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Artefact Team
Creative Graphic Design
Dublin, Ireland

Publicity

Publicity is designed to have pretty much the same effect as advertising but differs in the way it is presented and in its content, and is often a good deal more credible than advertising. It differs in the way it is presented in that it is usually not presented by the marketer but by a third party. It differs in its content in that it is not typical advertising copy but more likely an interview with the marketer, or an article about the company, or a news item about the product, or an unsolicited testimony by a happy customer. With advertising, you buy the space and you say exactly as you please about your product or service. Typically you exaggerate the benefits and ignore the weaknesses. Everybody knows that. As a result most of us are inclined to ignore advertising or at least take the claims of ads with a pinch of salt. But if a respected independent person recommends the product from his/her own experience, if a newspaper carries a complimentary article, if the owner of the company is interviewed in a respected e-zine, if positive news is being spread about you by other people - and free - then the advantages of publicity are clear. So much so that the old phrase tells us that there's no such thing as bad publicity - do not believe that by the way. Bad publicity can do a lot of damage.

If your business gets big enough and talked about enough, like Amazon, you'll get publicity good and bad whether you want it or not and you may have to hire Public Relations people to try to manage it so that by and large it works for you and not against you. For most of us, it's a question of putting in plenty of effort. What can you do to generate good publicity for an online business?

E-ZINES

Well, for a start there are e-zines out there on just about everything. Fortunately most of those who put them together, just like in the print media, are under pressure to deliver content and usually pressed for time so that they welcome contributions. If you can offer to contribute an article about your area of expertise for a publication focusing on that subject - and make sure that you get in the plug for your own site/service/product (with a reasonable amount of subtlety!), it will likely be welcomed by the publisher. Do a bit of research first. You don't want to kill yourself writing 2,000 words for an e-zine that nobody reads.

E-ZINES CAN BE EZ!
Find out which ezines are closely relevant to your market. Which ones are the most popular? What can you do to make sure that you and your product/service feature in them regularly. Can you offer some editorial, comment, reviews of the market or of relevant new books? Can you ask them to review your site/product/service? Go hunting for some publicity opportunities. In one ezine directory we checked out, the keyword 'marketing' brings up details on 386 publications. Some of these have a substantial subscriber base.

NEWSGROUPS

There are newsgroups on just about any topic you can think of. We have come across newsgroups on topics that we've never even heard of and others on topics so weird we cannot imagine why anyone would want to discuss them! So there's sure to be one, or even several, for you. You can get your offering across but you must employ caution. You should get involved and make a genuine contribution, stay on-topic, do not spam or advertise blatantly if that is not the culture of the newsgroup. The FAQ's or simply spending some time reading the messages in the newsgroup will let you know what's acceptable. Your sig file can also serve a useful purpose here. Be careful to observe the ways of each newsgroup - there are people in there who can cause you a lot of grief if you fail to observe the appropriate 'netiquette'. If you can get newsgroup members talking and writing about your product/service in relevant newsgroups - that's publicity!