The truth is that most businesses are too small be of interest to mainstream media, and this is the message shared by Caryn Marooney, co-founder and CEO of The Outcast Agency then VP of Global Comms at FB in a Techcrunch interview.
In America as an example, 92.47% of all companies are <24 people, 99.63% of all companies are <249 people. In other words most companies are so small that they aren't of interest to the media.
On this podcast I talk about the mindset change which business owners can take and to see not volume but value from communications, and how to break down the stages of the customer journey with our brand.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairmanof the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgansports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
The truth is that most businesses are too small be of interest to mainstream media, and this is the message shared by Caryn Marooney, co-founder and CEO of The Outcast Agency then VP of Global Comms at FB in a Techcrunch interview.
In America as an example, 92.47% of all companies are <24 people, 99.63% of all companies are <249 people. In other words most companies are so small that they aren't of interest to the media.
On this podcast I talk about the mindset change which business owners can take and to see not volume but value from communications, and how to break down the stages of the customer journey with our brand.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairmanof the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgansports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Today, I'm going to talk about Caryn Marooney who thinks that no one really cares about your business. Caryn Marooney was the co-founder and CEO of the OutCast agency, and after that, she was the Vice President of Global Communications at Facebook. TechCrunch released an article recently where she was interviewed by a reporter Lucas Matney, and Lucas says that the subtext of Marooney's comments were that the media really don't care about your business unless it's big enough. Having worked with founders of businesses and large companies for over 25 years and having run my own businesses that were not public relations agencies, I think that Caryn's right. We've got to face up to the fact that n order to get into the media, i to especially tier-one media, a d by that, we mean the Wall Str et Journal, the Times, or The Straits Times in Singapore, o e has to have a company that is talking to about two-thirds of their readership, and that's be ause very simply, for the media they have two business models. One is from subscriptions, a d the other is from advertis ng. So if our business is not b g enough to be appealing to enough of the readers, it's not oing to get covered. Caryn Marooney says that founders need to ask themselves
a couple of questions:
one, why should anyone care about what their business is doing? And second, is there a purchase order existing for this business? There was a third question and answer, but I have to confess, I didn't pay for the subscription to TechCrunch in order to see it. But I think the third question could be, are you the first or the best, and how can you prove it? Having launched and helped to introduce new products like Yahoo! Shopping or even the intelligent text entry for mobile phones back in the late '90s, unless something is particularly innovative, media has a particular interest in a sector, or you have a compelling story, it's extremely hard for businesses to get into mainstream media, but this doesn't mean it's the end of the world. I say that because, although I run a PR firm and we help large companies, in truth, most companies are actually not that large. In America, there are 18,204,679 companies registered in 2018, but 92.47% of all companies are less than 24 people, and 99.63% of all companies are less than 249 people. If you're a business owner and you're reading this, how many staff do you have? What kind of turnover do you have? The average earnings in America is something like $200,000 per employee as the average. Running consulting firms, my experience is that about three times the employee costs becomes the revenue. But obviously, there are different industries with different multiples on earnings. When it comes to my company, here at EastWest PR, I send out newsletters, I send out tweets, I do the SPEAK|pr podcast, and we have a website. My small team and I put a lot of time and effort into all the media work. In fact, it's me and a group of consultants and employees who work virtually. So, if nearly 100%, all but the last 0.47%, of companies are less than 249 people, the real question is how many customers do we really need? And then more importantly, how much media coverage do we really need? The answer is not that much, and that can be reassuring, because there are different kinds of public relations. I started the SPEAK|pr podcast, because most companies cannot afford a public relations agency. Most business owners find that working with an agency doesn't give them a return on investment, because they might get covered in the media, but the media is read by a lot of people that are not actually going to become customers. Most companies that I know have only maybe 30-50 customers. Even restaurants and other establishments probably have a mailing list of a couple of thousand, but in reality, they only have a couple hundred regular clients. This is a reality check on public relations. In the SPEAK|pr program that I've put together, we look at the three different kinds of media relations. One is the earned media, which is really what public relations companies and agencies do, which is to get companies into the mainstream media. Then there is the bought media, which is buying, for example, advertorial space, and the third is owned media; in other words, proprietary media, or media that that we can control. This is, I think, where we as business owners should concentrate. I started the SPEAK|pr methodology and also now have it as a course. If you're interested, I'd love to take you through it. I'm starting to take my first cohort of entrepreneurs and business owners through the SPEAK|pr methodology, and it's about building a brand using your owned media. When we look at our audiences, we have three kinds: our internal, our partners, and our external. In companies, we talk about public relations and trying to communicate to lots of people, but we often take for granted the internal communications and ignore the partner relations. We focus very much on what we call the customer-facing or external relations. But actually, this isn't a recipe for a profitable business, because what we talk about in our SPEAK|pr program is that there is a need to get customers, partners, and clients into alignment with the vision of the founder of the business. In the original comment that Maooney said that people should ask themselves why should anyone care and if there is a purchase order existing for this service, if we identify who our key customers, key partners, and key staff are, we will need to focus on the short-term horizon of our communications rather than always looking into the distance. I'd like to create this sense of a customer journey where someone that has never heard of my company before goes from ignorance to awareness to engagement, to participation to evangelism. Let's take ignorance. They don't even know that EastWest PR exists. Maybe you don't know that this agency that I've run for 25 years exists. Well, I would like for you to become aware of my agency to know that we offer business-to-business consulting across Asia. I'd like for you then to engage with my agency if it's for your company and participate, and this is when companies start to get involved in how I run my services for them. This is when customers start to share feedback and give encouragement. And then if they move to evangelism, where they start to tell other people about my business, well then I've got a business that becomes more profitable, because I'm spending less time doing marketing, but I'm actually encouraging and engaging with my existing customers to generate more revenue for me. The same can be said of our internal and our partners. How many of us are running companies and we have had referrals from business partners? For EastWest PR, referrals are one of our greatest sources of new clients. For instance, I was talking to a finance company the other day, and they offer a complimentary service to a legal firm, but they don't communicate with any legal firms, even though they're both professional services companies. Why would they not do that? Why would they not make sure that every legal firm in the market would understand them and the services they offer, engage with them, participate and find ways to improve that service, and then promote and announce that this other company has a service of comparable value and quality that existing customers could go to? And of course, we can't forget our staff. As we run our businesses, we're so busy thinking about new customers that we forget the people closest to us. Often, it's the case when we're looking for new friends and we forget the ones we've got now. We spend more time with people socially than we do with our own family. But in public relations, as business owners, we tend to focus too much on what lies ahead on the horizon, rather than what lies within our control, and within our control is the owned media channels. The SPEAK|pr program has Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know. These are five stages that are within the control of the business owner. I've been speaking in the last couple of weeks with a number of young business owners and entrepreneurs, and they found the simplicity of this five-stage methodology quite liberating, because it gets the business owners to focus on on why anyone should care, as Marooney is saying. It's a common theme, but I also like to talk about who that founder is. I think that before 'why,' there comes 'who.' Who is the founder? Why have they started this business, but who were they before they got to this place in their journey? Under the personalization at scale, it's about making sure that everybody that is being communicated with has a message that's relevant to them. And as I mentioned, 92.47% of all companies in America are less than 24 people, so how many customers can they possibly have? How difficult can it be to communicate with each one of those customers? And within the potential database of customers, which may be, say, tenfold the actual customers, how difficult can it be to personalize that message at scale? With engagement, it's about creating content that's relevant to those people, so that when they're reading it, they know it's for them. They know what action to take. The Amplification side is about automation, so that when we have our customer, partner, and internal bases, it's not taking a disproportionate amount of time to send everybody a personal message, because we're using technology to automate the distribution, but also, to Know through our Active Communications Index, the productivity levels of the team, so that we can ensure there's a consistent communication. This is important, because business fundamentally is done on the basis of trust. We trust those people that we learn about and who behave in a consistent way, because consistency shows some kind of reliability. If we're parting with our children, for example, as they go to school, when that provider demonstrates that they've got themselves in good order, we feel reassured that they're going to have the service they provide to us in good order as well. Providing consistent and compelling content over time is the focus then of SPEAK|pr. The plan with the Active Communications Index is not to worry so much about the volume of likes or the volume of page views, but to ensure that we're consistently sending information to people, and that we're able to have a complete loop. The next part of public relations is about ensuring that the actual customer experience is in alignment with the promise from the PR. For all of us that have dealt with companies that, on the outside, look fantastic, but the experience was disappointing, we know that creating a great public facade is not easy, but it's not the hardest thing to do, and anyone seeing the fraudsters at the moment on the internet understands how easy it is to create a public persona, especially with digital. Public relations all the way through to customer service is going to lead to having a profitable business, even if it is a small one. Again, only 1.5% of all businesses are greater than 249 people, so most of us really are running small businesses. With the old saying,"Revenue is vanity and profit is sanity," page views and downloads are vanity, while customers, happy team members, and supportive partners are sanity. I've been running multiple businesses for 25 years, and most of the businesses I've managed and all the ones I've worked with have been small. In the public relations field, I work with clients whose revenue is a billion dollars or more, but they operate entirely differently, and as we've seen today, they're the exception and not the rule. This is for you if you're running a business, like 99.63% of the rest of us. The hope, the promise, and the positive message here today is that there are technologies and tools that are very simple to use to put us as business owners in control of communications, and on SPEAK|pr, I'd like to share them with you. If you'd like to participate in the SPEAK|pr program, please reach out to me at jim@eastwestpr.com.