The Sage Closer

July 7, 2010

How to Go Zero-to-Sixty in PR

Few realize that PR is perhaps the most powerful and affordable way for small businesses to advance their chance of success and prosperity. Yet PR is a significant catalyst behind small companies with almost no advertising dollars to spend getting coverage on national TV, journals, magazines and newspapers.

This zero-to-sixty brand development is not just the stuff of legend. How else can you explain candle-making company sedafrance, based right here in Austin, getting an endorsement on the Oprah Winfrey Show and experiencing seismic growth and media pick-ups all over the place?

All it takes is a little creativity, a knack for writing and a defined objective. Almost any newsworthy story can go viral with the right kind of spin.

Just ask Jacqueline Hughes.

I met Jacqueline at Kick-Butt Coffee near Highland Mall this past week and learned that her nascent technology idea was just covered by a nationally syndicated radio show! Now when I say “nascent,” I mean so brand new she hasn’t had time to form a company yet. We’re talking raw, in utero, ink-still-fresh-on-the-cocktail napkin new.

Jacqueline is the founder of an exciting social calendar solution called Bridge the City, which aggregates events happening in Austin from lots of calendars on the Internet. Bridge the City is quickly becoming a go-to calendar for people wanting to stay plugged into Austin no matter what their interest: job seekers, live music junkies, outdoor enthusiast, hardcore Joomla programmers, inventor wannabes. You name it. If there’s an event in Austin, chances are, Bridge the City has the scoop you need.

How did Jacqueline get coverage for her “virtual” start-up? She found out on Twitter that Winston Edmondson from the Innovation at Work radio show – nationally syndicated on CNN Radio – would be in Austin for two weeks studying and documenting high-tech start-ups. Jacqueline used the twitterverse to track Winston down and gain an audience. (If that isn’t an endorsement for using Twitter to promote your company, I don’t know what is!) Winston stopped by Tech Ranch, which is a sort of high-tech start-up halfway house for underfunded ventures in need of nurturing, to watch Jacqueline demo her social calendar tool, which integrates to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, by the way.

It was an exciting day for this 2-month old start-up, which really began as a way for Jacqueline, a recent grad who had yet to find gainful employment courtesy of the recession, to execute an aggressive networking plan in hopes of finding a job. When she realized how painful it was to keep track of so many independent calendars on the Internet, in typical entrepreneurial panache, she set about to fix the problem. She cooked up an idea of aggregating events into one definitive calendar that would scrape other Internet calendars from all manner of websites so socially minded Austinites like her would have everything at their fingertips.

Jacqueline is a natural at PR, by the way. Her mellow demeanor belies the instincts of a shrewd showman capable of throwing out PR ideas as easily as Stephen King cranks out novels. How else could she have gotten her idea onto a national radio show, almost effortlessly? Her PR talent, and serious networking chops, has helped her build one of the fastest start-up trajectories in recent years. Fact is this 23 year old unemployed entrepreneur has pulled off some tricks that even seasoned PR professionals find difficult to manage.

So if you are a small company with an inferiority complex and think you’re company can’t possibly attract media attention, just think of Jacqueline. Throw off all doubts, play the PR game with abandon, and watch the press clippings start adding up!

Have you done something spectacular in the media that you want to share with me? Maybe we can learn a thing or two from your experience!

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