The Zip episode 34

The PR industry can sometimes get a bad rap.

Which is a little funny if you think about it – like, who’s doing PR for PR?

But public relations – especially for local marketing – can be a tough job. How do you create messaging that’s unique for each local market… without sounding like you’re trying to create messaging that’s unique for each local market? How do you reach out to overworked reporters at understaffed and underfunded local papers?

And I think like any industry, it’s the bad actors, if you will, who can color our impressions of the group as a whole. The companies sending a copy and paste press release to a thousand reporters, without any personal messaging or context. Most local journalists get dozens of these emails a day, often with no rhyme or reason or real story attached. Just a “hey, here’s information about my company!”

But today’s guest, Amy Rosenberg, is definitely one of the good guys. In our conversation, Amy and I talk about the storytelling aspect of PR – what a bookmaker at a trade show can do to make herself stand out, or how a New York financial company can appeal to the socially conscious Portland Market. Amy also addresses how she guides her clients into creating content, and why articles or blog posts that answer “how?” are a great PR move.

I think often, marketers and other businesspeople bring branding concepts into such an abstract place, that it really does sound like mumbo jumbo, or like snake oil to the average Joe. But what I appreciated about my conversation with Amy is how down-to-earth, and really story-centric she remains. Public relations – at its best – is about sharing an organization’s story – and Amy really gets that point across.

So let’s dive into local PR.

Welcome to The Zip.

Megan:

Amy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today about what it is that you do.

Amy:

Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s an honor.

Megan:

Yeah. I love the topic of local PR, and I feel like on the Zip, we haven’t really had enough episodes about it. I’d love to start with you. I’ve looked on your LinkedIn, stalked you a little bit. I saw that you worked in marketing, but then you switched over the real estate before coming back and starting a PR firm. Can you talk a little bit about what areas of marketing appeal to you, and why you took a hiatus in another industry?

Amy:

Oh, good question. First of all, I worked in, you could consider these advertising firms that I got my jobs in right out of college, but I always worked in the PR department. I have a lot of PR experience, but then working within a whole ad firm, you get your hands in everything. So, learning how the synergies between all the various marketing disciplines helped. Then, I had a friend, a family friend who was selling real estate at Windermere. That’s a local real estate company here. It’s a West Coast company, but they are local here. I’m going to be drawing a lot of comparisons from what I do today with Windermere as a realtor, actually, because now they’re my client. I had a friend, she was selling real estate. She had a big condominium development in northwest Portland, and she wanted me to come over and help her sell it and handle all the marketing. I thought, it is a marketing gig, really. When you’re marketing 50 units, it’s kind of the same as marketing something else, but I guess you just have to sell it as well, which I didn’t realize what that really entailed.

I had a year delay in working on that, because the construction was late. I had quit my job, got all ready to sell/market these condos. Then, I had some time on my hands, so I just started selling real estate. I’d sold real estate. It was good. I loved it. I love real estate, and that’s why I’m so happy to be doing the marketing for Windermere today. I guess after those condos came online and I got to really market those, I felt like, this is really what I’m supposed to be doing when you go back to something like that. I helped close all of those 50 units and continued to dabble with it a little bit, but then the market crashed and I had a baby. It was like, this is a really good time to just not pay the real estate license fee. I stopped doing real estate and then I had my baby and I was just pretending to be a stay-at-home-mom for a while. I say pretend because it’s just not quite in my personality to do that. My husband brought me my first client which was SEM PDX, where we met. We met at the conference, at Engage.

That was a cool first client because I was originally just doing the PR for Engage as a volunteer. Then, the next year they said they would pay me. I was like, wow. Essentially, you could say SEM PDX helped launch our marketing firm. I guess I count back to how old my kids are. I guess that was seven years ago, I don’t know. I don’t do numbers. We’ve grown up with them and continue to grow our firm. We still handle the marketing for Engage and SEM PDX. When I say marketing, it really is the PR. On Engage, you’ve got all those digital marketers working on promoting that digitally. We’re behind the scenes doing the traditional PR on that one, but for our other clients, we’re doing a handful of other things. It could even be placing a buy, like a media buy traditionally, but we always take the PR slant which is a different approach. It’s more a journalistic approach that delves into what the audience wants to hear about versus shoving your sales message down your throat. I’m not saying all advertisers do that, but that’s just something we definitely do not do.

Megan:

Right. That’s so cool you took a break to sell apartments, but you felt like there’s such a parallel there between selling the apartments and selling—did you learn any things that you brought back to PR from your experience in working with the apartments?

Amy:

That’s a good question. It’s more psychological, honestly. What you learn working with the audience would be the buyers for that one. So, buyers of condominiums is the audience. So, digging into what their hesitations are and their concerns with purchasing a certain property was really interesting to examine. Today, I use that when I’m thinking about the audience. What are the various hurdles? Then, the other thing is client care. As a firm, when you have a lot of different clients you’re working with, you need to think about customer service. Sometimes, even above and beyond the marketing of what you’re trying to do. I could do a great job for somebody, but if they’re really, really busy, let’s say at a trade show trying to sell their product and they don’t have time to do press interviews, then I might hold off and say, I’m going to be taking care of my client today and being of good customer service. I’m not going to make him do all my press interviews today. That kind of thing.

Megan:

Yeah. That’s really cool. I feel like, you mentioned the audience thing. I think another interesting perspective that you got probably was just being able to see people when they’re making decisions. I feel like when you’re selling something directly, you get to interact with them and you get to see them process information. Whereas so much now in digital marketing, we have to run A/B tests and we have to do so many things to understand what our customers are thinking when they’re considering us. But you got to see that upfront, if people were responding to certain messaging or not.

Amy:

Yeah. I guess we do that today. When I say we have a PR approach to all marketing, it really is thinking about, what does this person want? What are they trying to consume literally with their mind? I like to say, it is a DIY society, do it yourself society, because of the Internet. People go to the Internet first to make decisions, and it empowers them to do things on their own. The content that people want to read is how to do things versus maybe even why you should do things or why you should buy. It’s how. How can I empower myself? A lot of our messaging for our clients delves into that.

Megan:

That’s a really good point. Yeah, service is what people are looking for. You founded Veracity in 2009, I read. What a crazy time to start a marketing agency right around a financial crisis. What was that like? I guess you started it because you got your first client. I guess you were busy from the get-go. Has the market changed since we’ve come out of a recession? Has it grown since the early days?

Amy:

We’re just steady Eddies, what I like to say. We don’t try and grow too fast. We just grow nice and slowly. Slowly but surely. We’ve never decreased in client size. We’re just taking things as they come. We weren’t too worried about it, getting into it. I guess it was pretty bold to do that at that time. That’s another thing that real estate taught me, was how to be my own boss and to learn by trial by error kind of thing. With real estate, you are your own boss because you don’t make a salary. You have a commission. You really have to be brave to do that. I just transferred that bravery over to this. I guess it was a little bit more bold, honestly, to do this company because my business partner is my husband.

Megan:

Yeah. That’s always interesting.

Amy:

Yeah. We had to make the decision when he quit his job. That was kind of a big deal. It wasn’t really my decision. My thought was, I just wanted to fire half my clients because I got too big and I didn’t want to work too hard. That’s why I didn’t do real estate. I didn’t want to work that hard. I don’t want to work seven days a week. My thought was, I’ll just get rid of some clients. He said, no. We’re not doing that. I’ll just quit my job and help you with the clients. I said, okay. That was pretty bold, and it’s worked out. So, here we are.

Megan:

That’s really cool. So, he had a knack for PR, too?

Amy:

Well, no. Actually, he does more of the digital marketing. Actually, he was the president of SEM PDX at one time. He helped found a—not found, but he helped launch a digital marketing company here in Portland. He’s transferred a lot of those skills over to this. With PR, let’s say we’re just doing PR for a client, he’ll come in and help maximize that with search, throwing in the keyword terms into the press releases, that kind of thing. Or making sure the client actually uses social media to promote the coverage that we’ve garnered. Or, some clients if they have bigger budgets, we will handle some of their digital marketing needs.

Megan:

I was reading on your site you really advocate for clients to build attention by working with the local press. You mentioned specifically community papers. While I haven’t spoken to a ton of local PR professionals, I’ve interviewed a bunch of local journalists. I love talking to journalists, but I think obviously, there’s an overall consensus that there’s a bit of a crisis in local journalism right now with all of the consolidation. In other locations, probably not Portland, but certain locations are becoming news deserts in a way where there really isn’t a local paper. Given all of that and the fact that reporters who do remain are very busy, how do you recommend that your clients best do local PR or do local reporter outreach in a way that will fit the current market of the way journalism is?

Amy:

I can answer your questions step by step, because I think you have multiple questions in one question.

Megan:

I do. It’s a very long question.

Amy:

First, we’re talking about the landscape of the media and what’s happening. That’s one question. Then, the other one which I’ll address is how to get in front of the local media. What’s happening with the media in general is, I’m seeing that there are three tiers that businesses might want to pitch. First, you’ve got your big-time Wall Street Journal, New York Times, that kind of thing. That’s not necessarily going away. Then, you scale down to the daily newspapers in areas, various towns. That’s your mid-tier target which is a little bit easier to get in than the Wall Street Journal. Then, lower than that which is what I consider your low-hanging fruit are the local papers. From my experience, what has been scaling back are the daily newspapers. I have not had any of the smaller, local papers close.

You can think about this from, again, the consumer’s point of view. The reader’s point of view. They might want to turn to their news, to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times for the news on Trump, let’s say. That kind of national news that they need. They might turn to that. Then, they might bypass the daily newspaper because they got that news from their local daily newspaper. They got that news already from the New York Times. Then, they’re still going to rely on the local papers, which is the smaller newspapers that come out every week, once a week, once a month. They still are going to rely on that, because that’s where they get their news that really, really affects them and how they live. I haven’t found that those local papers have closed yet. Then, when they do, we’re going to have to have a big conversation about what that means for PR people, because I talked to somebody the other day that said, when our local papers close, we’re done. PR might be done.

Megan:

Do you see it that way, though? Are you worried about that?

Amy:

If it closes, yeah. I would be worried about it. I think our job would change drastically. I think it would just mean that our jobs got even harder, which is fine. It’s not hard to have a very hard job. What’s hard about is that you have to charge more. Does that make sense? People will not pay the premiums to get in the Wall Street Journal. They won’t pay us to do it. Then, let’s just say possibly let’s look at the Huffington Post. Well, if I can just purchase my article to be in there, are they going to pay me extra to get it placed for free? Or are they going to purchase it? That’s a bigger esoteric topic. I’m just saying that there’s the three media tiers. We still have local papers. We, meaning Portland. I can even talk about other areas that I’ve worked in that have the local angle. You had asked me to come up with some examples of what I’ve done. I’ve got some examples even in Las Vegas.

We want to try and get in those papers because that’s what people are reading, the local papers that are coming out weekly or monthly. If we can get into a daily like the Oregonian or the Las Vegas Review, those kind of papers, then great. But if not, let’s just get in the daily, or in the smaller pubs. How we do that, I guess the second part of your questions was, how do we do that?

There’s a lot of ways to do that. Number one is, you want to do something in the community where you want coverage. What do you do? There is a list of things that I’ve come up with. One is to volunteer for a local cause. Then, I can talk about how to get coverage in that, but I’ll just go through the list. Volunteer locally. You could join a board or a committee locally. You could donate to a cause locally. If you have a new brick-and-mortar location for your area—

Megan:

That’s news in and of itself, potentially.

Amy:

Yeah. It definitely has to be sent to the local paper. Then, even if you hire somebody—we take the local stance with everything we do. If you hire somebody, you write a press release. Let’s say it’s a notable new hire. You write a press release for the company. It’s a general press release saying, we hired Sally Jane, who’s going to be the vice president of XYZ. Then, you send that to your business journal, obviously, or even your daily newspaper. Then, you ask Sally Jane, what neighborhood do you live in? If she says, for instance here, if she says southeast Portland, we know there’s a southeast Portland paper. So, all we need to do is just change the email to say, southeast Portland resident Sally Jane accepts new position with XYZ company. That’s just one way to do that, and it’s very detailed on how you would take these various slants.

To speak at a higher level, if you don’t have anything locally that you’re specifically doing, you could try and incorporate the community angle into anything that you’re doing on a national scale. Let’s say you have a new product or service and you really want to get it in front of these consumers in a specific location, you talk about how that product or service affects those consumers. Or, if you don’t know how to do that, you could also have an opinion about a local based issue. That ends up being quite dangerous sometimes.

Megan:

It can be, but if you know who your target market is and if you know they would agree with your opinion, then it’s like, yay.

Amy:

Yeah. Having opinions these days is dangerous. Just so you know. Especially on social media.

Megan:

You just have to be strategic. When I see people who are prominent in certain industries then come out with an opinion for something unrelated like politics or whatever, sometimes I’m like, okay, cool. I’m proud of them for sharing their thoughts, but I agree it can be dangerous. If you disagree, people might lose respect for them. It definitely has to be strategic. Yeah, go ahead.

Amy:

I was just going to say, what our company’s stance, we’re moving into this training aspect where we’re trying to teach people how to do their own marketing and PR. I think the one area where you might want an expert is when you have an opinion, just FYI. If you want me to talk a little bit about how to do some of this and give you some real examples, I can do that.

Megan:

Yeah. One quick question before we get into that, though, and you spoke about it a bit already. You said that you’re training people how to do their PR. I feel like sometimes a company might just not know what their stories are. Maybe this would go into your examples. Do you ever have clients who come to you and they’re like, we’re just not interesting? We don’t have any stories. Then, you’re like, what are you talking about? You have all these interesting things. Do you think some of it is just training people to have the mindset for what is an interesting story about their business?

Amy:

That’s a really good question. That’s hard for people. I can talk about that, and I will. With the location based PR, this is trainable. It’s like, no, you look at this thing and you find the location story and you just do x, y, and z, and it’s pretty straightforward. But finding your general story, that’s harder. I always tell clients that you don’t know how interesting you are, really. Even people. Some people would say, why would you want me on your podcast? I’m really not that interesting. It’s like, no, you don’t know how interesting you are. I guess that is where an outside opinion would help, another instance to draw that out. Honestly, the best way to think about it is maybe the top leader of the company or the owner of the company might not be the best person to think about what their media pitch is.

They might not see what’s interesting. Bringing in an outsider which could even mean a new hire from whoever you’re bringing in to work—it can even be as simple as your receptionist sitting down talking to you about what’s interesting about either you and how you started the company. Or about your company in general would be one way to look at it. Another thing to do is to just pay attention to the news a lot. That is to spark ideas and for you to notice patterns on what people are writing about, talking about, so forth. Then, you can get ideas from that as, oh yeah, that is cool. We’re actually doing this. It mirrors what this NPR story is talking about. Then, you can put your own pitch together on that, hopefully.

Megan:

Yeah. I agree. I think that can be so hard for people to do about their own companies, but I also agree. I feel like almost everyone and almost every company does have something or multiple things that are interesting about them. It’s just you have to piece it out a little bit. I think internal interviews can be a really good way to do that. What are some other examples? I’d love to hear about some companies that you’ve worked with in Portland and stories that you’ve created for them.

Amy:

Okay. One example is, with Windermere, it’s a West Coast company, but we handle the whole state of Oregon. For us, that’s cool to handle something that has literally 60 offices throughout the entire state. For a PR person, that’s a dream because you can look at where there are offices and know that you might have 60 different newspapers you can reach out to with the same story that’s just tweaked a little bit. It’s pretty straightforward. Windermere already had community service day, which is one day in the summer where the entire company takes off the day and they go and volunteer. The traditional PR person would just write one press release about it and just call it good.

With community service day, I don’t want to sound overwhelming, like you would have to do 60 different press releases. So, how you break it down is, you would do one press release talking about community service day that you could send to the statewide paper saying all of your offices are participating in this, and here’s a sampling of the charities that they’re helping out. Then, you customize it however many times there are papers in the areas where they’re doing this. Let’s say we have 60 offices. Well, that’s not really 60 papers because there’s probably two offices in one coverage area. It’s literally 30 papers. Then, you do your research. You find out where all your papers are, then you customize it based on that. Really, the hardest part in this is on the client side, which is organizing where each office is going to volunteer, because you have to organize 60 offices to go to 60 different charities. Then, they just give us that information.

Basically, I look at local PR is just going those extra steps like that. Rather than just one general release, you’re always looking for the local slant. I guess another example could be for a trade show where the consumers are coming, because I wouldn’t do this for a B2B trade show. This is where you have to ask yourself, who do I want to look at this? It really works for more consumer-based publications or companies. For a consumer trade show, let’s say it’s the home and garden show or the boat show. Let’s say it’s in Portland, but you want the entire state to come and travel for it, you basically just get the vendor list, and it’ll show you who is coming from where, meaning to be a vendor in the show or to exhibit something in the show. Hopefully, it’s in an Excel that you can just sort by area of where they’re based.

Then, you can see where there are newspapers that match up with that area. Then, you can just write a press release that says XYZ company from, let’s say Albany, Oregon is going to be exhibiting in this show. You can even leave it as simple as that, or then you could call the exhibitor and say, what are you displaying? What are you doing? Then, that is where a real story could come, but if you don’t have time, because everybody works on a budget either internally or externally there’s a budget with time. Then, you just get a small mention in the press, and it’s just a little news piece that says XYZ company is exhibiting at this show. Again, if you can get the little extra personal attached, that’s where the real stories come in.

Megan:

Like a quote, yeah. I think it’s interesting because I feel like you’re so ingrained in the mindset of PR that for you it’s like, this is just a natural extension of what we do. It really is a mindset because I feel like there’s this natural human tendency to not want to overshare what we do. We often feel like, I shouldn’t brag about what we do. If you have a success or if you do something that’s really interesting in the community, I don’t think sometimes people don’t have, even people who run companies don’t have the inclination, oh, let me just tell everybody about this. I think that is where PR mindset really comes in and really helps a lot.

Do you ever work with—I know you just talked about how Windermere is throughout Portland. Do you ever work with other national, regional brands? How is it different doing, if a particular national or regional brand just wants to target a certain particular city? Do you have to take a dive in on that city and see what’s unique about them in that city? Or is there a different strategy as opposed to a local business in that city?

Amy:

Well, definitely. If you want to get coverage, you have to literally do something or bring something to the table for that city. You have to go and either volunteer or do something with the charities there or give a big donation. Something to get picked up in the press. Right now, we just did a press release for, it’s a new client, so I don’t even know the name. It’s based out of New York and it’s a wealth advisor. They’re based out of New York, but they have one person working in Portland. They created a fund called the Portland Fund, and it’s going to be so that people can invest in socially conscious companies. There’s a system around it on how companies can qualify for this, but they named it the Portland Fund. Or maybe it was the Portland Portfolio because our city mindset is quite socially conscious. It inspired the name of this fund.

Megan:

I love that. That’s a good story.

Amy:

Yeah. It’s going to be managed out of Portland as well. That’s how a New York based company is making a mark on Portland. It’s literally doing something. Does that make sense?

Megan:

No, it definitely does, and I think that’s such a smart way to tackle Portland, especially because I feel like New York has a much more corporate feel, and I can see people in Portland being a little more wary of a company like that. That’s a really cool campaign.

Amy:

Yeah. I guess you try and do something in the community, or have a stance. Or think about what you’re doing affects that community and then try and talk about that through either a media pitch or an op-ed or something. Then, hopefully just go from there. I guess to get back to the conundrum that you were talking about with people not being able to pick out stories, you might not even think of it that way. You might just think about what’s new, literally. If we’re trying to get PR, traditional PR is getting in front of the news whether that’s online or in the real paper. Everything’s online these days anyway. You just think about, what is new in your organization? That essentially is news. Obviously, it’s not like, we got a new watercooler. That’s news. People can use their best judgement.

Megan:

Yeah. Unless somebody handcrafted the watercooler and sculpted it out of locally sourced materials or something. Yeah, in general, that would not be news.

Amy:

Yeah. Sorry, to go back to your other question about how can a national brand—let’s say you have a national bootmaker company. You make cowboy boots. Let’s say you’re already in Nashville, Tennessee, but you want to get in the Orlando, Florida market. Maybe you would just look into some fairs or events to sponsor to get involved in that level. Then, there’s ways that you could connect with the PR person there to say, hey, I’m sponsoring or I am participating in your event. You’re the one who have access to the news, but in case your contacts are looking for somebody to talk about authentically handmade, crafted leather boots, I am your person.

Megan:

I’m the boot person. That’s really smart to go the extra mile and not just do a sponsorship, but be like, hey, if you have a reporter that needs some quotes, I’m your person.

Amy:

Then, the PR person loves that because they don’t know. If they see you being proactive and reaching out, they will probably use you. They’ll see that you might be outgoing and they might say, actually, we have this morning show coming. Would you be willing to do a fashion show with your boots?

Megan:

You’re like, yes.

Amy:

Sure.

Megan:

That’s great. That’s so smart. Final question. I love to hear from guests on the podcast about their hometown, since this is a podcast focused on locals. Are you originally from Portland? Whether you are or not, what keeps you there?

Amy:

Oh, good question. I am from Portland, and I’m very rare because Portland is very popular now because of shows like Portlandia. Nobody you meet really here is from Portland. So, I’m from here. Same with my husband, and we are staying here because we are pretty ingrained with the school that the kids are going to. All of our family is here, so we have a lot of extra help which is very necessary when you have little kids.

Megan:

Yeah, definitely. Do you feel like, if you had a client—I know you said you had the New York wealth management company, but what makes Portland special in terms of if someone wanted to appeal to the Portland market, what would they have to consider about that audience?

Amy:

Wow. I would say there’s just a lot of different demographics at play here. Right now, at a fast glance, you might think it’s a bunch of cool millennial hipsters drinking gourmet coffee all day, but then on the sidelines are the old-school Portlanders that have grown up here that might be a little bit more quiet and a little more traditional. We’re all quite liberal here. When I say traditional, I don’t mean conservative, but just more traditional in terms of still getting the newspaper every day and those kinds of things. You’ve got a mix of millennials, and then a mix of the traditional old-school Portland.

Megan:

Got it, okay. So, don’t just look at the first glance. Awesome. Well, Amy, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Amy:

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. It was an honor.