Convert Customer Ignorance to Evangelism. SPEAK|pr Masterminds will show you how.

I'm launching a Mastermind to help business owners to get noticed without the expense of using a PR agency. It may sound insane, as I run an international PR agency, but I think it's time we helped the 98% of companies which are under 250 people and who can't afford external help yet. Besides, often an agency sells what it can deliver which isn't always the same as what business owner needs.

So this course will help the business owner to be prepared for when they do engage an agency.

I illustrate the 5 stages in SPEAK|pr which give a guide to how business owners can approach their own PR, including the productivity metric the Active Communications Index.

For more info on the mastermind visit here.

SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.

If you like this podcast, then subscribe to our newsletter here
Please visit our blog post on PR for business please visit our site:
https://www.eastwestpr.com/blogs/

Transcript

Jim James : 0:17

Today, I'm going to share with you about the SPEAK|pr methodology. This is a program that I'm working to make into a Mastermind and one which I've built using my 25 years of experience of running an international public relations firm, as well as setting up businesses on three continents. I'd like to do to share with you the framework of Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know, what I call SPEAK|pr. SPEAK|pr is an overall methodology for anybody, regardless of the size of the business they're running, to communicate effectively and consistently with all of the audience groups that matter to them. First of all, let's start with the S, which is to Storify. To Storify means that we want to look at the narrative behind your business, why you started that business, what your motivation is, and what your vision is for why you're creating this company, who you're going to help, and prove what problem you're trying to help them to solve. The creation of a narrative about you and your business, why it exists, is personal, authentic, sustainable, and it's the heart of the storification stage of the SPEAK|pr methodology. Storification is also about putting the customer or the client at the heart of the business. We've always talked about customers being the central focus of a business, but storification talks about having your customers as heroes on a journey, while your role as a business owner or an organization leader is really to facilitate their journey to help them overcome the challenges that they're going to face along the way, and you're going to do that with yourself, with your organization, and with the goods and services that you supply to them. Storification looks at creating a narrative, which includes personalities, challenges, opportunities, and ways that you and your company have helped to deliver those stories and those outcomes to your heroes. The second dimension is to Personalize. This focuses on the three different audience groups: the internal or the people we pay, the external or the people who pay us, and the third element, our allies. With communications, we need to think about what we call the avatar. The avatar is the visualization of the individual characters within those different subsets. As we think about the characteristics of the people that we might want to have as employees, customers, or partners, we can start to identify what kind of messages are going to be important to them. The other dimension to the personalization is the engagement process, because when we look at the individuals that we want to address, we have to recognize that they're not all in the same level of engagement with our company. There are five stages in the customer journey: ignorance, awareness, interest, engagement, and evangelism. Ignorance is where people have not even heard of your brand or may not even identify with the issue. Awareness is where that person starts to hear, see, read, or be told about your brand. Interest is where they start to make inquiries. Maybe they visit the website and they go through the beginning stages of due diligence prior to a purchase or to become an employee. Engagement is where they become a customer, where they actually make a transaction, they spend money, or they become an employee or a supplier. The fifth stage of the process is when they become an evangelist, when they start to tell others about your company, because they're so delighted by the service or product and the customer, employee, or partner experience. So, under personalization, we need to look at the avatar, the profile of the individual, but also which stage they are in the process of engagement with our brand. The next element is to Engage, and the only way to engage with these avatars, and to move them along this process of engagement is through compelling content, which is accurate, concise, but most of all appealing to those different audience groups. Of course, different avatars will find different kinds of information interesting. But because they are processing that information at different times of the day, month, or year, they're going to need different kinds of information in different formats delivered across different channels. Content is now at the very heart of all public relations, and in the SPEAK|pr program, we look at the different formats of text, of video, of infographics, of events, of signage, and of meetings. The next stage in the SPEAK|pr program is Amplification. This is the sharing of our stories using technology, and it's what we call personalization at scale. Every company needs more than one employee, one partner, one customer, so amplification at scale is a key part of the SPEAK|pr methodology. Because of social media and digital technologies, all companies have an equal opportunity to amplify their message. It's no longer a function of size. It's a function of using the best tools. And within the amplification module of SPEAK|pr, we'll look at the tools individuals can sign up for and organizations can take advantage of, many of which are free, but all of which will enable the content you create to be repurposed and shared frequently, consistently, even globally, and most importantly, in an automated way. It's going to be the ability to take content and share it without spending any additional time, and it's going to be a game changer for everybody that takes the SPEAK|pr course. The fifth element is to Know. Knowing your public relations activity is what we believe is most important, and so is productivity; in other words, how much effort you actually put in to the public relations campaign. We've defined a term called the Active Communications Index which is a measure of [content x frequency x channels]. We believe that this is a more sane way of measuring the work being done on public relations, because the alternative is to measure some of the vanity metrics like impressions and reach. Those are entirely dependent on the algorithms of the software platforms that you're using and the vagaries of a trending story. What we like to do on the SPEAK|pr course is train people to develop the Active Communications Index and to track it every week. By tracking your productivity and your input to your public relations campaign, you can ensure that you have a consistent approach and that will, as a function, create consistent communication over time. Public relations is essentially the necessary, consistent, and compelling communication with personalization at scale. So, under Knowing, we're going to track what you send, where you send it, and when you send it. It's very simple measurement, but a very effective one. The overarching theme of the SPEAK|pr programme is to enable business owners and entrepreneurs to run their own public relations program without the need of an agency. If they so choose to engage an agency, they will have a strategy or they will have a known audience and a known metric in the ACI to give the agency a guide as to the amount of work they want them to carry out. The SPEAK|pr course is going to be taught along the STEPE methodology of training, which has Skill, Theory, Example, Practice, and Evaluation. Each module will follow these five elements. By doing so, we shall ensure that people that take the course will understand the theory and the skills that they need, they will have learned about case studies of best practice, and they will then start to evaluate their own company's activities in the light of this new SPEAK|pr methodology. Our goal with this SPEAK|pr course is to pass over the skills that we've built from over 25 years, so that individuals can manage their own campaigns. The parallel would be that we would like to teach people to fish rather than to show them how to buy fish. Again, the SPEAK|pr programme has five elements: the Storification of the business, the Personalization of the message, the Engagement through compelling content, the Amplification to ensure personalization at scale by using technology, and the measurement of the activity using the Active Communications Index. Overall, the plan is to enable people to develop public relations programs that will be profitable for their business, because it will generate more sales leads, encourage employees to take ownership, and ultimately transition anybody that's involved in this business from a position of ignorance, through to awareness, to interest, to engagement, and finally to evangelism.