Planning Ideas

Include Your Clients in Your Speeches and Articles
Doing your own PR and presentations? Tap your clients' knowledge in order to enhance an article or speech that you're preparing. Be sure to send a reprint of your published article to the client with a note of thanks. Have your speech recorded "live" and send a tape to the client as a "thank you".

Smart PR for Small Businesses

PR consultant Earl Ross, with over 32 years experience in public relations, extends the following advice to small business owners about using PR to rectify mistakes in his article "Small Business PR":

"Sooner or later, chances are every business is going to do something wrong. What can PR do then? Here are the first ten rules to follow when something goes wrong:

1) Own up to your mistake and try to rectify it ASAP. 2) Ditto 3) Ditto 4) Ditto 5) Ditto 6) Ditto 7) Ditto 8) Ditto 9) Ditto 10) Ditto.

To illustrate, here's an actual example. It happened to my wife. She had purchased a fairly expensive skirt from a local department store, wore it once and took it to a nearby dry cleaners. A week later, she returned and found that her skirt had been ruined. Instead of admitting she had made a mistake the cleaner asserted that the skirt was a cheap one and that is why it had come out so poorly.

Despite my wife's remonstrations the cleaner remained adamant -- she would take no responsibility for the ruined skirt. My wife walked out of the store, never to return. By trying to save a few dollars, the cleaner had lost a valuable customer. Apparently, my wife wasn't the only one to have had difficulties with this cleaner. Her attitude toward all her customers was surly. Moreover, she generally waited on customers clad in a housedress and with a head full of curlers. Clearly, a walking example of the worst in public relations. The proof of the pudding was that within a few short months, she was out of business."

Read the rest of Earl's "Small Business PR" article.

From the "Find the Need and Fill It" Department...

Kevin Siegel, technical trainer and owner of independent publishing company IconLogic (410-956-4949) in Riva, Maryland, started his company in 1993 when he found an industry need that wasn't being filled:

"I'd been teaching various software packages for years and never found a book that was perfect for a classroom setting. If the book was beautiful, odds were that the text was too small to read and hard to follow. If the content in a book was well-presented, the quality of exercises left something to be desired.

Finally tiring of these relentless inconsistencies, I started teaching without any books at all. Over the next several months, many students asked if the things taught in class came from a book. "If so," they asked, "Where and how can we buy it?" That sparked an idea and I began to ask students what they wanted in course manuals. Their feedback became the driving force behind each and every IconLogic training manual.

All of the training manuals are designed in an easy-to-use, "self-tutorial" format that effectively supports both instructor-led and self-study training methodologies. Each is set with large type, has plenty of room for notes and contain plenty of student exercises. Each book is 8 1/2" x 11" and spiral bound so students can lay them flat and each book comes with a student data disk (when required). Since all of the manuals are modular, they can be customized to meet specific skill requirements."

IconLogic has over 70 unique "skills and drills" training manuals that have sold internationally. Who says that students are the only folks who learn something new in class?

Advice About Student Intern Assistance
Small business owners should contact their local university and college business departments concerning student marketing interns. According to Gene Holand, who is with the Business Division of Columbia Basin College in Pasco, WA, there's plenty of help to be had…for free:

"No matter how hard we try to get the word out to the communities and businesses, they don't seem to call. Contact college (2 yr. as well as 4 yr.) placement offices. There are government subsidy monies available to help defray the labor costs."