Storification - How can you use books as part of your PR plan? Author, contributor or subject?

Today, I'm going to look at the the merits of creating a course around your knowledge. If we can share our way of thinking and it becomes an industry-leading way of thinking, this is great publicity, because it becomes the standard. One example is how Jack Welch made the Six Sigma the GE way, and it became synonymous with quality and shareholder value. So today, we'll look at building courses for our companies as a way of communicating our value. I'm looking at creating a course for SPEAK|pr, which is the five-stage methodology that I've established as the EastWest Public Relations approach to getting companies noticed. I've started the SPEAK|pr podcast to share this methodology, which is Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. I got news recently that the trademark for it has been filed, which is really exciting. I'm going down this path of using my intellectual property for the value in the business. Normally, we have ways of doing business, and those certainly as an agency are somewhat repeatable. The value in the business is always considered to be, if you like, the client list, the turnover, and the revenue. If we own, for example, a restaurant, we think of the delivery of food as being the value. I was having a conversation with a chef recently, and she's in exactly the same position where she keeps making food, selling, and delivering it, but then she has nothing left. So, we'll talk about how we as business owners can create value from what we know how to do rather than just what we can deliver, and courses are one of the ways that we can do that. I'm looking at creating the SPEAK|pr course. This is going to be a Mastermind and an eight-week program. I'm working with an old friend Morry Morgan, who managed to get his comedy training business in Australia. Now, why would we do this from a public relations point of view? We're all trying to find ways to differentiate our business, no matter how big or small it is. And when I look at the agencies in the world, there are tens of thousands of agencies. But as we know, globally, enterprises employing less than 250 people represent 99% of all enterprises. In other words, there are thousands of agencies and freelancers all pursuing less than 1% of the companies, because by and large, companies have to have a certain scale before they employ a third party or an agency to help with their marketing. I'm looking at creating this course, because I think that there are lots of people, possibly 99% of all companies, that would like to learn how to do their own public relations without necessarily the costs and the complications of hiring an agency. My business strategy is to teach people who can't afford or don't want to hire an agency how to learn the tools and the technologies that we as agencies possess and, in the process, create value within my company which is attached to the way that I know how to get clients noticed, rather than just see the results of getting clients noticed as being the value in the business. I want to share my knowledge, but I need to do that in a structured way. I'm creating articles, and I'm doing the SPEAK|pr podcast. The podcast generates articles that are going out across various platforms, but that's not enough in itself. SPEAK|pr now is heard in over 55 countries, which is really heartwarming to think that people are listening all over the world, but I need to also give everybody listening an opportunity to have a more structured way of addressing and incorporating the SPEAK|pr methodology into their own businesses or in their own lives. I've been looking at a platform called Udemy, which has over 130,000 courses already online. The issue with Udemy courses is that most of them are in the $20 low price range. With the SPEAK|pr product, I'm planning to raise this as a masterclass where it's not a hands-off course. It'll be an eight-week program where we run through with just six people per cohort the methodology whereby those companies can work on their own company with me in this session. That's quite different to hands-off remote learning, but let's not be snobbish about that. If we look at The Complete 2020 Web Development Bootcamp created and hosted by Dr. Angela Yu, it has 262,843 students. It used to cost 19.99, but it's recently gone down to 14.99. This program is packed with 53 hours of on-demand video, 110 articles, 20 downloadable resources, and according to my calculations, will have grossed some 5,254,000. So, online courses are not only a great way of developing public relations because it establishes one as an authority, but plainly, it can be a source of great revenue. There's a another organization called Coursera, which has got courses for corporations as well. They have professors on there, one of whom is Aric Rindfleisch, a Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana. His course on Marketing in the Digital wWorld has had 1.43 million views recently. Clearly, online courses are a brilliant way to share your knowledge, but potentially in a commercial way too. And so, that's really what I'm looking at now for EastWest PR with my SPEAK|pr methodology, because I think that I can help unlock the value in companies and organizations for people who can't afford an agency or may not be ready for an agency, but could use the tools. I'm working with Morry in Australia, and this is his STEPE methodology. I want to share that, because there are many of us out there who have got value that we could share through the processes that we know how to leverage and what we do day-to-day for our clients. It's a way of demonstrating an expertise, which can be used in public relations and marketing. One of the key learnings I got from his methodology is this need to create the structure within the course time itself. With my five-stage methodology, he's helping me break it down into component parts within each method. In Morry's STEPE programme, the S stands for Skill, and by the end of each module, we're going to be able to identify gaps within the five stages. Next, we have Theory, which is the T, where we're going to talk about the elements within the different stages. The third element is going to be the Example of a company that follows the five-stage methodology, and that becomes the key point that validates the SPEAK|pr methodology. Next comes the Practice. This is where the participants in the course will be able to use the templates that we've created, which will enable them to identify which parts of the course they already understand and which parts of the five-stage methodology do they currently already implement within their own organizations. Last is the Evaluation. This is where we're going to get individual participants to share what they're currently doing and to evaluate the performance of their current work, so that we can identify the gaps between what they currently know and where we want them to get to. That's Skill, Theory, Example, Practice, and Evaluation. I like this approach, because it's very structured, and what Morry and I are doing is working on the timing. For example, we'll have some background pre-reading, which we'll send to people in advance. It'll be a two-and-a-half minute section on the skill you're going to learn. It's not too long. We don't want to lecture people. It'll be seven and a half minutes on the theory of the Story, Personalise, Engage, Amplify, Know. It'll be 10 minutes on an example and how it's worked for someone else. It'll be 30 minutes on the practice, getting people to try the tools, because it's only through practice that people start to learn. By and large, people don't learn by being spoken to, especially when we're all virtual. Lastly, it'll take 10 minutes for the evaluation, where people get to reflect. As we're working in a mastermind practice group, where we've got six people all together, we're going to get people to share with one another. How we structure the course will enable us to then generate consistent results for all those people coming in, but will also then help us communicate to each of the people within the course our own methodology. The reason that a course could be potentially a great public relations tool is we will be communicating the values that we have within our own organization for whatever service we're providing. We'll be able to articulate that, and people will become more and more knowledgeable. One of the parts that we talked about under Engagement and Amplification is about getting people to go from being ignorant to becoming aware, to becoming engaged, to becoming evangelists. Evangelists are people who understand, believe, and then start to share more information about the organization, the good, the product, or the service by having a course. I'm hoping that I can genuinely share what I know and have people improve their own public relations abilities through using these tools that I've developed, and also that people will understand what we're doing and help other people understand it as well. Public relations, as I have mentioned on more than one occasion, is not just press releases. It's about all the different touchpoints between a company and the three different

the internal as in the staff, the partners or those people whom we rely on but are not necessarily giving us money, and our customers. Lots of different people in lots of different roles are required to create an effective company, and courses can help us to train not only external. If more freelancers come and work with us, I can take them through the course, and this is codifying the knowledge of the business. If I want to share with potential customers how we work, I can give them free access to the course as well. The hard part, of course, is sitting down in a focused way and making this content consistent, engaging, and compelling, and then delivering it in a way that resonates with people. We have to choose people that are at the right stage in running their own business and in need of the five-stage methodology. We have to deliver it to them in a way that is accessible and that fits their timescales, because if it goes wrong, the downside is that the course could be a liability. So, if you've got knowledge in your company that actually is a core part of the value of the business but it's what you don't charge for currently, is it something that could be made into a course that could then become a book, training notes, or articles that go into industry publications? As we say in public relations, it all starts with content, and this is really what we're trying to develop by creating this course. Last year, I was working with a group at Mondelez, which is the large food company. I was the Asia Pacific digital expert, and I taught using the Simplilearn platform, which can embed video, audio, live polling, and documentation, and it also displays your progress across a course. It's marked like a corporate platform much like Coursera. Mondelez was using this to establish common best practices across their teams, and the same course was being delivered across America, Europe, and Asia, with each individual market having its own special subprograms. Training is definitely a core part of any communications program, certainly internally. Externally, it could be another way to build our public relations activities. Over the coming weeks and months, as I build out the SPEAK|pr training, I'll share this with you, because there are many lessons of how to put this content together and how to deliver it. Above all, it's a way of encoding the knowledge that we have within an organization, and multimedia platforms now really enable this in a way that's never been possible before. My mission is to share with more people the ways to get noticed without necessarily having the cost of engaging an agency at this stage, and this is something that you as a leader or business owner can do as well.