PR Strategies for Start-Ups

Recently, I attended a gathering hosted by SG-Startups. Paddy Tan, CEO of Bak2u has started this group to facilitate meet-ups between entrepreneurs such that everyone can share their best practices and their thoughts on various challenges and obstacles confronting their start-ups. The last meeting was held in a meeting room in the iShop, Cineleisure and the whole discussion was about start-ups and public relations (PR) strategies. For example, we talked about how marketing is different from PR and looked at a few incidents where PR disasters can be averted. I have distilled most of the discussion and summarized some of the thoughts shared by various entrepreneurs in the meeting.

• PR is not marketing: In Singapore, most big companies have a corporate relations unit, and they usually lump them up as a marketing unit. In the SMEs, the situation is even worse where PR is often labeled as marketing. The important question that a start-up or business must ask, “How do you let people know your service or product and how do your customers can have their problems solved by using your product?” At the start, most entrepreneurs need to get the word about their product or service out to the market. Hence the PR department will perform operations similar to the marketing department. However, as time goes on, both units will start to diverge and specialize into specific units that helped the company in different roles and responsibilities. It starts to diverge when customers start using them and generate feedback, it is the PR department’s job to gather feedback and perform crisis management should anything major happened. It is also their job to engage the public if there is any unhappiness generated from a faulty product. If you need a case study, think of the battery incident in the US where most computer manufacturing companies had to recall their batteries. In that situation, a customer showed a blog entry of a badly burnt computer Recently, a food company in Singapore has suffered from a disaster of having a lot of customers getting food poison within a day. In fact, it is only through the crisis, we realized that the company has no PR department to help them with the crisis management. Of course, one can outsource the PR to companies which specialize on this, but they don’t come cheap. In today’s world, with the advances of technology, start-ups can use social media (web 2.0, online social networks and virtual worlds) to create community and buzz for their new products before and after their launch.
• Getting Media Attention for a start-up centred on a CEO and a brand: In the start-up phase, it is easy to associate a start-up with a founder or CEO. Paddy talked about his case, where both the designs of his company and his personal blog are similar. He noted that it is essential for a start-up to get the message out there, and there are different roles for different blogs. For example, his company blog will specifically pinpoint on the products and services, while in his personal blog, he can talk about the industry in general and his passion about the company. It creates a human face that can constantly engage their customers in the process. However, he noted that once the company start to take off, there needs to be a slow disengagement between the official company blog and his personal blog. The reason is that the company will need to stand on her feet with a brand and not by a person.
• Sell your company at the appropriate time and place: It is important to know where and when to sell your company, particularly a start-up. Credibility is a very important trait that is required at that stage. If you want an example of creating poor PR, this incident from here will offer a good example. There are two issues with selling your company. It needs two ingredients: first, it must be relevant to what the customers want as a solution to a problem and two, you should not sell something in a place where it is totally irrelevant. Of course, sometimes, not talking about the product but about the industry (with subtle mentions of your company) in general generate credibility for you and your company.
• Rules of Engagement in the Online World: We come down to the few rules which are important in any PR engagement in the internet: 1. Never engage in a heated discussion on an online forum which does not belong to your company. 2. Never respond to flames and heated comments in your blog, and always get someone more neutral and within your company to do the engagement, and 3. Keep a calm mind in the midst of a crisis such that the actions to resolve the problem is almost immediate.

Acknowledgments: We thank other members in the group, for e.g., Michael Cheng, Andy Tay, Daryl (DK99) and Nicholas Aaron Khoo for their thoughts and input on the issue.

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