“If a tree falls alone in the woods, will people still buy my limited edition screen prints?” Or something.

PR is a great way of getting people to find out about your organisation. So what is PR?

PR stands for public relations. It’s all about managing how you are perceived by ( and this is a real shocker here) the public. The great news is, even if you’re not paying for any formal PR help or you’re not too sure what it’s all about, you’re probably already engaging in some PR activity.

Do you do any of the following?

• Going to networking events and talking about your business (bonus points for handing out business cards and following up afterwards).
• Spend time on Twitter getting to know more about your industry and then sharing what you’ve learnt.
• Throwing your own events, like a product launch bash or a birthday party (for your business, not for yourself).
• Telling the media anything at all about what you’re up to.
• Writing a blog
• Distributing a newsletter or email updates.
• Sponsoring events
• Entering awards

PR isn’t just about getting in the papers, although that’s certainly part of it. Other tactics are just as important for spreading the word about the awesome things you get up to. If you’re a small independent retailer, for example, getting out and about and making your presence felt in your local community is just as important as getting coverage in a national newspaper. The most effective PR considers the target audience – it’s much better to engage with 100 people who really care about what you’re doing, than 1000 who really couldn’t care less.

PR is about getting the word out about your organisation.

Some more definitions of PR:

31 Public Relations Definitions (Fab blog post)
Wikipedia has a useful, well referenced article
Find out about the world’s first press release

“PR is about reputation: how an individual or organisation is perceived based on what they say & do. PR is managing words & deeds.” Andrew Brown, Frank & Brown Communications

“(PR is) building & maintaining reputation between you & your audiences. It’s what you say about yourself, also what others say about you.” Sarah Moffatt, Marcomms Manager

As you can see, PR isn’t so easy to pin down into a single definition and there are many different opinions as to how it should be described. This is especially true now that social media and other online channels have made it much easier for you to promote yourself and your business online. Feel free to leave a comment below with your own views on PR, what kind of PR activity you engage in and how you would describe it.

Dirty Enid is an online PR resource for independent businesses like startups, bands, designers and makers. You can follow Dirty Enid on Twitter, check out her Facebook page or sign up for the irregular Dirty Enid newsletter.

(The article came to me via the Startup Digest reading list, which is always full of juicy links and well worth subscribing to.)

“I was in Bogota last week for a couple days of mentoring startups with theFounder Institute; the topic of the week was revenue generation, something we do a lot of at YouSendIt (my first company). But everyone knows the real currency of most early stage deals is user acquisition and I was peppered with questions about how PunchTab reached 1.2 million users, registered 15,000 members, and signed up over 250 sites in the month of May alone, less than five months after our first day in the office. Here’s one part of my answer:

Over the years I’ve developed my favorite tactics for raising awareness about my products and one of the most cost-effective has been “hacking PR”: getting into the heads of writers (primarily tech bloggers) and figuring out why they should cover you. Here’s the only takeaway you need from this post: your job is to pitch stories that generate lots of pageviews, otherwise you’re wasting the writer’s time. Read on for a handful of patterns that always generate discussion and have a higher likelihood of getting written up. Hopefully you have some material up your sleeve to make the cover of TechCrunch too.”

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

Dirty Enid is an online PR resource for independent businesses like startups, bands, designers and makers. You can follow Dirty Enid on Twitter, check out her Facebook page or sign up for the irregular Dirty Enid newsletter.

See that? It’s a QR code. If you scan it with your smartphone it will unlock a world of joy and wonder. QR codes are a great promotional tool because they’re free to create and you can put them pretty much anywhere. You can also customise them, because there’s a 30% error margin in the design (meaning you can alter/hack away that 30% and the code will still scan no problem).

You can link your QR code to websites, downloads, video content and lots of other great web stuff. Did I mention they’re free to create?

As with all marketing tools, there are places where this kind of thing will work really well, and places where it will be a complete failure. Here are some places where QR codes are a REALLY BAD IDEA.

• Any curved surface, like lampposts or telegraph polls. Poster promoters take note.
• On anything that’s moving – if an object’s in motion, chances are people aren’t going to be chasing it down to scan it.
• Anywhere public if your product is at all embarrassing or sensitive (erectile disfunction ad on the subway during rush hour anyone?)
• Anywhere with a link to non-mobile friendly content.

The key thing with QR codes is that is has to contain information your audience really wants, and be around at a point where they’re likely to want to stop and scan the code. Don’t forget that you’re asking people for a commitment that goes further than a quick glance of an advert – it has to make it worth their while.

Here are a few ideas for places QR codes could really work:

• On the backs of seats at conferences to provide more information about the speakers.
• On real estate literature to give house buyers a chance to access more photos of a property.
• On a band tshirt with a link to a limited edition download that is guaranteed to get fans talking. Bonus points if you can ONLY access the song via the tshirt.
• As part of a game that makes long distance coach journeys more interesting.
• On take-home pamphlets in a doctor’s surgery.

What other places do you think QR codes could be a hit for your business? And where do you think they should be avoided at all costs? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

Dirty Enid is an online PR resource for independent businesses like startups, bands, designers and makers. You can follow Dirty Enid on Twitter, check out her Facebook page or sign up for the irregular Dirty Enid newsletter.