How to Do PR the Right Way

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Mickie Kennedy – eReleases PR Agency

Podcast Overview:

05:30 Leverage newswires for wide-reaching press release.
11:39 News organizations pull and license articles from wires.
19:26 Effective PR is about building relationships, not databases.
21:25 A la carte, packages, and press releases.
27:30 Small businesses benefit from sharing relatable stories.
36:13 Small businesses at risk, targeted for breach.
40:46 People can write press releases, AI helps.
46:37 Build relationships with top media outlets.
49:28 Reach out, highlight green efforts, standout quotes.
57:30 Media articles build trust and influence conversion.
01:01:24 PR campaigns need 6-8 releases for success.
01:04:19 Regret over wasted money on ineffective PR.

Podcast Transcription:

Mickie Kennedy [00:00:00]:
Had one client come to me and say, hey, Mickie. I followed your advice, but now my customers are mad at me. And I said, well, then you didn’t you didn’t follow my advice if your customers are mad at you. 1st rule is do not alienate your existing customer base.

James Kademan [00:00:14]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at drawincustomerscom. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie as well as calls on call extraordinary answering service, and, of course, the bold business book. And today, we’re welcoming slash preparing to learn from Mickey Kennedy of Ereleases, the PR model of the world, I suppose you would say, or something of that nature. So, Mickey, how is it going today?

Mickie Kennedy [00:00:51]:
It’s going well. How are you?

James Kademan [00:00:52]:
I’m doing very well. Tell me just really briefly, I guess, in a nutshell, what is ereleases?

Mickie Kennedy [00:00:59]:
So ereleases is a press release distribution platform. I started it a little over 25 years ago. I started it as a database of journalist. I was doing PR and I was faxing at the time and a lot of journalists started requesting it for me to just email them. And I was like, wow, email is so much easier. And so I just started reaching out to journalists and building a database and took about a year. And I launched with 10,000 journalists who said I could send them press releases. And I was just a matchmaker sending press releases to journalists.

Mickie Kennedy [00:01:37]:
And, over the years, PR Newswire reached out to us and said, hey. You know, we like what you’re doing. We’d love to support you. You’re helping small businesses and entrepreneurs. Why don’t we give you a discounted state or city distribution? And I was just like, Hey, most of my customers are e commerce. They’re doing national business. I’d really like to offer national distribution. And so, you know, they they charge $1600 for a 600 word press release today.

Mickie Kennedy [00:02:06]:
So I was it was a big ask. So, we we met. One of the things I discovered was that they have an overnight editorial team that doesn’t do very much. They have to be there in case there’s breaking news or getting something out to Asia. But there’s lots of hours of downtime. And I just said, hey. I could schedule all my releases for next business day by default. Your people could set them up overnight, so it’d be no additional labor.

Mickie Kennedy [00:02:33]:
And with that in mind, we finally did agree that they would, give me a national distribution for all of my press releases. And so that’s that’s a big with us is you get a national distribution over PR Newswire, which is the oldest and largest Newswire or press releases with, you know, spending about a third of what you would pay, if you went directly through them.

James Kademan [00:02:55]:
Nice. So just for those that don’t necessarily know and even for me because I think I know, but maybe I’m wrong, what is a press release?

Mickie Kennedy [00:03:04]:
So a press release is just an announcement, to the media. It’s usually written in the 3rd person. You may have a first person quote where you say something in the first person And it basically is just a message to the media where you’re announcing something. It’s usually you wanna make sure you cover the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your announcement. And, hopefully, it’s important enough that it’s got the building blocks for journalists to write an article about you. The goal of a press release is not to have that press release duplicated on a bunch of websites. There’s there’s, you know, a big, I guess, misunderstanding in the industry that that’s what a newswire is. And that’s what the goal of press releases is to get your press release duplicated.

Mickie Kennedy [00:03:49]:
And that’s a distraction. That’s syndication. It’s always happened when releases go out, especially publicly trade companies like to have the release under, like, Yahoo Finance and things like that. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to have a journalist write an article about you, have it appear in the New York Times or, you know, even your local newspaper, you know, appropriate trade publications magazines. It also conveys to TV and radio as well as well as social media. You know, there’s a TikToker who is called the Snackalator. And each week he does a roundup of new snacks hitting, store shelves.

Mickie Kennedy [00:04:26]:
And he also does a weekly roundup of, fast food, new products and things that are coming out. And all of that he bases off of press releases that he pulls from The Wire including the images and things like that. So, you know, what what media is is evolving and changing. It started decades ago with blogs and now it includes a little bit of everything. But a lot of these same people do rely on press releases because it’s a great way to get information, to get photos and get it, you know, really early in in advance of everyone else and be able to use that and collect it. And the great thing about a wire, I mentioned PR Newswire is that it is a single place where a lot of people use it in the US. We have a duopoly basically where 2 people control the wire of press releases and it’s PR Newswire and Business Wire. And it is the main place that most journalists go to because they probably, you know, 97% of all press releases of importance do end up there in either of those two places.

Mickie Kennedy [00:05:30]:
And so, you know, for that reason, you definitely wanna make sure that you’re on one of the major newswires. And, it is a great way in which you can just, you know, push a button, hit send, and your release is available to so many people. And you know, the the real magic of that is when you have something that’s really breaking news. Like early in the pandemic, we did a free press release for the dining bond initiative, which was set up to help restaurants that were closed during the pandemic. You nominated your favorite local restaurant and they were able to get in contact with them. You would give money that went directly to that restaurant to help them during that time. And they would be secured through a dining bond, sort of like a gift certificate scenario. And, you know, just by, you know, hitting send once it got over a 100 articles, major places picked it up, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post.

Mickie Kennedy [00:06:22]:
You know, we quit counting local newspapers because there were just so many. But we reached over a 100 articles that were individually written about them through that. And it just shows you that, you know, the leverage opportunity that’s out there, over $11,000,000 was raised through that one marketing effort. And I challenge anybody, you know, no matter how good you are at marketing, you know, show me where what would have cost $350 You can hit a return of over $11,000,000 And it’s, you know, I think it’s very difficult to do. And I will say that this is a very unusual case study that I have on the website, but it does show a wide example of the opportunity that’s out there if you do have something that is of interest to the media

James Kademan [00:07:08]:
Dang. That is quite a return. That’s cool. Tell me when somebody puts out a a press release because I thought they were just copying and pasting. I guess I didn’t realize that the journalists or editors or whoever were rewriting it. When that gets released to these wires and all these places, do those journalists then take that press release as it is and essentially just reconfigure it? Or are they having to reach out to someone and say, hey, I got a few more questions kind of thing?

Mickie Kennedy [00:07:37]:
Right. So you can always tell that you’ve done a good job when you get an article written about you and the journalist has not contacted you. And, surprisingly, that is the majority of what happens you get articles written about you and you didn’t know it. So, you know, I tell my customers, you know, check out Google Web and Google News. A lot of places that opt out of Google News still appear in Google Web. And if you do a search and go to the little drill down and pick the date of your press release distributed to today, it allows you to define your search a little bit more. So, you know, it’s definitely or more likely from that press release that this these places, covered you. And, you can then search by, you know, product name or something that’s specific to the press release announcement within there.

Mickie Kennedy [00:08:25]:
And that that’s a really good way of trying to find out. But journalists will contact you if they need clarification. They don’t understand something. They need more information that they couldn’t get on your website. And also if they’re working on something that’s, you know, slightly related. So maybe you’ve got a logistics solutions that’s for warehouses and maybe this person is writing a story or covering something that is Mickie, tangentially commercial space and they’re wondering if this could be applied to that market as well. And so they may contact you before that. But most of the time, journalists are are busy.

Mickie Kennedy [00:09:05]:
There there’s a lot of them are shy English majors, so they prefer not picking up the phone or playing tag through email and things like that. So, you know, you get a pat on your back when you get articles written about you and and they didn’t contact you because it definitely is not the norm that that that they contact you unless they do have to get more information or clarification.

James Kademan [00:09:25]:
That is cool. Now tell me when a press release goes out and it gets picked up, journalists did they call them journalists or editors? I don’t even know.

Mickie Kennedy [00:09:34]:
So, most of the time, they’re written by a journalist or writers. You know, sometimes they can also be editors. People are wearing a lot of hats in this industry. I don’t know if you know, but the publishing industry is not as strong as it used to be. So a lot of journalists are having to do more with less resources. And so it used to be that, you know, people would be expected to write 2 or 3 articles a week, and now there might be expected to write 2 or 3 a day. And so the time where they would go and research for hours is minimal. And so that’s why I think that being in a newswire is so important because it’s just the, you know, one of 2 places that they generally can start their search and end it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:10:16]:
And when they log in, they have a journalist login access. It’s over the web. They will be presented with their feed and it may just be an industry feed if they cover 1 industry or it could be, you know, brought together of 2 or 3 industries and it could also have inclusions and exclusions. So you can say I don’t want to see stuff in my feed of headlines if it involves these keywords like maybe I don’t cover the retail world, or Mickie I only cover, you know, high fashion. And if you mentioned Levi’s or Target, I’m not interested. So, you can really customize it, which makes it a valuable tool and resource for busy journalists.

James Kademan [00:11:00]:
Alright. So these 2, the what’d you call it? The new r PR and newswire?

Mickie Kennedy [00:11:06]:
Newswire and Business Wire are the 2, basically the 2 big newswires in the US.

James Kademan [00:11:12]:
So where does Associated Press fit in there?

Mickie Kennedy [00:11:15]:
So that’s great. So a lot of people are familiar with other types of wires. There’s, AP Associated Press. There’s Reuters. There’s UPI, United Press International, and, Dow James and a few others. So their model is completely different. They don’t disseminate press releases. They have a team of writers and they get press releases and they’ll turn them into their own articles.

Mickie Kennedy [00:11:39]:
And so what happens if I’m the Baltimore Sun and, you know, something happens that’s big that, you know, national news, you know, like, I don’t know, the president gets a flat tire. Rather than have a busy Baltimore Sun, journalist write that article, they just pull it from the Associated Press. They’ve already written the article. They’ve wrote they’ve written it once, and they license it to lots of different places. And all a lot of these publications will belong to 1 or multiple wires and the way it works is they’ll just pull that article put it in their newspaper and rather than have to pay their journalists to write that article or take them off of another story, they can just license that. And then at the end of the month or whatever the term is they add up the number of articles that they use from those wires and they pay a fee to them or they may have a subscription arrangement or something like that but that’s the way they work. So would Reuters or the Associated Press post a press release on on you know as content never because they can’t hold the copyright to it but they could take that press release and then turn it into an article that they’ve written they control the copyright and they can then license that article to others.

James Kademan [00:12:59]:
Oh, interesting. So there’s somewhat of a middleman kinda ish?

Mickie Kennedy [00:13:03]:
I think I mean, kinda. I mean, basically, they are a franchise in which they are, you know, selling or licensing these articles. And rather than having a business journalist at your place or maybe you just don’t have the staff to cover everything and, but yet you want to plug in a few national stories, it’s easier just to license these. And, you know, you’re getting, you know, really great content because, generally, these are, like, top notch, you know, well written articles and, you know, you’ll you’ll see in lots of publications where it’ll say Reuters or AP or or Dow James. And you just know that that wasn’t written by that publication, but it was licensed and put in there rather than having to, write it themselves.

James Kademan [00:13:51]:
That is so interesting. I remember back, long time ago, I had a printer repair business, and we got called by a TV station. And it was a crisis. It was emergency. It was, I don’t know, 5:30 at night or something like that. And I go there and they have this fax machine, this $89 brother piece of junk fax machine. And they’re like, this is our AP fax. And I didn’t know.

James Kademan [00:14:13]:
I’m like, AP fax. And I was like, wait a second. You’re associated press like, this is this little thing, this piece of junk, this barely better than a calculator thing, that’s where you’re getting your AP news. And they wanted it for the 6 o’clock news. So they’re like, quick. You have less than 20 minutes to fix this thing. That was a piece of junk when it was brand new.

Mickie Kennedy [00:14:31]:
Right. Yeah. They don’t do that anymore. And at the big newsrooms, instead of a fax machine, they would have a dedicated feed come in, and it would often just spit it out dot matrix printer, just print out the the feed in these places.

James Kademan [00:14:44]:
Yeah. So this is the grain

Mickie Kennedy [00:14:46]:
and white paper. Yeah. But Oh, that’s But it’s come along now. It’s all online now.

James Kademan [00:14:50]:
Alright. Yeah. It was funny. I’m just like, you could just spent another $80 to get another one just in case.

Mickie Kennedy [00:14:57]:
Right.

James Kademan [00:14:58]:
It’s funny. Like how many advertisers are relying on them to do their job and all that james. Interesting. So you I was poking around on your website. I think you mentioned syndication versus distribution, and I think you touched on that. Could you elaborate on that more? Because I was reading your website and I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve paid for PR before, but I couldn’t tell you which one I paid for. I had no idea.

Mickie Kennedy [00:15:23]:
No idea. So, there are a lot of companies out there that have wire in their james. And one offers a $100 distribution and it doesn’t reach any journalist. And they used to be a little bit more forthcoming of it and just say it was online visibility was the goal. But basically, it just syndicates in your press releases on a bunch of different websites. The majority of them they own and they have create, created always WordPress press templated websites that, you know, are dedicated to a certain industry or location. And they’ll send you a bunch of links to your press release on these websites. Now the links on these websites are no follow links, and Google has made it very clear that we’re not penalizing people that have syndicated stuff because it happens even when you use PR Newswire.

Mickie Kennedy [00:16:15]:
Your press release does get on a bunch of websites, but it shouldn’t help you. And I have people who swear that it does. But I also know that I think it’s very unlikely. And if it is, it’s very fleeting. The goal is to get real articles written about you. And the great thing is that you get SEO benefit even when there are no links when it’s an earned media article. For example, you get picked up in The New York Times and there’s an article about you, but there’s no link because very rarely does any of those national publications link to you. New York Times says that they never linked to you.

Mickie Kennedy [00:16:52]:
But despite that, I did get them to link to me once, by having a resource page, that was so valuable and relevant to what they were discussing. They did link to it. But, so they broke their own rule there. But, generally, they don’t link to you. But Google has a patent, and they actually use it where if they can contextually tell that this article is about you, you get an implied link. And a lot of people will tell you when they get in the Wall Street Journal and they get in the New York Times, their SEO boost, you know, 3 to 6 months out. And it is it is an implied link that definitely Google still conveys. And it makes sense.

Mickie Kennedy [00:17:34]:
You know, if if they can tell an article about your release, this press release distribution is 99.9% certain it goes to ereleases.com, You know, why not treat that as a a signal of trust that this is, you know, a major site like New York Times is talking about them that shows that they have some authority and then advance them in the SEO.

James Kademan [00:17:57]:
That is awesome. I like that. There was, I’m trying to think there was a I wanna say c word, but I don’t even know if that’s worth saying here. There’s a company that I’ve seen listed Cision?

Mickie Kennedy [00:18:10]:
Cision.

James Kademan [00:18:11]:
Okay. What is Cision?

Mickie Kennedy [00:18:12]:
So Cision is the parent company of, PR Newswire, and they also offer a Cision journalist database which is kind of what they were known for And then they acquired PR Newswire. And they’ve also acquired PRWeb, which is another one of these online syndicators. It’s not, you know, ideal for reaching journalists, but really good for online visibility. But, yeah, they they they have such a strong database of journalists that you can license for, I think, 15,000 plus a year to be able to to send to. It’s really used predominantly the database by PR firms. And the reason for it is even if you acquire that entire database of journalists, the likelihood it’s useful for you, it’s very small because you don’t have a relationship with them. But a good PR firm will take that database, follow it as new people come in, use it to introduce themselves and start a connection and a relationship. And, hey, how can I help you? What kind of stories you’re working on? Oh, I have a client that I think would be appropriate.

Mickie Kennedy [00:19:26]:
Can we, you know, discuss that? And and, you know, a good PR firm is is really good at that in establishing relationships. And for them that database makes sense to have and to have access to but you know for some people they just buy the database and, you know, do the shotgun approach and then are surprised or not surprised when nothing happens. And I think it’s just, you know, it’s relationship based. When I started e releases, I contacted 10,000 plus journalists myself for a year and, you know, said, hey, I’d like to send you a press releases by email. And they’re like, you’re not gonna charge us. You know, that’s what they that was that what I heard that again, it again, because they thought, this is great. You know, I’m just sitting here for my computer, and all of a sudden, you know, I can get these press, press releases rather than going to this dot matrix printer that we all have to share the office and look at stuff that comes in and things like that. So, it was it was really innovative at the time.

Mickie Kennedy [00:20:26]:
And, I think that but it still shows that relationship based things work well. And I always tell people that PR firms are definitely great and if you can afford them go for it But, you know, with many costing 20, 40, $60,000 a year or more, it’s outside of the budgets for my customer base, which are entrepreneurs, small businesses, authors, speakers, you know, startups and things like that. So I say, hey, you know, take advantage of the wire, draft press releases that are compelling and strategic and important and get those out. And you’ll definitely, you know, if you’re doing a PR campaign of 6 to 8 releases, you should see 2 or 3 of them get some media pickup.

James Kademan [00:21:13]:
Nice. So when you have a client, are they kind of a one shot, one kill kind of thing? Like, hey, we’re a new business PR go or press release goes out and they move on with their life?

Mickie Kennedy [00:21:25]:
Are they Some of some of them do. Some of them do. We do sell a la carte because we just want to keep the entry, you know, affordable for people to dip their toes in without a commitment. I do think sometimes that makes it difficult, because there are people who will send out a release, and then nothing happens, and they just move on to Pinterest or whatever else the next shiny logic is in marketing. But, you know, we do offer packages and, know, try to get provide education for people. You know, the biggest thing we get is we get a finished press release and people often find us when they are just looking to send a release out. And so we take their money, we send it out, but we also recognize that most of those people aren’t going to get media coverage because it wasn’t a great press release. And by that, I was like, it’s a product launch press release, which can be great, but it’s one where here’s our product, here’s a list of features, and here’s a page dedicated to it and a way to buy it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:22:24]:
And, you know, I know that a journalist is looking for a story and they like a story arc. You know, they’re story builders. There’s not a lot of stories there. You know, a list of features is not a story. So, I try to tell my customers, hey, if you have a product launch release, put a use case study in there. Here’s somebody who had this problem, this concrete problem. They used or beta tested your product. This is the results that they saw.

Mickie Kennedy [00:22:55]:
Here’s a quote by them talking about their experience with you. That makes more of a story arc for journalists to build a story. And, you know, at the end of the day, a journalist job is, of course, to produce content. But even more importantly is to keep their paid audience or in the case of it’s free, their audience that they do have happy. And that involves educating that audience with stuff they want to know or entertaining them with stuff that they want to be delighted by. And so, you know, you not having a story or an art makes it very difficult for that journalist to turn it into content that their audience will want to consume. So taking a a product launch press release and putting us a a use case study is one way to do that. Another thing that you can also add to a product launch release is what are the stakes? If you’ve got a logistics solution, you know, what does that mean in your business? You know, maybe, you know, 4% of businesses in your industry file bankruptcy every year.

Mickie Kennedy [00:23:56]:
And overwhelmingly, it’s because of this bottleneck or this problem that prevents them from reaching profitability, you know, search for numbers that are available in your industry, data points and incorporate those into your press release.

James Kademan [00:24:12]:
Alright. That is interesting. I had no no idea. I guess I know that I’ve paid for press releases for different things, but I guess in my mind, it was always I don’t feel like this is newsworthy that this business started Right. Or that this this new product is out. But you have a very interesting point about the story line. So I wanna quiz you a little bit about the length because I’ve heard different different people say 300 words, 200 words, 500 words. And I’m like, who’s gonna read that? And then if you’re telling a story, you could have novels.

James Kademan [00:24:45]:
Right. So what is a good size of press release to, to keep a story in there, to keep it compelling, but also short enough that someone’s gonna actually read it?

Mickie Kennedy [00:24:54]:
I think that, like, 98% of press releases can be satisfied between 406 100 words. I think that 80% of releases should be 400 words. And, Mickie there’s arguments to be longer. I worked on a press release recently where it involved a medical product that had 4 different owners who had very idiosyncratic and strange backgrounds. I wanted those stories to be in there. So I had to dedicate a paragraph to each of these people because they were they were just beautiful. And I I realized that that would be something that the media would resonate with. And so that one was longer.

Mickie Kennedy [00:25:36]:
That one was a little over 600 words, but I think that most copy should strive for 400 to 500 words. If you have something that’s very technical and you want to get a lot of information in 600 words can be fine. There are exceptions to this, but it mostly is publicly traded companies who have data points like, you know, their their balance sheet or revenue numbers that they have to publish. And those are cases where those releases can go 12 1400 words. But I don’t work with publicly traded companies. So, you know, I don’t think that would apply for most people. Going back to the 4 founders of that company that I thought had such interesting background stories. That’s that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize if you are a startup, you know, is there something idiosyncratic or strange or just interesting about, how this business came to be or the product came to be? There’s a reason that everybody that goes on Shark Tank opens with their story.

Mickie Kennedy [00:26:35]:
You know, I I was laid off and I had this hobby and I wondered if I could turn it into a business. You know, my dad died and he always made this chili and I felt like, could I put these spices out or something like it? And what it is is it’s a way to just break through all the corporate logos and names and just get people to care about you have a human interest element. You’re humanized and people love, you know, the stories behind businesses, what the journey was, you know, sometimes these are inspiration all. They’re often vulnerable. Sometimes they can be funny. Sometimes they could be, you know, in the case of these founders, most of them were very just silly and idiosyncratic, how they ended up from one place into the healthcare arena, medical arena. And I thought that that worked really well for them. But, you know, don’t discount yourself.

Mickie Kennedy [00:27:30]:
A lot of small businesses want to appear more corporate and professional, and they don’t like to share, you know, mistakes they’ve made or obstacles they’ve overcome. But, you know, I had one client who had an embarrassing story of how they had to cancel Thanksgiving and the whole family’s having to, you know, fulfill orders and put them in boxes to get them out, when, shipping opened on Monday. And, I told them they should put it in the press release. We didn’t lead with it. We put it down towards the bottom, but it became the opening paragraph of a 2 page Inc Magazine article about them. And, at that time, they were very successful, but that that was, you know, something that happened early on with them. And I think that the reason it resonated so well is, you know, it’s something that any entrepreneur can identify with. We’ve all had, you know, mistakes or shortcomings or embarrassing little things where we just have to step up and, you know, call on people to assist us and get through it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:28:33]:
And I think that that was one of the ways in which Inc. Magazine recognized this would be a great lead into an article about this growing company where we can really just humanize them, share something, a vulnerability that any entrepreneur would recognize, and then go into an article where we then talk about their growth and their achievements.

James Kademan [00:28:52]:
Nice. So you I was digging a bit on your website. I saw you started in 1998. And while you’re chatting, I’m thinking 1998. I don’t think Google was even around in 1998. Or if it was, it was in someone’s basement.

Mickie Kennedy [00:29:08]:
I’m not sure either. I know that, I I I started advertising Google in the early 2000, but I don’t remember exactly when. I remember the first paid and then paid a settlement. But, Google was hemorrhaging money so bad that they’d run out of money, and they had burned through all of this offerings. And, they were desperate. They went to the offices of go to.com, overture.com, and, said, share with us how your pay pay per click advertising works. And their engineers looked at it. And the, the idea was they were going to license it to Google and Google engineers came back and they said, there’s no way we could implement this in time.

Mickie Kennedy [00:29:59]:
We’ll be we’ll be dead, in the water. So they said, let’s just steal it and, make it ours. We program it, we engineer it, and we launch it. And, they did, and it saved the company. And then they just said, to over to the owner of Overtur and go to dot com, which I think was an investment firm. Here’s a bunch of Google shares, and they cashed out for 100 of 1,000,000 or maybe even 1,000,000,000 of dollars later. So it worked out well for everybody, but that’s just how desperate Google was at the time and how close it was to, like, the lights going out, because people had put so much money in and they were widely used, but they didn’t have any idea how they were gonna monetize themselves. They knew they didn’t wanna do banner ads or, you know, traditional advertising.

Mickie Kennedy [00:30:47]:
And, they, you know, they they just, you know now they are who they are but yeah those were the early years and I could bid on stuff for you know 10¢ each and now there’s certain keywords that I pay 40 to $60 a click. So, times have changed. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:31:04]:
It’s getting crazy. So the businesses that you target, they’re generally small mom and pop places that just, are they searching for PR help or

Mickie Kennedy [00:31:16]:
by looking for press release submission, press release distribution. Most of them have a press release they’ve already written and they’re looking for who who to use to send it out. And so, you know, it is, you know, an education place. And so know, we get the same questions. Why should I pay you $350 for your new customer special when, you know, EIN press wires $99. And we’re like, well, you know, with them, it’s syndication. And, goes on a few websites that no one watches and has no traffic or you could, you know, send it to some place that’ll actually get it in front of journalists. We don’t guarantee you’ll get Mickie, but there’s the possibility you’ll get pickup.

Mickie Kennedy [00:32:01]:
I can guarantee with almost 99.99% certainty, no one gets media pickup with the, you know, the online syndication only because journalists never see it. It’s not put in front of them.

James Kademan [00:32:12]:
Interesting. Tell me with, what is that email, help a reporter out? Where does that come into play?

Mickie Kennedy [00:32:21]:
Okay. So help a reporter out, which is rebranded. It’s really great. 10, 15 years ago. And, the journalists, they’d aggregate basically calls by journalists looking for a story. And they’d say, hey. I’m looking for someone, you know, who’s in, you know, a dry cleaner that’s gone gone green, and they’re, you know, using environmental methods. And I want to talk to someone about that.

Mickie Kennedy [00:32:45]:
And then you have like your pick of like, you know, 5 to 10 dry cleaners sending you their themselves. And, the really good ones will put a great quote in there of like a really concise, powerful quote. So a journalist is like, oh, I don’t wanna lose this guy because that quote so good. And, you know, now journalists sends a message out and you might have 25100 people reply. So the likelihood that you get picked up today is very remote. In most james, it’s 700 to 800 people you’re competing with. But in some competitive spaces, yeah, journalists get as many as 2,500 pitches and sometimes sometimes they’ll just cut it off after like 2 or 300 and just say, you know, but choose from this.

James Kademan [00:33:31]:
Yeah, I would think he’d cut it off after 10.

Mickie Kennedy [00:33:34]:
Right. So it was great. It was great when nobody knew about it. Now everybody knows about it. And I think that they’ve put up some paywalls, so that that will slow down the number of people, but it is still a lot of people competing for that. And it’s not really, as effective as, as it was. It’s one of these ideas that if, you were doing it for a small community of people, it would work really well. But once you open it up to the public, it, it becomes a bad thing.

Mickie Kennedy [00:34:02]:
Just, you know, like like my grandmother’s always, used to tell me what day the zoo was free that weekend. And I’d be like, great. Cause that’s the most expensive day for me. It’s going to be crowded. There’s no lines. And, for me, my time is worth a lot more. It’s it’s those are the days to avoid for me, not the days to take advantage of it. And I think that that’s kind of what has happened to that to that product.

Mickie Kennedy [00:34:29]:
Gotcha. But that being said, you know, at around the same time that Help A Reporter came out was this whole trend called newsjacking. And it was basically if something was breaking in the news like the credit card breach at Target was one of these things that just everybody was writing about it. And, a lot of people in, who were, in the space of providing risk management and security consultants were doing press releases with their opinion on this and their quotes. And at that time, I realized news Mickie doesn’t work anymore. I went and did some searches, and I counted in a 7 day period over 1400 press releases that referenced the target breach. I then looked at the number of articles that came out, at, that time going forward 3 weeks. And there was over 200 articles.

Mickie Kennedy [00:35:27]:
And I was just like, you know, you did the you did the math, you know, almost very few of the articles mentioned a security consultant or got a quote from them. So it was just too many people, competing for too small of spots. That being said, there are approaches and you had to be a little creative. In that case, I had a client come to me and said they wanted to to basically do the same thing. They wanted to news chat about the credit card breach and they were security consultants. And I said, you know, who’s, you know, what are your customers look like? And they just said, well, they’re everybody. I’m like, what, who’s, you know, who’s a great customer? And they’re like, oh, well, you know, this, this, you know, Domino’s is a great customer, because, you know, they buy lots of these terminals. And I’m like, okay, and they pay you a lot.

Mickie Kennedy [00:36:13]:
Well, no, they get a big discount because they have so many locations. So I don’t make a lot of money from them. But they’re a good client. I was like, well, who do you make your most money with? Because mom and pops as like, who and he’s like, you know, just an individual pizza shop, someone selling subs, you know, going to a dry cleaner, you know, anybody with a credit card terminal on their counter, and they’re not a franchise, and there’s not a lot of locations. And I’m just like, nobody’s writing about that person in context of the target credit card breach. Let’s write a press release where it says, hey, are you a small business with a credit card terminal on your countertop? And you have no idea if you’re at risk of the same thing that happened to Target, you know, read on. And we shared a lot of security tips and how they could do an audit. And it was all written for that mom and pop individual person and that one did get a few articles written about them And I guarantee if we’d done the other approach where we’re just generalist and we’re talking about this generally, nobody would have picked it up.

Mickie Kennedy [00:37:23]:
So, you know, in those cases, you know, being layered and nuanced works really well, when everybody is saying the same thing. Another thing you can do when everybody’s saying the same thing, if this doesn’t cost you customers or alienate you with your customer base, be a contrarian journalists like to cover both sides of a topic. Often they don’t because no one’s there raising their hands saying, hey, I’ve got something negative to say about, electric cars. And, everybody’s talking about how great they are. I’ve got, a rational reason for why we shouldn’t embrace them. You know, the environmental cost of pulling these out of the ground, the labor, involved with some of this stuff with children is crazy. Taking 30 to 50000 gallons of water to put out a fire involving electric car. I don’t know.

Mickie Kennedy [00:38:16]:
And not to mention, are we creating a bigger landfill problem at the end of the life of these batteries? And maybe we should slow down, answer these questions, and then think about it going forward at a pace that makes sense and at a way in which we can address these issues. And I think that is a rational way in which you can be a contrarian and not seem like the crazy person that’s out to the left with conspiracy theories and things like that. But often what you’ll find is if it’s a big hot button item that is often in the news, you can often be in multiple articles because you’re the only person that’s been quoted and given an opinion that is the, the con side of it. And that’s a great way to stand out as well.

James Kademan [00:39:04]:
That, you know, it’s so funny you say that because I was joking with my buddies. I mean, this was back the first time that Trump ran. I’m like, that guy’s a marketing genius because all he has to do is get people fired up. And he’s got a crowd that is super easy to fire up because they’re just looking at something like we got all these pitchforks. Let’s find a target kind of thing. Like it’s marketing genius. And I was trying to think, how can I find that to my business? How can and I couldn’t think of a way without pissing off a lot of people.

Mickie Kennedy [00:39:34]:
Right. That that is the thing about being contrarian. I’ve I had one client come to me and say, hey, Mickie, I followed your advice, but now all my customers are mad at me. No. Well, then you didn’t you didn’t follow my advice if your customers are mad at you. First rule is do not alienate your existing customer base. Make sure the opinion that you take is not going to cost you customers or make it difficult for you to keep your customer base.

James Kademan [00:39:59]:
You know, you raised an interesting point, though. We’re in the customer service business, and I feel like customer service with kiosks and self checkouts and stuff like that is circling the drain. So maybe we could do something. I’ll have to check into that or dig into it. So tell me a story about writing a press release because I bring up the help a reporter out thing because I subscribed to those emails for years. And I think I’ve submitted 2 articles because I was like, okay. This one really applies to me. At the time, it was printer repair or something like that.

James Kademan [00:40:30]:
I gotta write a press release. And I’m like, what does a press release look like? I didn’t even know. So when you say people are offering press releases to you for you to release, do they is that typically what people do, or are they actually hiring a writer that knows what they’re doing?

Mickie Kennedy [00:40:46]:
I think for a lot of people, they’re writing the release themselves, and I don’t have a problem with that. If you look at a press release, they’re supposed to be very readable and understandable. They’re supposed to be like a 8th grade level, you know, so, you know, the complex words outside of industry related jargon that needs to be there. You don’t want to have the 25¢ words when the 5¢ words work fine. It’s and I do believe that the average person can look at a press release and a template and write a pretty decent release. And for those that can’t, I think you can lean on AI. The great thing about an AI written press release is, it it isn’t going to be published in these articles and places like that. It’ll be written as an article by journalists.

Mickie Kennedy [00:41:39]:
So you’re basically just providing a tool for the journalist to hopefully turn into articles. And so me, personally, I would I don’t feel comfortable putting AI written, like, blog posts on my website because I feel like, you know, I don’t know how Google is gonna feel about that today or a year from now. But I I know that Google can definitely determine that that was written by AI. I I know that Google has the powers and the might to figure it out, and I don’t want to to con anyone. So I’m protective of the content I put on my website. If a press release was going to, you know, be the end product, I wouldn’t suggest AI. But the fact is it’s not supposed to be. It’s the article that’s written by journalists.

Mickie Kennedy [00:42:21]:
And so I’d say if you’re not a great writer, feel free to lean on AI. Where I think AI falls short with a press release is the the what the press release should be about. If you just say, hey. I’m a press release distributor, and I’ve been in business since 1998. Here’s my about section. Write me a press release. It’ll write a press release and I’ll probably read well, but it’s not gonna be newsworthy or important enough for a journalist to probably engage with it. So, you know, maybe you could brainstorm with it.

Mickie Kennedy [00:42:54]:
But I find that a lot of times you want to come to the AI knowing exactly the the hook, what you want to promote and what the lead is and go from there. And that being said, I often, you know, I feel like I’m punishing AI. I will be like, rewrite the 3rd paragraph. Give me 5 or, opening paragraphs, you know, trying different approaches. Give me, you know, 20 different headlines to choose from, with this thing. And I will then, you know, take what I think is the best and, maybe incorporate some elements from the other pieces. But, I I I if I’m not happy with it, I go back to it and make it rewrite it and redraft it and, and get to where I need to be. With chat GPT specifically, I found that with 3.5, I couldn’t get it to write a 400 to 600 word press release.

Mickie Kennedy [00:43:47]:
It would stop at 270 to 280 words most of the time. I don’t have that problem anymore. My approach then was to break it down and say, give me the opening paragraph. Give me the next paragraph. And if I if I fed it piecemeal, I would get a press release. So it was 4 100 to 600 words. But I’m finding I’m not having to do that now. So, I do think that that’s that’s that’s really cool.

Mickie Kennedy [00:44:13]:
You can put what the word count is you want. You may have to massage that by editing it or whatever. But, I do think you should also spend a little more time with the quote if you ask it to include a quote in the press release. Really spend some time on that because, I think I’ve mentioned that journalists can really be captivated by an amazing quote and say, I’m going with this person because that quote’s so good. I want to use that in my article. The same thing if you have a press release with an amazing quote, the journalists might forgive a mediocre press release if they know there’s an amazing quote there that they can build a story around. And what makes an amazing quote. You know, sometimes it can be, you know, the creativity and flourish, you know, how well written it is.

Mickie Kennedy [00:44:58]:
You know, maybe those are instances where you can use a 25¢ word, but it can also just be how powerfully concise you paraphrase something and said it in a way that’s powerful and meaningful. And it’s also if it’s controversial, if you say something that’s sort of, you know, against what everyone else thinks is a little bit contrarian or is negative. Generally, journalists don’t want that to appear anywhere but within a quote so that they can attribute it to that person. And so, I think spend a little time on the quote, make it meaningful, so that when a journalist does see that press release, they’ll say, hey, this is like a good idea. Wow, that’s an amazing quote. I’m definitely gonna move that to my probably pile for consideration. And so, you know, I think that AI is one of those things that is a great tool. Use it as a tool.

Mickie Kennedy [00:45:50]:
You know, there’s other resources for brainstorming strategic types of releases. I would recommend you go to those first and then figure out what you’re gonna write before you get to, AI.

James Kademan [00:46:01]:
Interesting. Tell me, you mentioned the relationship with the journalists. So is that does that still come into play with this with the PR stuff? Or is it because I can’t imagine you’re making a phone call to every journalist saying, hey.

Mickie Kennedy [00:46:14]:
No. It’s a

James Kademan [00:46:15]:
pizza place, whatever.

Mickie Kennedy [00:46:16]:
No. We don’t do pitching, but there is still email email that happens. And these are people that recognize us. You know, it can unsubscribe at any time. So, you know, it is a little bit of a relationship. It’s not a personal pitch. We don’t know all of these journalists, you know, anymore. It’s just too many people.

Mickie Kennedy [00:46:37]:
You know, if I was a PR firm, I’d pick like an industry and I would drill down and make it my job to get to know the top 100 journalists in that space and foster a relationship that wouldn’t happen in a day. It would be something I’d try to work on over a 2 to 3 year period and get comfortable touching in with, you know, touching base with them maybe quarterly or anything like that. And that’s something that you can do as well. You know, there’s a lot of companies that maybe they don’t have, a national market. And when they come to your releases, I’m like, we can do our release and then do a local saturation. But I think when it comes to local media, that’s something that you should facilitate yourself. And if you are in a city or a metro, just think about it logically. There’s probably less than 10 people who would write about you less than 10.

Mickie Kennedy [00:47:29]:
That is so easy for you to develop a relationship with those people. It might be as few as 4. You know, you look at your local paper and, you know, who’s the person who generally covers your industry? If you’re lucky enough to have a business magazine or business newspaper or in the case of Baltimore, we’re lucky enough to have both of those right now, who at those publications, would write about you reach out to them, see if their email address is online. If it’s not reach out, call and ask for their email address. These are not celebrities. These are writers in your community and they’re supposed to be approachable and you’re supposed to be able to give them story ideas. So they will give you their email address all 90 5% of the time. Sometimes they might just say, I prefer a phone call or I prefer fax.

Mickie Kennedy [00:48:18]:
You know, I don’t think that’s very common. It used to be some would say I prefer pitches through Twitter, but I think that, Elon Musk has taken care of that so that most journalists are are not really on Twitter the way they used to be. So or X now. But I think that these are things that you can do. And then you reach out to these people on a regular basis. And what that looks like is as you have news that is important, you know, in your space. And I say try to do it at least quarterly, you know, at the very least. And what does that look like? You know, if you have something important, a new product, a new service, a new location, you know, any of those things, Yeah.

Mickie Kennedy [00:49:04]:
That’s fine. But a lot of james, you’re not gonna have any of that. You’re going to have to create this out of nothing. And what does that look like? Well, you know, there could be trends in your industry. You know, going green and environmental is one of those things. Every industry has to face that. So if you’re a local dry cleaners, you’re doing something to that’s green. You have to be the way the industry is going.

Mickie Kennedy [00:49:28]:
You can just reach out to them and say, Hey, I’ve noticed a lot of people in my industry have been talking about getting rid of this one chemical in at the dry cleaners. And I’d love to share with you what we’ve done to go green and how we’ve adopted this safe thing. And I can provide photos and boom, here’s an amazing quote about that. And it’s like, you know, while the whole dry cleaning industry has been divided about how to go green, The it seems like the one thing that they now agree of is this particular chemical is the worst. And we are proud that we, you know, have have removed that 3 years ago or or something to that effect, and and make it, you know, massage it, play with it, make it powerful, make it stand out, and, and and and then just email that. You don’t have to email a press release. Literally, just a few sentences. I do think having a great quote in there will make you stand out and, just do that quarterly with each of these, people, and eventually you’ll get picked up.

Mickie Kennedy [00:50:31]:
You may not get picked up the 1st year. It is hard to break in, but what you’ll find is as you email these journalists, you will stay top of mind after a while And it usually is around 10 months when that happens And a magic thing happens the 2nd year. You will probably get published, but it probably won’t be something you pitch. It’ll be that journalist under deadline working on something completely different. And they’re talking about, I don’t know, charities or something. And they’re like, I wanna plug in a local business here. Who could I do that with? I remember that dry cleaner who’s pitched me 4 james. I’ll reach out to them and ask if they’re doing any initiatives with, you know, nonprofits or charities or something like that.

Mickie Kennedy [00:51:18]:
And, the thing is, when these people call, be creative, open your mind. If they if it doesn’t exactly apply to you, think of ways of which it could and just say, well, it’s interesting. You suggested that we haven’t done anything with charities in the past, but okay. It’s April. It’s April. What the heck’s going on? You know, look up online. What’s going on later this year? Is there a cancer month? Is there something else we plan on doing next month or in June? You know, a cancer initiative, and I’d love to, I I don’t have the time right now, but I’d love to share some concrete ideas of what we’re doing. And, and then, you know, put a quote in there and reply to them.

Mickie Kennedy [00:52:00]:
And what you’ll find is boom, that’ll be your first article. And it just happened because you were persistent and reaching out to them without being a pest. And you are someone that they’re now thinking of, and they’re actively thinking of you are part of the mix. And when I’m working on stories, I can plug them in. I can also stay open to them as they pitch me. And it’s one of the reasons that, you tend to see the same companies use again and again in a lot of, local newspapers and publications. It’s not necessarily that they’re advertising. It’s because they’ve they’ve just established that relationship with the journalists and journalists who are busy can just reach out and grab someone that, they know is always available and easy to plug in.

James Kademan [00:52:44]:
That is so crazy. That is man, now that you’re saying that, I’m thinking when I look I guess, what I’m paying attention to is more, more corporate Fortune 500 type stuff. But I think when I look at the news, which isn’t often national news, whatever, it’s like I can guarantee there’s gonna be some Trump articles, some Tesla articles. I’ll see Jamie Dimon in there, and there’ll probably be some fast food thing, usually McDonald’s. Like, I remember seeing an article about McDonald’s, the discounted menu or something like that. And I’m like, how did this make the news? Like, really? Is this is this really news? Does that mean that the world is perfect right now? It’s shy of, like, when the discount on the McDonald’s cheeseburger or whatever is big news? But I’m like, now that you’re saying that, I’m like, holy cow. Is that just PR teams or or

Mickie Kennedy [00:53:36]:
It is. I mean and some people are very clever. You know, if they see something that’s trending in the news right now, like back when everybody was talking about grimace shakes and things like that. You know, if you’re a local dentist and you say, I’ve banned my entire staff, if they get McDonald’s over the next 6 weeks during this promotion, they’re fired. And, and you put a quote in there, and you send that to your local newspapers and business magazines, they’re probably gonna contact you. And, you know, that’s a great way in which you’re kind of news Mickie, but you personalized it very much for your business. And you could just talk about, I’m a dentist. I see people putting garbage in their mouth all the time and the outcomes.

Mickie Kennedy [00:54:21]:
And right now, there’s this company promoting these purple shakes everywhere, and people are going out and buying, you know, buying 3 or 4 a week. I’m not going to participate or encourage it. And so, you know, a grimace shake is not a protected class, you know, so therefore, I will fire anybody who brings in McDonald’s over the next 6 weeks while they’re serving these these awful things. And you just put that, you know, don’t say awful. Go go get a the source and say something crazy and powerful and and weird. People will remember that. And people remember, oh, that’s the opinionated dentist, but, you know, he has a point.

James Kademan [00:55:03]:
I can just imagine the front desk person reading the news, like, wait a second. And she looks over at her lunch, like, throw in the trash, throw in the trash. Oh, that’s genius. Mickie, thank you so much. You shared a ton of information about PR stuff, because I’ve heard of it. I’ve paid people and companies to do it for me. I know now I did it wrong. I guess what I was looking at, I I know what I wanna ask you.

James Kademan [00:55:32]:
I have seen places have little like, we got Fox, we got NBC, we got CNN, little things, like, featured in. And then you try to click on it, like, it’s not a link. It just shows us the logo.

Mickie Kennedy [00:55:45]:
Right.

James Kademan [00:55:46]:
So is that one of those games where you just send it to a wire and it was featured in kind of thing?

Mickie Kennedy [00:55:51]:
And even when you go over PRDZ wire, a little bit of syndication happens. There’s like a 100 of those, links and you can pull those logos. There’s always usually a Fox affiliate, an ABC affiliate. So, yeah, you can you get to put the little logos up if you want to. I don’t know how meaningful that is. I think that when you have an actual article written about you, you know, that’s that’s the real goal. And the reason for that is when someone reads an article, there’s this huge credibility thing that happens. You know, a journalist has written about you.

Mickie Kennedy [00:56:23]:
We often see that as a signal of trust, and we allow ourselves to have an emotional response to the article that we do not allow when it’s an advertisement. When it’s bad, we are rigid. You know, I might click through just to see what this is about, but I’m not buying.

James Kademan [00:56:36]:
Well, also, yeah.

Mickie Kennedy [00:56:38]:
But when it’s an article, it’s completely different. I’ve read so many blog posts or articles about Kickstarter campaigns. I’m like, woah. This guy is cool. He has he has figured out this little niche and need. And you know what? I don’t really need it, but I’m gonna click through. And next thing I know, it’s like, it’s only $35. I’m gonna help this guy support his dream.

Mickie Kennedy [00:56:58]:
And next thing I know is, like, I don’t know if I’ll ever even get this, but I just spent $35. And that’s what happens with earned media. And you can then take that article and rather than have these logos, put that article on your website. Take that article, take that link, share it, and social Mickie, put it in front of your customers and your leads. And people always go, they’re already customers. Why would I put it in front of customers? I’m like, churn. There’s always a certain amount of customers, they’re gonna shop around and say, I just need to make sure I’m using the best company. So we’re gonna try a different one this year.

Mickie Kennedy [00:57:30]:
Did they read that article? They get that same signal of trust, you know, that that social proof when a journalist writes about you, they’re like, we’re we’re the right company. No need to to move around this year. You know, leads, you know, there’s always a percentage that you’re not gonna convert. And, you know, I hate to admit, but with my leads, it’s it’s over 80% don’t convert. But maybe I take that 80% that we’re never going to buy and put that earned media article in front of them, And I get a few of them to read it, and they get that same emotional response. And maybe they were at 48% of the mark to choose me, and they didn’t get over the 50 percent mark. And maybe this article does that. And that’s the real power of earned media.

Mickie Kennedy [00:58:11]:
You know, I had a local carpet company in New Jersey that we did a campaign, got great coverage in their trade publications. And the first thing I pointed out is your customers don’t read trade publications. Other carpet companies do. They said, you know, when we told you that’s what we wanted, we we we have a bigger picture. So we kept doing that. And to the end of the year, we had 30 clips from them. We did get them in their local, newspaper and in New Jersey magazine, which they said is a big, big deal for them. And they were based in New Jersey and like 28 trade publications.

Mickie Kennedy [00:58:47]:
They printed them out, put them in a binder, and every time they gave someone a quote, they would say look we’re not gonna come in the cheapest but you know we rarely have ever had to come back and re stretch a carpet or fix a seam. We do it right. And, here you can see they open the book and they say, we’ve been Mickie, you know, picked up by Floor Trade Weekly. We’ve been picked up by, you know, coverings today, all of these different places. And here we are in the local newspaper and here we are in New Jersey Magazine. They closed that book. No one read an article. It was less than a minute.

Mickie Kennedy [00:59:19]:
And just by adding that they increased their conversion rate by 17% every time they went into someone’s home. So almost one out of every 5 james that they were losing, they were now converting just by adding that credibility boost that brag book is what they called it, to their james, thing. And that’s the real value of earned media. I I guarantee you, you just take a copy of your press release from a bunch of websites and print it out and show it. I don’t think you’re gonna get the increase in conversions, anything close to 17%.

James Kademan [00:59:51]:
Right. Man, that is genius. I love it. That was with our call answering service. That’s the biggest challenge is essentially proving trust, which I imagine that’s a challenge for a lot of businesses, big or small. Because we are saying, like, yeah, you are right. Trust us. And we know they can trust us, but they don’t know that they can trust us.

James Kademan [01:00:14]:
And they’re the ones writing the check, so we gotta get them to trust us kind of thing.

Mickie Kennedy [01:00:17]:
Right.

James Kademan [01:00:18]:
So, yeah, it never dawned on me. I guess I was treating press releases as a different means of advertising rather than a means to actually build trust. So that’s cool.

Mickie Kennedy [01:00:31]:
I think if you go into press releases with the marketing mentality and then dig in and put another 15% more energy and creativity into it, you can you can make a huge difference. You can go in. I think the people who come in and test it and do a few releases and nothing really happens, it happens a lot. But if you go in and you’re creative and you really do strategic types of releases and you’re playful with it and you test a lot of different approaches, you’ll have you’ll have a much better outcome and you may be really shocked at at how well it works for you.

James Kademan [01:01:05]:
Nice. Tell me just really quick last question here because I know we’re running out of time. I started to ask you this before, but I wanna dig into it a little bit more. The PR stuff, is that a one time thing, or you recommended people hire a company like yours or whatever, monthly, weekly, daily? I don’t know. Whatever it is.

Mickie Kennedy [01:01:24]:
I I always tell people if you’re going to try press releases, I would prefer that you do a PR campaign of 6 to 8 releases. So, you know, I would never tell anybody create a Google Ad campaign, get 30 clicks. If you don’t, you know, sell anything, stop. You know, you have you have to have enough of a sample to know whether it’s gonna work for you. And for PR, it it is a a single PR campaign, and it’s usually 6 to 8 releases. They’re never about the same thing unless you’re doing really well. Sometimes if you knock it out of the park and you get a lot of media pickup, you can write about a similar type of release and continue to milk it. That’s what we did with that carpet company.

Mickie Kennedy [01:02:09]:
In a brainstorm, I asked them who their biggest enemy was, and they said it was big box home improvement stores. And he said, the funny thing is the trade publications have never talked about it. And everybody that reads trade publications are other local carpet companies. So we did a David versus Goliath. Why big box some improvement stores are so bad for the carpet industry. And and we got like 10 places Mickie it up the first time. And we continue to do themes along that line and it still continued to work. So, you know, try different approaches.

Mickie Kennedy [01:02:38]:
But if it works, you know, test if you can, you know, get the lightning to strike again, because some often in PR, you can. And, also, you know, just just be strategic. And when I say strategic, I I can point people directly to, my free master class. I have, an hour long video master class that’s completely free. It’s good for anybody with from no background in PR to people who’ve tried several, and it will teach you what are strategic types of releases that anybody can incorporate and do. And, it’s available at ereleases.com/planplan. And, again, it’s completely free. Less than an hour, I recognize I’m not gonna watch a 12 hour course.

Mickie Kennedy [01:03:21]:
I know the average person isn’t, so I made it short and easy to digest. I consider it like, an audit where you can go through and come up with potential ideas, for for what that PR campaign should consist of. But do a PR campaign, give it a try, and I, you know, I have one idea in my arsenal that I share that has never failed. The least amount of articles that that one press release generated was 4. The average is 8 to 14 articles every time someone does that. And and and yet there are people who’ve spent 20, 40, $60,000 with a PR firm and got no earned EBITDA. And yet if if they had done that one, it would have worked. It always works.

James Kademan [01:04:05]:
Nice. Well, we’ll check that out. Tell me or tell us, I should say, tell us that website one more time.

Mickie Kennedy [01:04:10]:
Sure. It’s ereleases.com/planplan.

James Kademan [01:04:14]:
Awesome. I love it. Mickey, thank you so much for being on the show.

Mickie Kennedy [01:04:18]:
Oh, you’re very welcome.

James Kademan [01:04:19]:
I feel like after talking with you that I have wasted a lot of money with PR stuff that I didn’t even know. I mean, in the end, it was me throwing spaghetti at the wall because I didn’t know what I was buying. But I remember paying PR company. I think it was just on Fiverr or something like that when I pushed my book out in 2017. And I’ll have to look back and even see what I bought because I don’t remember getting anything from it, but it’s, it’s interesting. It’s very good to know something that I’ve I’ve been meaning to know about for a long time. So I appreciate you being on the show.

Mickie Kennedy [01:04:54]:
Sure. Absolutely.

James Kademan [01:04:55]:
This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. My name is James Kademan, and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls on Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country on the web at callsoncallcom. And, of course, the Bold Business Book, a book for the entrepreneur in all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guest, Mickie Kennedy. Mickey, can you tell us that website one more time?

Mickie Kennedy [01:05:28]:
Sure. It’s ereleases.com/planplan.

James Kademan [01:05:33]:
Perfect. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, keep the algorithm happy, thumbs up, subscribe, and, of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends. Normally, I tell people to share it with your entrepreneurial friends in a specific industry. But in the case of PR, I feel like it is safe to say I don’t know of any industry that couldn’t use it. Maybe catalytic converter stealing or something like that, but I’m certain that every industry could use PR. So, Mickey, thank you so much.

Mickie Kennedy [01:06:01]:
Oh, you’re very welcome.

James Kademan [01:06:03]:
Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night at the podcast link fun at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for listening. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.