MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

How do you lever­age pub­lic rela­tions more? Joel Roberts says you should always begin by ask­ing your­self, “What is the prob­lem that I am try­ing to solve?”

Don’t talk about the solu­tion until you have talked about the prob­lem. Here’s one more secret on how to get atten­tion from the media.

There’s a huge strug­gle in this area because as a busi­ness owner, you have to grow rich in your niche. But, to get mass media atten­tion, you have to broad­cast for a rea­son. That means your mes­sage is broad­cast to a lot more peo­ple than those in your niche. This is where most peo­ple get it com­pletely wrong, and here Joel Roberts gave a very inter­est­ing example.

“If you have a prob­lem that tack­les illit­er­acy and helps peo­ple learn how to read, how do you get on a radio show?” he asked. Nobody in the audi­ence had a clue as to how to answer that question.

Frame It in A Big­ger Perspective

The mass mar­ket has to pay atten­tion. Joel Roberts’ sug­ges­tion was to find research that shows that illit­er­acy is related to crime.

• The more illit­er­ate peo­ple, the higher the crime rate.
• Show that illit­er­acy is related to income – namely, the class divide.
• Show that it’s also related to taxes because peo­ple that are illit­er­ate gen­er­ally don’t pro­duce a lot of income, there­fore they don’t pro­duce much in taxes for your community.

I found this infor­ma­tion use­ful because I had cer­tainly never looked at it that way.

This Gets People’s Attention

You can go on radio and talk about crime. You can then talk about fight­ing crime by fight­ing illit­er­acy. Peo­ple will lis­ten because every­body cares about crime. If you don’t make those con­nec­tions, you’re never going to get on the radio; you’re not going to get pub­lic­ity from any mass media.

No mat­ter what your niche is, you have to fig­ure out a way to frame it so that the masses will lis­ten. If you can grab their atten­tion for an instant, you can then go into the details. But, if you start with the details and the solu­tion, you won’t get any­where with the mass media.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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