If the elephant in your promotional parade broke ranks and made major deposits in the mayor’s garden, Public Relations — not advertising — would be your first call.

Damage control, reputation, image-building, and the art of assuage are only a few of the many faces of PR, a practice often underutilized, under-deployed and too often misunderstood by business and the internet marketing community.

Given the potential for effective business and social media market visibility today, especially in a service-oriented economy, PR — two letters that spell credibility and sales support in any language — should be given the same weight as advertising. It need not take a crisis.

To be sure, intelligent PR can and should be mind-bending. Do the research. Evaluate. Mix with innovation, courage, media savvy, persistence, patience, and a dollop of charm, and you have a recipe for impact. A few tips:

1. Know Your Markets. They are consumers, business owners, managers and stockholders who read, blog, net-surf, watch cable TV, listen to radio, and the human
   side in communications. You want them to trust you, your company brand, message, products and services. You need them to realize that the benefits they receive will be greater than the costs they incur.*
2. Unless you’re buying space on the Mouse World site to explain why the cam tottle on the Model 66 unit malfunctions, there are no assurances of feedback.PR targets issues, philosophies, and opinions. And it goes a long way toward altering perceptions. If you opt to involve the commercial media, know that the majority will tell your story their way, not yours. But also know that if you create a compelling case for your story, any reasonable reporter or editor will consider what you say and very possibly act on it.
3. Perceptions are Seldom Uniform. Thus, target audiences must be carved into segments. Be mindful of the “4 P’s”: 1) Develop an alluring Product ; 2) Play down the Price; 3) Ensure that the Places the target encounters the product are convenient to their lifestyle; and 4) Promote the encounter creatively via strategies and tactics designed to generate best response.
4. Measure Results. Like the electronic tools that rule our lives, the marketplace changes constantly. Watch what you’re doing. Make sure it’s working. Know your competition. Be ready to make changes, quickly.
5. Aftermarket the Good News. When the hits come — and if you’ve thoughtfully shaped your story and your market approach, they will — use the news. Post it to your site, your client’s, build a link to it (i.e., make it easy to access) for your customers and prospects. Make a product or news release from it. Do not assume that those who should have seen it/heard it actually did.

Oh, about that elephant? With the help of the Humane Society and the city groundskeeper, the PR guy convinced the mayor on the value of elephant droppings as garden fertilizer. The story made front pages and home pages around the country.
* Social Marketing Institute, 2008

I thought I’d start off this series of articles by briefly communicating some philosophy about strategies and attitudes towards establishing a website for your business. There are a ton of articles which give you some strong technical advice and expertise around the subject of web strategies, which is great, but none of them really address the broader, more esoteric questions:

Why & How?

So that I don’t put you to sleep with my very first blog entry, I’m going see if I can help address the “why?” There’s lots of time to address the “how?” later.

From my point of view, I answer the question of “why” by explaining that everyone in business wants to find themselves in a target-rich-environment. Without really understanding a little more about the general trends in consumer research, however, that statement may not quite cut it for most business owners.

If you really want to know why your business needs a strong web presence, it seems that an easier way to answer that question is to ask “Why Do Customers Look for Goods or Services on the Internet?” Let’s look at a 5 possible reasons here:

1. Information is instant. We don’t have to wait for a reply to a letter, or to wait for the person who “handles” that department to return from lunch. In fact, we often don’t even have to pick up the phone.
2. Purely because of the nature of the Internet, business owners are able to give far more information about the goods or services being offered on a website more easily than any other form of marketing communication[1] in history. Want to know the specifications of the current model Corvette? Look it up online and decide if you even want to bother with a test drive before actually going to a dealership and requesting one.
3. When it comes to having the ability to research a subject, consumers can do it far more easily and far faster with a business’ website than with any other medium.
4. The Internet provides a global reach and is accessible 24 hours of the day, 365 days of the year. This means that consumers can look for anything they want when they want, and they can get it from anywhere in the world.
5. By reviewing a business’ website, consumers do not feel they are being influenced by a sales person on commission. The consumer feels that he or she is viewing as much information as necessary to make a decision. If not, he or she is free to move on to someone else at any time and without pressure from that sales person.

I know. Right now you’re saying “well, duh,” but the reality is that many business owners today do not consider the reasons why the very people they are marketing to would possibly be looking for a website with information about the goods and services they’re offering.

So, when thinking about the reasons why consumers use the Internet to research goods and services and to make informed buying decisions, were you able to flip that coin and think of the reasons why your business needs a website?

I hope so. Perhaps you were able to think of areas in which your own website can be improved to better attract those who are specifically seeking your goods or services.

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[1] I’m not dismissing other forms of marketing communications here. In fact, when Chevrolet wants us to know they are releasing a new Corvette, they use specialized forms of marketing communications to tell a mass audience many times over. Once the audience knows, however, they then look to the Internet for more information.

Information Technology (IT) comprises a major portion of many Small and Medium Business (SMB) operating budgets. With the impetus on reducing operating costs and increasing profits, SMBs turn to cost-cutting measures in various departments. One of the most common areas to focus on is with IT costs. While the “sticker price” of computers appears to be decreasing, the increasingly complex and integrated nature of business networks necessitates experienced IT support and these labor costs can significantly out shadow hardware costs. Smaller companies, in particular, are generally in a quandary over their ongoing struggle to properly source their IT support, since they lack the in-house expertise to handle the tasks internally.

With companies gradually turning away from “traditional” methods of conducting, operating, managing and performing business functions; technology and communication systems are at the core of the entire process of sharing information and business growth. Today’s businesses are increasingly reliant on e-mail, hosted applications (e.g. SalesForce), shared databases, and networking equipment (e.g. servers and routers) in order for daily operations to function. These integrated solutions, network security, network management, infrastructure maintenance, disaster recovery, data storage, and network monitoring generally consume 60-70% of annual IT budgets for most organizations. Simply stated, this means 2/3 of IT budgets are consumed in maintaining the current IT infrastructure and only 1/3 of IT budgets are utilized for upgrading and actually improving the competitive advantage of the company.

This evolution in business processes makes companies of all sizes vulnerable to security issues such as hacking, exposure to malicious software (malware) (e.g. viruses and spyware), denial of service attacks, data compromise by both employees and hackers, spamming, and data loss due to natural and man-made incidents. Whether it leads to temporary business downtime or the loss of critical business information, SMBs need the experts and the resources to cope with these challenges.

What can business owners and managers do? There are a few key deciding factors to keep in mind:

§ Develop a business-focused IT strategy: With IT plan development, management must factor in the nature of their business, their strategic growth, and their business requirements. An IT strategy should be featured in the company’s business plan.

§ Resist the urge to react: Always consider the bigger picture. What are the driving issues for your business: changing business plan, emerging technologies, strategic vs. tactical challenges? Preventative maintenance and planned IT purchases are proven to save companies money.

§ View IT as a critical asset, not a simple tool: Formal policies and contracts are forged for how employees sign for paper clips or how they can use a company vehicle. However, most SMBs completely neglect the importance of formal IT and Information Security (IS) policies to protect their business. Without IT, businesses will fail. This severity necessitates a formal approach.

An IT strategy is really a roadmap to keep a business “on course” with managing its information assets (e.g. computers, printers, server, etc.) and its information resources (e.g. data). This is a concerted effort between management and IT staff, since both opportunities and threats constantly evolve. Where a plan benefits a company’s bottom line profitability is in reducing poorly planned purchases, improving efficiency by pairing the proper equipment with job functions, and reducing reactive maintenance costs.