Managing your perception is a basic life skill. PR used to stand for public relations. Now it stands for perception of reality. Our job is to manage between that perception and reality. For most people the reality is better than perception for example: “I am really good, people just don’t know it!” For some people perception exceeds the reality. We call that hype. We want to keep perception and reality relatively happy otherwise it would be something wrong. Cognitive dissonance refers to individuals who hold two or more contradictory beliefs. We should manage between perception and reality when it comes to PR and media.
What do clients get out of it? They get more clients, do more business and even they get to change the world if they are president in PTA or environmental activist.
Everybody has a website and social media accounts.
How do you make a client see an accurate perception of themselves? You should do a research online about the client and talk to them before starting a project. You should get to know them and what they really wish for.
People always judge the others but not themselves. People are never quite grounded when dealing with themselves. Some people think they are huge superstars. Some other people think they are minor stars but in reality they are huge superstars. Your job in PR is to get them grounded and understand the reality and saying:” here we are starting from and here we are going to”.
How can you find out if someone become a best seller in book publicity or superstar in his/her business? You have to find out what the client want to achieve and if it is achievable at all. Did you know that 20% of teenagers believe that they will become famous? Not wanna be but famous? They are right because there are many mediums that can help them to become famous. They got facebook, youtube, reality shows and other social media channels. There are so many ways to stand out in this world. It all starts with a recognition with: “here where i wanna start and here where i wanna go”.
You can be famous for many things. Becoming famous is easy. What you should do is to get recognition in your field. You have to aim at achieving your goal in your niche. There are always ups and downs in business, don’t get me wrong. But being patient and having perseverance are the key in success.
Recognition is good because you build a brand that you can monetize. You cannot monetize for being famous. You don’t make a living by virtue the fact for being famous, you make a living by virtue the fact that you do something well and fame helps to accelerate a lot of these things. You want to be in control of the velocity of fame and recognition and good PR takes time. It is like cooking a good chicken dish, you prepare the ingredients, the chicken and then you place them in the oven and it is delicious in comparison with placing a fast food in a microwave.
I don’t judge people’s motives. Some want to become rich, some others want to change the world but the question is what is their next 5 years old plan.
How do you spot the next trend? In order to get the client in media, you create a trend for example “lady Gaga”.
Build relationships with journalists. We don’t have good journalists anymore. Good ones got a lot to write about and have a little time, so when you do some works for them, they really appreciate it. You can give them tips about certain people doing certain things or hot news here and there that nobody pays attention to.
To create a trend can be different from making the way a person wear clothing to travel, science book writing and so on. Health issues and medical science have always been hot and journalists love to get their hands on news like that.
You just have to look at components of the PR you are working on and take it from there.This means improving each component in order to reach a successful PR for the client.