Bachelor Degree: Public Relations

How Much Do Press Releases Cost?

A new entrepreneur asked me how much a press release should cost to write and distribute. And the answer is that it can cost anywhere from nothing (if you use your own time and effort to do it yourself) to thousands of dollars (depending on the services used and the distribution).

I think the real question to ask is...

Why are you sending out a press release in the first place?

If you want to reach a specific audience, perhaps you would be better off talking directly to a reporter at a targeted media venue. Once again, it all comes back to your specific goals and what you want to accomplish with your publicity efforts.

Now if you want to announce some news to a large audience, remind media members you have current products and services and get the word out quickly, a press release is probably the way to go.

And if you are not a skilled writer, I highly suggest that you find one to write your release for you. After all, you want to make a good impression and I'm sure you have core, business activities that need more of your attention and focus.

Where to Get a Press Release

To find out more about press releases, check out resources such as PRWeb, PRNewswire, BusinessWire, and PRSA.

You'll also find many sites where you can post your release for free by doing a simple search. Look for pertinent media venues where your audiences hang out and see if there is a place to post news items.

Press releases are a great tool for building buzz about your business. But before you spend too many resources on writing and distribution, review your goals and research all of the possibilities. You may want to pursue other publicity opportunities that will give you better results.

How Much Should Press Releases Cost?

How Much Do Press Releases Cost?

A new entrepreneur asked me how much a press release should cost to write and distribute. And the answer is that it can cost anywhere from nothing (if you use your own time and effort to do it yourself) to thousands of dollars (depending on the services used and the distribution).

I think the real question to ask is...

Why are you sending out a press release in the first place?

If you want to reach a specific audience, perhaps you would be better off talking directly to a reporter at a targeted media venue. Once again, it all comes back to your specific goals and what you want to accomplish with your publicity efforts.

Now if you want to announce some news to a large audience, remind media members you have current products and services and get the word out quickly, a press release is probably the way to go.

And if you are not a skilled writer, I highly suggest that you find one to write your release for you. After all, you want to make a good impression and I'm sure you have core, business activities that need more of your attention and focus.

Where to Get a Press Release

To find out more about press releases, check out resources such as PRWeb, PRNewswire, BusinessWire, and PRSA.

You'll also find many sites where you can post your release for free by doing a simple search. Look for pertinent media venues where your audiences hang out and see if there is a place to post news items.

Press releases are a great tool for building buzz about your business. But before you spend too many resources on writing and distribution, review your goals and research all of the possibilities. You may want to pursue other publicity opportunities that will give you better results.

Public Relations - How to Attract Celebrities to a PR Event

A PR event can be great for generating free media coverage for your client. One thing which can make it even more successful, however, is the presence of a celebrity or two.

By their very nature, celebrities seem to be followed by the limelight, and anything which they are seen to endorse or choose to be a part of automatically becomes more successful by association. This is why advertisers use celebrities to endorse products in print media advertisements and television commercials.

There are three main ways of attracting celebrities to your event, and which one you choose to take will depend primarily on the nature of the event itself..

1. Rent a Celebrity

Many celebrities are happy to show up at an event in return for a fee. Whilst few clients can afford the fees demanded by 'A List' celebrities (movie stars, gold-medal athletes, and so on), there are many more 'B List' celebs (soap stars, daytime TV presenters, etc.) who charge more affordable fees for an appearance.

While these individuals won't necessarily have journalists from the gossip magazines following their every move, they almost always make it easy to get local television and newspaper coverage, which would normally cost much more than their fee.

2. Invite a Celebrity Customer

If your client has worked with or for a celebrity in the past then this prior association might encourage the celebrity to volunteer his or her presence at the event. For example, if a celebrity uses your client's product with great enthusiasm, he or she might be more than happy to attend the event for free, or perhaps in return for a year's supply of free product. The more enthusiastic the celebrity is about your client or his product, the more chance you have of having him attend.

3. Liaise with the Charity

If the event in question is being held primarily for charitable purposes, you might find it most useful to speak with the PR department of the charity concerned and find out if they already have some celebrity supporters who may be willing to attend. If they do (and most recognized charities have at least a few) then the charity's own PR department should do the rest and ensure that someone comes to support the event you are organizing.

Although attracting celebrities often increases the effectiveness of a PR event, this doesn't mean that an event which doesn't have such high-profile support will be a failure. Certainly not. If any PR event is well organized and promoted properly, it will almost always prove to be a success as far as generating publicity for your client is concerned. Celebrity presence must therefore be viewed as the 'icing on the cake' rather than essential for success.

Public Relations - How to Attract Celebrities to a PR Event

A PR event can be great for generating free media coverage for your client. One thing which can make it even more successful, however, is the presence of a celebrity or two.

By their very nature, celebrities seem to be followed by the limelight, and anything which they are seen to endorse or choose to be a part of automatically becomes more successful by association. This is why advertisers use celebrities to endorse products in print media advertisements and television commercials.

There are three main ways of attracting celebrities to your event, and which one you choose to take will depend primarily on the nature of the event itself..

1. Rent a Celebrity

Many celebrities are happy to show up at an event in return for a fee. Whilst few clients can afford the fees demanded by 'A List' celebrities (movie stars, gold-medal athletes, and so on), there are many more 'B List' celebs (soap stars, daytime TV presenters, etc.) who charge more affordable fees for an appearance.

While these individuals won't necessarily have journalists from the gossip magazines following their every move, they almost always make it easy to get local television and newspaper coverage, which would normally cost much more than their fee.

2. Invite a Celebrity Customer

If your client has worked with or for a celebrity in the past then this prior association might encourage the celebrity to volunteer his or her presence at the event. For example, if a celebrity uses your client's product with great enthusiasm, he or she might be more than happy to attend the event for free, or perhaps in return for a year's supply of free product. The more enthusiastic the celebrity is about your client or his product, the more chance you have of having him attend.

3. Liaise with the Charity

If the event in question is being held primarily for charitable purposes, you might find it most useful to speak with the PR department of the charity concerned and find out if they already have some celebrity supporters who may be willing to attend. If they do (and most recognized charities have at least a few) then the charity's own PR department should do the rest and ensure that someone comes to support the event you are organizing.

Although attracting celebrities often increases the effectiveness of a PR event, this doesn't mean that an event which doesn't have such high-profile support will be a failure. Certainly not. If any PR event is well organized and promoted properly, it will almost always prove to be a success as far as generating publicity for your client is concerned. Celebrity presence must therefore be viewed as the 'icing on the cake' rather than essential for success.

How Public Relations (PR) Hype Can Create Celebrities?

Lately, I have been thinking about an interesting news item category. It all started, when few months ago almost every mainstream daily newspaper in the UK reported the sad demise of Jade Goody on the front page. While it certainly is a sad event, when I saw this news item grabbing 2 of the top 5 read news on BBC website two things clicked in my mind with regard to celebrity hype and the PR strategies and marketing.

Firstly, in Liverpool I had an academic colleague who researches into the area of celebrities and their impact on masses. He also happened to be a fanatic football fan and I remembered him telling me that he had read umpteen number of celebrity biographies (including many footballers and entertainers) and had concluded that there was hardly anything inspiring in those memoirs (BTW, jade goody had one!). It was just one skill which had put most of these people in the mainstream media and once they are there we know the human struggle to be there.

The second thought which arrived in my mind related to the power of high tech public relations (PR). I might be completely wrong but even the BBC obituary of Jade Goody notes "...she hit the headlines as a young woman with shockingly poor general knowledge, who was often the object of her fellow housemates' derision" (BBC, 2009). However, when you just type Jade Goody in Google it turns up with 5,130,000 results. These include a Wikipedia which is several print pages long, official website, news (obviously in terms of celebrity gossip), a perfume website and a FAN website (yes...)!

Thinking about this I ran another Google search for Prof. Amartya Sen (yes, yes, the 1998 Nobel prize winner) and it returned with 659,000 entries. Pardon me Prof. Sen for even comparing.

However, this demonstrates the power of public relations and how PR firms exploit it.

I am amazed to see that society as a whole what do we really look for and how our thoughts can be manipulated. Reminds me of Edward Bernays - the father of public relations and the nephew of Sigmund Freud - who believed in manipulating society and resultant public opinion. In one of his seminal works 'the propaganda' he argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy. He successfully used it in 'breaking the taboo against woman smoking in public' and even helping United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

Today's high tech public relations firms have honed their skills with such a finesse that a 'Miss Piggy' who reportedly thought a ferret was a bird, an abscess a green drink from France, that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, that there was a part of England called East Angular and that there was a language called Portuganese (Jeffries, 2009) gets 2 out of 5 top news items on BBC and gets coverage on all the world media. I have hardly ever seen that being achieved...

Something has surely going wrong at the macro societal level or I guess Bernays was so right when he said "The public has its own standards and demands and habits. You may modify them but you dare not run counter to them." This is what we demand as news today, don't we?