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I covered this topic in the previous episode, when I talked about demarketing. You don’t need to listen to the previous episode first, because I’ll give you a little background: in Episode 119 I gave the example of our client who had created an excellent video and wanted influencers and the media to share it on their platforms organically (without being paid).

The more I think about what I call the PR compound effect,the more I find that the concept, which I invented, makes sense and totally applies to our human behaviours. For us at NATA, the PR compound effectis created through our constant communications, through the connections we’ve established and nurtured over time. These connections take on their full value whenever we need a message that’s off the beaten path, as in the case of this video from our client who sells jeans.

That’s the work we do every day here at NATA PR – offering influencers products that get them to know our clients. This example perfectly captures how important the “time” factor is in public relations.

You already have connections with influencers and the media. They’ll be receptive to your next press releases and more inclined to talk about you.

Now, the PR compound effectalso applies with the media, and we often build our public relations plans and many of our service offers with this very simple tactic: messaging on a single theme or a single company at several key moments in time.

To illustrate this PR compound effect tactic even more easily, I’ll tell you what we set up for a client who, let’s say, didn’t have the most attractive products like beauty, fashion and design can be. I like to work on these accounts from time to time, because they get us to move away from our usual contacts and re-examine what we’re doing day to day.

In this case it was an association that included makers of PVC doors and windows. These manufacturers’ stories were fascinating, because PVC had been proving itself since the ‘60s in terms of durability, flexibility and environmental protection. So I laid out the themes we’d build our campaign on, and the key moments when we were going to send out each of our three press releases.

As I often say, no one’s waiting for your press release, and sometimes there’s no way to know if the topic will interest the media. Sometimes they’ll respond to our second or third press release. They could be interested in PVC windows, but it’s not the right time for them to write an article about it. Maybe you’ll hear from them after your third press release.

That’s why time is the most important element in our profession. And the snowball effect lasts a long time, for brands that communicate regularly.

If you’d like to know more about the compound effect and how to develop a PR campaign that will hit the mark, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

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Recently, a client asked how they could promote an excellent video that explains in detail how to choose the right jeans for your size and body shape.

Even though it’s interesting to offer videos, the major media outlets will seldom share them on their platforms. That’s why PR professionals are reluctant to promote them. Even if we explain it to our clients, they secretly hope we’ll be able to get their video in circulation, and they’ll be disappointed in the results.

Keep in mind that for major media outlets, sharing any video like this means:

But times are changing, and we don’t hesitate to show these videos with our press releases.

With influencers especially, it’s easier to get confirmation of views. If they choose to share your video without being compensated, it’s probably because they already know about you, they like your products and your brand, and they want to support you.

That’s the work we do all the time here at NATA PR – offering influencers products to get them to discover our clients.

When I talk about the importance of the “time” factor in public relations, this is the perfect example. You already have connections with influencers and media. They’ll be receptive to your next press releases and much more inclined to talk about you.

So, to present this video, we chose to go with the “demarketing” trend, which in this case means promoting reduced consumption.

The title of our press release: Don’t buy jeans until you watch this video.

Since our title is an attention-grabber, many media outlets viewed the video and congratulated our client for this initiative. We know very well that many of them won’t be able to share it, but I like these initiatives for setting up what I call the PR Compound effect.

And our client’s video was developed for this very reason – to reduce the number of returns. It’s a huge problem, as you can imagine, and one we don’t talk enough about. What could be better than demarketing for making customers aware of this problem: consume less, consume better?

PATAGONIA used this strategy in a Black Friday ad that appeared in the New York Times: Its title was “Don’t Buy This Jacket.”

https://www.patagonia.ca/stories/dont-buy-this-jacket-black-friday-and-the-new-york-times/story-18615.html

And indeed, there’s no better way to explain this ad than with public relations. The explanation is included in the blog section of their website. Clearly, the company knows a thing or two about SEO.

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We are witnessing profound changes in what I call “social tolerance.” Now I’m not an expert or analyst of the deeper social currents that we all observe. But I’m talking to you here as a trend watcher in this podcast.

Since #metoo, #blacklivesmatter and #cancel culture, I’ve been fascinated by the mass movements that come to life on social media.

Since I’m a woman of my times, and very often in agreement with my contemporaries, I think these movements are needed if society is to evolve. I’m filled with sadness when I think of all those women in Iran and Afghanistan who are deprived of freedom and can neither speak their minds nor use their talents. What a waste for a society to deprive itself of women’s intelligence – which could do so much to help their loved ones and their fellow citizens. In many countries, they’re quite simply working without 50% of the population, under the cover of beliefs and values.

I’ve seen how these people acted when what’s now defined as toxic behaviour was tolerated. Let’s be watchful, and sensitive to what the human race will no longer accept. That in itself has a profound influence on our personal lives, but of course on our professional lives as well.

That’s why I wanted to talk about company values in this episode because, as we saw at Adidas recently and with many other companies that are quickly withdrawing their sponsorships or financial holdings, it’s also important to have these discussions now and to broadcast our values as a company, before a crisis arises.

This is where public relations can help you lay out your values to the public. How do you handle these transitions to, say, offer equal pay to the men and women you hire? What actions does the company take? What processes are in place during the hiring process and once the employee is on board?

A company’s employees can become tremendous ambassadors and convey your values.

A company’s values generally reflect those of its leader, who is, in a sense, their guardian. It’s the basis for building a team, and it will help you quickly decide whether or not new employees share the company’s values.

Share your values with the help of a public relations professional. Broadcast them on your social media and your website. It’s the heart and soul of your company.

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Originally, unboxing meant filming a product as you were taking it out of its packaging. These days, there are plenty of strategies for getting influencers and YouTubers to unbox products on their social media platforms, wowing their followers and other viewers.

Years ago, I thought it was all pretty pointless. It still seems a bit strange to me today, but history proves that when this tactic is well thought out, the numbers speak for themselves. People just love watching videos of products being unboxed.

Of course, what our clients who use the unboxing tactic want is to introduce a target customer base to their latest products and grab the attention of newer and younger consumers.

For the past few years, the big brands have been ingeniously vying to stir up envy and be chosen by the key influencers in their industry. We work with a lot of beauty brands, and the boxes being sent to influencers can be luxurious enough to warrant being added to their collection.

As you can imagine, big groups like LVMH and L’ORÉAL and brands like Chanel can deploy enormous resources to create genuine beauty boxes at very high volumes, and therefore at a reasonable cost.

These companies are experts in creating desire in their customers and influencers, and everyone wants the amazing Guerlain or Skinceuticals boxes.

Over the past few years, unboxing has reached new heights in North America with “advent boxes,” which reveal one of a company's products for each day of the countdown to Christmas. These are amazing boxes that you can open a section of each day. You can see how this tactic would get the same influencer to talk about you for several days.

Beauty brands – but also tea, chocolate and other gourmet brands – really outdo themselves in creating these fabulous boxes, which customers can also purchase.

Our marketing friends like to think this is a tactic unique to them, but I can assure you, this is pure public relations:

It’s the very foundation of what we’re doing every day at the agency: introducing our clients’ products with no money changing hands first. It’s possible that later, we could pitch a paid collaboration with influencers whose communities have the best reaction to the products being presented.

So, yes, unboxing is a public relations tactic.

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What the public knows about public relations is primarily how it's used for crisis management or reputation management. Obviously, no company or individual is ever really safe from a crisis, and obviously, PR can prevent and manage crises and reputations. But it's a myth to believe that’s all it's for.

So, what is public relations really for? Here are a few answers:

When you use public relations to get known, be aware that your success could inspire future generations to join your industry, be part of the next generation, or even get started in business.

“Getting others talking about you is ‘fundamental,’” stresses Hubert Bolduc, Vice President of Communications & Public Affairs at Cascades, “especially for publicly-traded companies, because investors often make decisions based on the news making the rounds in the media.” He adds, “With the tight labour market, companies increasingly have to raise their profiles to attract applicants, and they have to boost their company's brand image in its sector if they want to ensure continuity.”

“The media and public opinion both abhor a vacuum. If you're not taking up space, others will,” adds Bernard Dagenais, a professor in the Information & Communications Department at Université Laval.

I totally share his views, and I very often say that if you or your company are not connecting with journalists or influencers, your competition will step in.

So, if you feel like you're seeing your competition everywhere, even though your product is superior, and you're not getting any calls or requests from journalists or influencers, I’m here to tell you that that company is reaching out to the media and sharing news continuously on its social media platforms. It’s not a coincidence. That company knows how to communicate and probably has its own communications strategy.

I hope I've managed to show you the many advantages of public relations, beyond crisis management. If you want to get known, there’s no substitute for public relations when you combine it with your social media.

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At the turn of the last century, you could still get away with inventing your own biography – but things have changed a great deal since then in free countries with access to information and social media.

Public relations, as practised in democratic nations, relies on principles of truth and transparency which PR develops with journalists and the clients’ various target communities. Agencies like ours wouldn’t last very long if our press releases served up a steady diet of half-truths.

Today we hear a lot about greenwashingand cultural appropriation, for example, and internet users are quick to denounce companies that make outsized promises even though they’re just obeying the law, or certain brands that launch “Conscious” collections that use just a small percentage of recycled fabrics in their clothing. Watch out for these practices, because internet users will seize upon them. And it could spread through public opinion at the speed of light.

Yes, it’s a myth that public relations issues half-truths or spins its messages. If you want to reach your consumers at a deeper level, nothing works better than the truth. That’s what we recommend to all our clients. Don’t say your products are natural if you don’t have the data to prove it – even if the law does allow it with a lesser percentage. It’s best to say “99% natural” – if you can prove it – and state what’s in the remaining 1%.

If you’re interviewed to talk about your business or your product, tell the truth. If you don’t know the answer to the reporter’s question, don’t make it up. Just say you don’t know.

And in a crisis, the truth is always the right idea. If a product is defective, our expert advice is: Say so – and soon.

To anyone whose job it is to speak on an issue, we say:

Telling the truth garners respect. You become trustworthy to your clients. It’s the best strategy if you want to last and prove to your consumers that you’re genuinely interested in them. What about your mental and physical health? If you want to be well, there’s nothing better than telling the truth.

Should you tell the whole truth? I sincerely believe so, but I’m also willing to be delicate and empathetic while I’m at it. The truth can hurt – even if you don’t mean it to.

Without truth, there’s no reconciliation. Interesting, isn’t it?

I hope I’ve convinced you that half-truths have no place in the public relations business.

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* CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA

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In the marketing world, we’re all bound by performance as well as metrics – and public relations is no exception. Return on investment is part of our routine. So it’s completely misguided to think that public relations can't be measured.

However, it’s true that there are several ways to measure the success of a public relations campaign, and that public relations, like advertising, is not a science.

You have to consider public relations as a game, and you and your agency can decide which goals to achieve, whether it’s:

The quickest and easiest way to measure the success of your SEO strategy, for example, is to figure out how many conversions your SEO actions have generated,and public relations fits in with an SEO plan. A conversion can simply be a target you set to be met on your website.

You might want to increase your newsletter subscriber numbers or how many sales you get through your website.

These are the so-called key performance indicators (KPI). There isn’t a single service offer we provide that must set out KPI to be achieved. Since you can check everything using Google Analytics, it’s up to you to decide what’s important for your company.

Some suggest up to 13 KPIs, but two or three is quite enough to measure the impact of a public relations campaign, such as:

Some of our clients measure the success of our work by the number of times they appear in print and online women’s magazines.

The number of feature articles and interviews is another particularly good indicator, and you can set targets for each of these.

I hope I’ve convinced you: public relations is very measurableand strategic, and it means a lot more than just a press release.

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We frequently meet marketing professionals who know very little about public relations. For those who study marketing, PR is often taught very superficially. Most of the time, our marketing friends’ careers have meant developing brands and, above all, driving sales. The “consumer appeal” aspect, which involves getting them to choose your products over your competition’s and should be part of any good marketing plan, is often overlooked. If there’s any discipline that can provide that “fantasy” element, it's public relations.

But what’s harder to understand here is the time it takes to get the desired impact: an article about your company may or may not generate instant sales. What’s often left out of all this measuring is the impact of a series of articles over time. For our friends in marketing who just want to generate sales, the compound effect can seem unpredictable. But PR will have a direct effect on your search engine optimization or SEO.

One essential is true, and that is that the press release is indeed the #1 tool in any announcement or campaign. But there are a few more questions that should be part of this discussion:

We have an A-to-Z list of questions that go even further, especially if we add an “influence” component to the campaign.

Let’s focus for a few moments on these three questions and their possible answers:

Answer 1 – You want to reach new consumers, reach out to future investors, get your expertise out there, and so on.

Answer 2 – You can decide over time which approaches to take: is TV your priority, or the major newspapers? Are women’s magazines your top target?

Answer 3 – PR = simple: Obviously you can do a lot to simplify PR operations, and that's what I teach you at NATA PR SCHOOL, if you choose to do it yourself. But if you’re looking to hire a public relations agency, then you should draw on all its expertise and resources. Sure, you can come up with a list of media outlets and send them all a press release, but you’ve got to know which news and images you want to put out front – and when. Have you thought about the effects and the demands of issuing that press release?

As you can imagine, “we just want to send out a press release” can have major impacts for your company, and it can irritate journalists if it doesn’t answer their questions or give them what they want in terms of sensitive information, content or images.

I hope I’ve convinced you: public relations is highly strategic, and it means a lot more than just a press release.

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Launching a public relations campaign or contacting media when it’s new, or the first time, might be as intimidating to you as mountain climbing, a ‘mission impossible’, or the Olympics. You may think that reaching out to journalists is, well, beyond your reach. One thing is for sure – if you believe: “I don’t know anything about it, I’ll never manage,” you’ll have trouble taking the first step.

It’s that first step that I want to explore in this episode by suggesting your opening move, because of course your voyage into the PR universe could start out differently; you could choose to approach influencers. Public relations isn’t mathematics, nor is it an absolute truth. What I’m suggesting to you here is your opening gambit, to help you master – and learn to love – public relations.

To familiarize yourself with the media universe, there’s no better place to start than the specialized press – such as the trade publications.

How do you define what falls under ‘specialized press’?

Wikipedia:

**A trade magazine, also called a trade journal or trade paper (colloquially or disparagingly a trade rag), is a magazine or newspaper whose target audience is people who work in a particular trade or industry. The collective term for this area of publishing is the trade press.

Trade publications keep industry members abreast of new developments. In this role, it functions similarly to how academic journals or scientific journals serve their audiences.

If you want to get talked about – like your competition does – but you’re not very adept at it yet, it’s a great idea to start with the specialized magazines in your industry.

Personally, I love these publications when I want to learn about what’s happening in a certain community. WWD (Women’s Wear Daily) is one of my most frequent reads, because I find out everything about the fashion world there. It’s an international trade paper, but an easy example to understand when you’re talking about a certain industry. Sometimes we’ll contact them to let them know about new shops in certain markets.

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*https://www.acrimed.org/-La-presse-specialisee-

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_magazine

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When I founded NATA PR in 2000, it was just me in my living room. The internet was just becoming accessible, and we all had to hook up to a phone line to get on. Do you remember the sound – and most of all the time it took to download an image? We were a long way from high-speed internet.

I was a one-woman army. I didn’t yet have the budget for an accountant who would pay my taxes every month and do the payroll for my employees every two weeks. I did my own promotion and business development in addition to performing my clients’ public relations work.

In those first years, I was even doing my own billing. So, I wasn’t an accountant, but I could do the basic work of an accountant while also growing my business. You see where I’m going with this… yes, you can do simplified PR operations yourself too. That’s what I teach you at NATA PR SCHOOL.

I’ve lost count of how many employees I’ve trained in my more than twenty years. So, I’ve developed a proven, simplified method for making graduates with degrees in public relations more effective. These are bright, talented young people who had never contacted a journalist or influencer in their lives before they worked at NATA PR.

The issue is those university programmes that are so traditional, and not always adjusting to the reality of the business world. I could tell you a long story about it in another episode.

So, I developed a six-step method to show you that you can take your PR in hand and do it yourself, until the time comes when your business has grown enough that you can afford the services of an agency, like I do now with the accounting firm I use.

Not only will you get talked about, but you’ll gain so much insight on public relations and appreciate its benefits. I talk about it in earlier episodes: PR is the best organic part of any good marketing plan.

This is especially true since the pandemic: more and more newspaper and magazine readers are viewing their content on a device (smartphones, tablets and computers). So – why not take advantage of that?

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