You are Your Best PR: Uncovering and Amplifying Your Stories

Post on 25-May-2015

541 views 2 download

Tags:

description

Did you know that you have personal and professional stories that, when told well, can enhance your chances of landing a profitable new client, scoring a board position, or even making your next career move? Once upon a time, savvy public relations for entrepreneurs meant mastering the art of pitching these stories to the media; in today's business and media climate, however, you also need to know how to be the storyteller—to own your narrative and share it widely—not just how to solicit and respond to one. The right story can spell the difference between being known as a credible thought-leader in your field and just wishing that you were. It can also help you and your business to engage your target audiences on a deeper, emotional level. In this interactive, hands-on session, you'll explore the crucial business skill of storytelling and using the media and social media to tell.

transcript

Your social media

clout

You are your best PR

Your personal brand

You are your

best PR

Catriona PollardSarah Robbins

Our brains are wired to remember stories more

than facts.Good stories build

emotion, and motivate and inspire people to feel

and draw their own conclusions.

The brain doesn't make much of a distinction

between reading about an experience and

encountering it in real life.

Stories package data, logic and analysis into a

memorable form.

Long-form narrative and conventional journalism now share the stage with

messages of 140 characters and images that disappear

seconds after they are opened.

While there have never been more ways to reach audiences, it has also never been

more difficult to really reach them.

Every single person in this room has a story to tell – in fact, have so many stories

to tell.

When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, we hold ourselves back. But when we do act, even if it’s because we’re forced to, we perform just as well as men do…. To become more confident, women need to stop thinking so much and just act. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, authors of The Confidence Code:

The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know.

TAKE ACTION: proactively tell your stories or they won’t get told.

Great stories have three components to them:•They are relevant to the situation and the audience•They are memorable and have an element of drama to them•They reveal something personal about you – your values, your beliefs, the very core of who you are.

Exercise: six word memoir

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Your storyThe Entrepreneurs Journey

“A hero[ine] ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero[ine] comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow [wo]man.”

—From Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth.

Your leader’s story

Timing: A story must be new and current. Generally, a story is newsworthy if it happened today, but not if it happened last month.

Prominence: Prominent people, celebrities and well-known companies are newsworthy.

Human interest: These stories appeal to human emotion and aim to evoke an emotional response, such as sadness or amusement.

Significance: This relates to how many people the story affects. A story that affects a lot of people is more newsworthy than a story that only affects a small group of people.

Proximity: Where the story occurred. Journalists are more interested in local stories than stories about other countries, states or regions.

Embrace anything that makes you unique – eg. “Running the World from down under”. http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/expertise/running-the-world-from-down-under-20140326-zqn5k.html

Human interest: Personal story as the inspiration behind a business start-up, rags to riches. Highlight that you’re doing something most people are afraid to attempt, such as starting a business during a recession.

Give evergreen stories topical new hooks: Have you noticed that New Year’s resolution articles fill newspapers and magazines every January and tax tips abound in March? Editors always have a need for evergreen stories,

Provide a journalist with an expert to interview who has used and can vouch for your product. If you sell skin cream, for example, ask a dermatologist who likes your product to be available for an interview.

Media releasesMedia angles/pitchesContributed articles

OWNING YOUR AMPLICATION

Article writing

Social media is a set of conversations, connections and sharing of information.

Blogs

• Start your own

• Guest post on blogs

• Add comments to blogs

• Pitch your story ideas to key bloggers

Rosaura Ochoa

Three stories/media angles you will start working on tomorrow. 123