The Publicity Hound

How do you feel when you see the name McDonald’s?

In my mind, I see the Golden Arches. And I think “cheap, fattening food I can’t stomach.” Others love Mickey D’s because they know the Big Mac tastes the same, whether they’re eating it in Peoria or Paris. And that’s reassuring.

How about this one? Gillette.

I think “safe” and envision multiple layers of razor blades whizzing over whiskers.

And how about this one? Google.

I feel reverence, respect and ALWAYS a twinge of fear that’s directly related to how many orders I’ve gotten that day.

Branding isn’t just a snazzy logo, a clever tagline, attractive colors, a catchy jingle, or a compelling home page. It’s what you feel in your gut when you think about a company. Build a strong brand, and you’ll never let your competitors define you.

3 Elements of a Great Brand

Start with a distinctive name, visual identity and, most importantly, a solid reputation. Don’t like your name? You can change it within a few seconds.

Hate your logo? Find a good designer on Elance.com. My logo evolved with help from a graphic designer and clip art.

But you can’t buy reputation. You must earn it, and that takes time.

My company, The Publicity Hound, sells content-rich special reports, CDs and transcripts, ebooks, and services that show people how to use traditional and social media to promote a product, service, cause or issue. The brand includes non-traditional elements you might not consider with branding, like an easy-to-find telephone number on every page of my website and a human being (me) who answers the phone.

A friend told me she heard at a conference that people who do business online should make it difficult for their customers to have access to them “because it makes people respect you more.” If that works for you, who am I to argue?

But when I talk to a stranger who calls me with a question, I can often close a sale. And I won’t hesitate to ask, “Do you want fries with that?” I’ve talked many callers into staying on the phone and buying an hour of consulting so I can REALLY help them.

Sometimes I can upsell them to The Publicity Hound Mentor Program. Even if I sell nothing, I can start a relationship with them which is far more valuable than a string of retweets. (Why do so many people, by the way, not answer their phones but think nothing of spending two hours a day on Twitter “building relationships”?)

Other elements of my brand include:

My customer service manager’s name and telephone number everywhere. “If you need help, call Christine Buffaloe at 619-955-5772. Or me at 262-284-7451.”
My personal replies to emails, even if people need help and I don’t know them. (They get a free tip, and often a link to a product I sell where they can find more.)
Little surprises sometimes tucked inside product packages, from gourmet dog treats to Publicity Hound notepads.
Humorous dog videos, jokes and quotes I share in my ezine and on the social media sites, just to keep things fun.
A free special report or CD of the customer’s choosing when we screw up and ship the wrong order.
My own vocabulary tied to The Publicity Hound theme. I call my followers my “Hounds” with a capital H. People who don’t know the correct publicity techniques are “media mutts.” And when I do something dumb, I’m “sent to the dog house without my dinner.” That’s called sub-branding, and I learned it from marketing strategist Tom Winninger. How do you know when it’s working? When your customers start using the same words and phrases, and suggest others.

Thing to Consider When Building Your Brand

Elements of your own brand might be very different from mine, depending on what you sell. Some things to consider:

How quickly do you respond when a customer complains?

How do you behave in public and online? Do you use four-letter words on the social media sites that you’d never use when meeting with consulting clients? Guest blogger Phyllis Zimbler Miller wrote about how everything you do online is part of your publicity

Can you add a prop to your official business photo—something that ties into your brand?

How often do you ask your customers what they think about your products and services?

What percentage of your social media tasks are spent sharing free tips vs. pushing free commercials?

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? What’s the one thing that’s uniquely you?

Can you use mobile marketing to strengthen your brand?

Can a customer who arrives at your website or a social media profile understand, within 10 seconds, exactly how you can help them?

Are you the first in your niche to show people new and innovative ways to solve their problems? Or are you a Johnny-come-lately?

Do you promote your expertise in everything you do?

Do you understand how people feel when they see colors like bright red, sky blue or forest green? Are the colors at your website evoking the types of feelings you want your audience to experience when they arrive?

If you sell high-priced products and services, does your website convey the look and feel of elegance and quality? Do you charm your customers with five-star service?

Do you give your support staff the freedom to wow customers at every turn, even if it costs you a few bucks more?

What do you do when a customer complains about crappy service they received from a company whose products you promote as an affiliate? Are you as concerned as you’d be if the products were yours?

If you showed the name of your company to 10 strangers, how many of them would know immediately what you do?

Listen to Your Customers!

If you’re having trouble creating your brand, let your customers help.

I wish I could take credit for creating The Publicity Hound brand all by myself. But I can’t. My customers pushed me into it.

When I started my business 14 years ago, it was Media Relations Consulting, Inc.—a name dull enough to make your eyes glaze over. My eight-page print newsletter followed a year later and it needed a name. I worked for 22 years in the newspaper business, so “The Publicity Hound” seemed perfect.

The bi-monthly newsletter turned out to be the worst product I ever created because it never gained traction. It bled red ink and consumed my schedule. I kept it on life support far longer than I should have. But the good news is that people who saw the name loved it.

“The Publicity Hound—how clever!”

“What a great name!”

“When I couldn’t remember your name, I could always remember The Publicity Hound.”

I eventually killed off the print newsletter, and turned it into an ezine, “The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week,” which quickly amassed 40,000 subscribers. It became the main marketing tool to sell my more than 100 info products. I added a Hound Joke of the Week, which has been expanded to include dog quotes and videos. Readers send me my best material, and I thank them publicly in each issue.

Finally, the light bulb went on.

Media Relations Consulting, Inc. became Media Relations Consulting, Inc. dba The Publicity Hound. If you’re a corporation, “dba” is a convenient way to turn a boring name into an easy-to-remember brand.

I started adding “The Publicity Hound” to my name on bylined articles. When I comment at blogs, it’s always as “Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound” or just “The Publicity Hound.”

Today, I’ve dropped the stodgy company name from just about everything except my tax return and bank statement.


Let a Survey Help You

Early last year, I registered for a Stompernet teleseminar hosted by faculty member Don Crowther. His guest was survey expert Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD, who discussed the value of customer profile surveys and how you can use them to create a roadmap for your business.

I was so impressed that I hired her to create my own survey. Jeanne helped me pinpoint exactly what I wanted to learn and then created the questions.

The survey results showed more than a 90 percent customer satisfaction rate (all those phone calls paid off!).

But more importantly, it gave me 60 testimonials I could use at my website. It laid out in amazing detail exactly what kinds of products and services my customers wanted, and how much they’d be willing to pay for them.

Surveys, done correctly, can help you develop your brand because you don’t have to guess about what people think of you.

Jeanne, by the way, is my new business partner. My survey showed, among other things, that my customers were hungry for information on how to use social media to promote. And Jeanne has been studying social networks since before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was born.

Our company, My Social Media Solution, LLC, dovetails perfectly with The Publicity Hound business.

Tips for Branding Your Business

Choose a theme, something obvious that can be associated with your signature product or business. If your theme plays off the name of your cat, and your business has nothing to do with cats, go back and start over.
If you’re having a difficult time thinking of a creative name for your business, don’t force it. Instead, go for a walk, or take a swim or shower. Water and exercise invite creative ideas. “The Publicity Hound” came to me during a six-mile walk.
When you hit on a successful brand and get great feedback from your market, spend the money to trademark your company name and logo.
Be consistent. Use the same photo, tagline, logo, colors, style and design in everything you do, from your website to printed materials.
If you’re not sure what your customers think of your brand, ask. Consider a customer profile survey.
Listen to what your customers say about your brand. If they aren’t saying anything, it’s probably not a brand.
Remember that reputation absolutely supersedes everything.

And Bogie Makes Two

In keeping with the dog theme, my German Short-Haired Pointer, Bogie, is joining me in my new business profile photo which will appear at my website. But I’m not sure which of two photos I should choose for the homepage.

Through my brand, I’ve build a strong community of other Publicity Hounds who love being a part of my business. So I’ll ask them.

And you, too. Which of the two photos do you like? Bogie on my lap, or nose to wet nose? Let me know by stating your preference on this one-question survey. Thanks for helping me continue to build my brand. Now, go build yours.

If you asked me to describe my ideal business partner, never in a million years would I envision someone with a PhD in sociology.

Such degrees, I always believed, are expensive pieces of paper printed by the diploma factories otherwise known as universities. They seldom lead to “real world” jobs outside of academia.

I certainly wouldn’t want a Phi Beta Kappa tagging along with me. Such a highfalutin academic would be horrified to hear that I flunked five college courses and almost didn’t graduate because I was three credits short of a diploma just six weeks before graduation.

Meet Jeanne Hurlbert, a PhD sociologist at Louisiana State University, survey expert and Phi Beta Kappa, who was studying social networks long before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was born. When I heard her on a teleseminar in January this year, I was hooked less than 10 minutes into the call. I emailed the teleseminar host immediately and gushed, “This woman is brilliant! Where did you find her?”

Jeanne (pronounced Jeanie) was the guest expert, and she was explaining the importance of using customer profile surveys to gather scientific data about what our customers want. Don’t make false assumptions about products to create or services to offer, she cautioned, based on discussions you’re having at social media sites. False assumptions can derail your business.

Her message hit home.

For a few years, I’d been wondering where to take my business ever since newspapers started marching toward the graveyard. Traditional media has far less influence now than it did 20 years ago for any Publicity Hound who’s self-promoting.

Two days after the teleseminar, I hired Jeanne as a consultant to help me create a customer profile survey. She suggested questions I never would have thought of asking, and she devised a clever way to generate customer testimonials for my website and product pages.

In March, when I was called to Ohio for a funeral for three days, right in the middle of the survey, she kept all the plates spinning, personally attending to dozens of customer service problems we encountered when the technology “hiccuped” and many of the respondents had trouble accessing the survey.

Social media: The bridge to a partnership

The results of Jeanne’s survey were like the footbridge to our partnership.

Many of the respondents admitted that they were completely confused—and sometimes terrified—by social media. Jeanne and I talked about how we were, too, when we started creating profiles at the social media sites and how it’s still often overwhelming.

I confessed to her two of my big social media sins:

Blatant promotion without knowing any better
Being too embarrassed to ask about things I didn’t understand. Here’s a good example. When you go to a blog, why is there sometimes a big cluster of words in a box, and some of the words are bigger than other words? Sometimes, the words don’t even appear to be related. I eventually learned that that’s called a tag cloud. It’s a visual representation of topics discussed at the blog. The bigger the words, the more often they’re discussed.

Then she came clean with me:

She thought social media was a flash in the pan and only for kids.
When she started participating, she assumed it would be a fairly easy ride because she’d been studying social networks for years and, after all, she had that PhD. But she eventually learned that she was lost.

That’s when I knew we weren’t so different after all.

One conversation led to another. She interpreted my survey results and suggested new products and services I could offer my customers. The survey led to a shift in my business, with far greater emphasis on online publicity and social media.

Then, in May, Jeanne suggested we start a business.

She already had the technology in place to create a detailed questionnaire on any topic and return to the respondent a customized report based on the answers. She called it an assessment, and suggested that the logical topic was social media and how people should use it for business.

We could combine her technology and knowledge of social networking with my more than 10 years teaching people how to self-promote. The results would be a customized “here’s what to do” report that removes the fear for anyone struggling with social media and gives them hundreds of solid suggestions on how to map out a social media strategy and stay on track.

If I had something like that in my hands when I started blogging several years ago, I reasoned, I could have shaved years off my learning curve. I jumped at the chance to join her, and we formed My Social Media Solution, LLC. It’s the perfect complement to my regular business, The Publicity Hound, and my weekly ezine, which will still be going strong.

Social Media Rx: Just What the Doc Ordered

In a few weeks, we’ll introduce you to “Social Media Rx: Your 20-Minute Prescription for Cutting through the Clutter, Chatter and Confusion.”

After completing a 20-minute questionnaire, each respondent receives a customized report along with a formula that suggests exactly which topics they should be discussing at social media sites, and how often, based on their job and career, hobbies, interests, family, areas of expertise, and other factors. No two reports are identical. We’ve even applied for a patent to protect the process we used to create this product.

Your report comes with six checklists that detail which tasks you should complete daily, weekly and monthly at social media sites. The checklists even show you which of those tasks you can delegate if you’re lucky enough to have an assistant, and which you should do yourself, like writing your own blog posts.

More about this in a few weeks.

And She Loves Dogs!

Jeanne teaches spin classes at 5:30 a.m. She scuba dives. She loves spending time with her husband, Jack, and their 8-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. And she has two dogs.

We’ve never met in person. But it seems like Neily, her Corgi, and CB, her rescue long-haired Chihuahua, are on a first-name basis with Bogie, my German Short-Haired Pointer, and Tracker, my Weimaraner, because they all bark at each other while we’re talking on the phone.

Jeanne and I often coordinate our schedules while walking the dogs, feeding the dogs, yelling at the dogs, dispensing treats, wiping muddy paws, shoveling dog food into bowls, and corralling them into their crates at night.

More than a few times, the daily walks for her two boys and my two girls have had to wait.

Social Media Rx has been more than eight months of back-breaking work and, often, frustration, particularly when it comes to technology. We’re excited to finally introduce you to it.

And when we do, Neily, CB, Bogie and Tracker will be happy to have us back again.