best won’t happen. With nothing from you, journalists can put their own spin on a story; if you reportedly “refused to comment” or were “unavailable for comment” people will invariably draw a bad conclusion.

Continue reading ‘Crisis? What Crisis? How PR Can Help Avert a Business Disaster’ »

People say that children these days never learn to spell. Well, to be honest I am not sure I did either until I became a journalist.

I went to a very good, private girls’ school and I know they constantly corrected my spelling and grammar but much of it didn’t sink in until I started working for a newspaper.

There, I had a wonderful news editor who not only taught me how to write news but also how to spell.

So bad was I, that he kept a kind of hall of shame of my faux pas, some of which I will share with you now:

* Loan parents (instead of lone)

* Sceptic fingers (instead of septic)

* And – my personal favourite – my report of a curb crawler (rather than kerb crawler) after a particularly juicy magistrates court case.

Continue reading ‘Why You Need to Spell Well in Business’ »

According to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, the fear of being a bad speller is a remarkably common fear for people who want to write but are creatively blocked.

It doesn’t matter that the fear is irrational, it doesn’t matter that every single word-processing program out there comes with a spell checker, the fear of not being able to spell still haunts those would-be writers. And thus, those people remain blocked.

Many people who are blocked creatively suffer from some sort of fear. Some fears are based on creative “myths” (all artists are broke, crazy, alcoholic, dying from AIDS, etc.), some are based on things adults said to us as children and some, like the fear of being a bad speller, appear to be based on nothing at all.

Regardless of where the fear came from, there’s no denying its power. And the harder it is to admit to a fear, the more potent it becomes. After all, imagine trying to explain to someone that you can’t write because you can’t spell. You would sound like an idiot. So you don’t say anything. And because that fear goes unvoiced, it burrows deeper and deeper inside you.

Continue reading ‘Is Fear of Spelling Getting in Your Way?’ »

The other day, a colleague of mine told me about a new marketing agency and sent me a link to their Web site. I checked it out.

Needless to say, it was dreadful.

Oh, it was pretty enough. Very nice graphics. And what little copy there was, was very artfully placed (although so tiny it was difficult to actually read).

Why do I say it was dreadful? Because, even though it was pretty, it had absolutely no personality.

The copy was boring (not to mention full of “we’s” but that’s for another day). The graphics were pretty but boring. There was no life, no energy. Just flat.

It was as though the Web site was trying so hard to appeal to everyone, it ended up appealing to no one.

You see, people want to do with business with people. And they want to do business with people they know, like and trust.

Continue reading ‘How Your Personality Can Grow Your Business’ »

So many people don’t understand the difference between editorial and advertorial. Well – here is a simple definition: editorial is free and written by journalists; advertorial (usually some words to go with an advert) is paid for. Now, while you have total control over the wording of your advert, or advertorial, you have to pay for it. And that can cost a lot.

Editorial is free. And, because it is free and at the discretion of the publication (or journalist), they aren’t obliged to publish anything at all, and they can change the words or emphasis to suit. But – and here’s the good news – if you have a great angle then there is every chance that you could interest a journalist in publishing your story.

The best way is through a press release. And that release has to have a really good angle to attract the reporters’ eye. It’s no good sending in a story saying that you are the best thing since sliced bread, even if you are. You need a hook, a peg to hang the story on, an angle.

So what about some of these for ideas?

* Your busines has reached its 10th, 25th, 50th, 100th birthday

* You have developed a new product

* You have clinched a fantastic deal/contract

* You have sold your millionth widget (!)

Continue reading ‘Do-it-yourself PR – or How to Get in the Press for Free’ »

A press release today is not the purely informative kind of 30 years ago. Today it’s a mixture of persuasive copywriting and press release writing. If you plan to inform a target audience, you might as well persuade them to do something–sign up, answer a survey, click on a banner, visit a site, email you back, or buy from you.

But good sales copywriting packed into a press release is not enough. You have to make sure your press release is both crawled by search engines, and that it reaches sites viewed by your target audience. That involves search engine optimization and targeted distribution.

You not only need seo copywriting, but a copywriting company that will submit your press release to where your information will be best received and acted upon. If your business in all about lawnmowers, there’s no point in distributing your press release to the boy scouts web rings.

You could of course do the searching for relevant sites on your own, but if you’re a good manager, you choose your battles depending on intelligent goals and available resources. Can you do your own in-house professional copywriting? But even if that copy is a good read, will the search engine spiders love it? Many managers are into blogging these days, but article writing is a whole other thing.

Continue reading ‘What to Target in a Perfect Press Release’ »