Ilise Benun

To get people talking about you, your company, or your product, you need to develop a good public relations (PR) plan. Applying some PR fundamentals, knowing how to deal with the media, getting your press release to stand out and your blog noticed are all key steps in your public relations campaign.Employing important public relations principlesPublic relations is all about getting noticed.

You've looked at your checkbook, looked with dismay at your current promotion campaign, and made a major decision: You want your promotions to be first class, and you've decided to get professional help — an advertising agency, a PR firm, a freelancer, or a graphic design studio. Here are some helpful hints for getting the best work out of your outside supplier with the least amount of trouble: Brief your agency.

It's ironic: One purpose of PR is to get good press and avoid bad press, but PR itself has had pretty bad press over the years. The public image of PR has been produced in part by corporate flacks who made their living covering up toxic spills and oil leaks; by hucksters hovering around Paris Hilton or P. Diddy; and by Hollywood operatives keeping drug-addicted movie stars' rehab schedules out of the papers.

Everybody knows it makes sense to be customer driven when designing a Web site, especially if you're doing business online. For a company doing PR, an important application of technology on the Web is the virtual pressroom — the section of a company's Web site designed specifically for use by the media. The top three things journalists want to find quickly when they visit a site are deep financial information (for public companies), a file of historic press releases, and readily available contact information (e-mail, phone, address).

Public relations is more than just pitching stories to the media or mailing out press releases. The PR umbrella covers a number of related activities, all of which are concerned with communicating specific messages to specific target audiences. If you're the PR person at ABC Enterprises, you're responsible for managing communications between your company and your public.

You need to promote your public relations plan, which requires some creativity. Make your public-relations promotion tactics as creative, sharp, original, and engaging as possible with these tips: The media is looking for news. News, by definition, is anything that is new, different, and creative. The most successful PR ideas aren’t totally unique.

Turn to public relations agencies when you want to get coverage of your business in the media. Public relations firms are public relations specialists. Use a public relations agency if Effective PR is crucial to your success and you can afford the going rates. Your company is marketing-oriented. You want fresh thinking, outside objectivity, and a more creative approach to PR.

The public relations (PR) umbrella at your business covers a number of related activities. All these public relations activities are concerned with communicating specific messages to specific target audiences: Research: You have to thoroughly understand not only your business but also your customers and potential customers.

The impact of buzz marketing is very hard to measure. Agencies that specialize in generating buzz create ads just for viral marketing. These viral-marketing experts start the process and track it wherever it goes. There are all sorts of “buzz-meters” that claim to measure buzz by, for example, searching for the popularity of certain words and brands in selected blogs over time.