EO Portland Educational Event: Cameron Herol Outlines 3 Easy Steps to Free PR

For the April learning event, Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) Portland brought in Cameron Herold from BackPocket COO to talk about his tremendous success growing businesses with little or no marketing budget.  Being a recovering PR professional myself, I couldn’t wait to hear what Herold had to say.  Perhaps best known for his role as COO at 1-800-Got-Junk, he generated reams of feature coverage for the company by following his process.  The premise of his presentation was that there are three simple steps to generating free PR for your company, which are:

-know your (story) angle

-know your target (audience)

-pick up the phone (that thing on your desk you don’t use anymore)

What I appreciated most about his presentation was the counter-intuitive and incendiary (by traditional APR standards) approach to PR: treating it as a sales function.  In fact, he recommends hiring people with no formal marketing or PR background (he prefers those with a sales mentality).  His approach is very roll-up-your-sleeves-and-dial-for-ink.  In fact, Herold recommends building an in-house PR team, as they “resonate” at the same “pitch” as key company executives and personalities.

He used a multitude of examples from his past to illustrate the “angle” and “audience” elements of his successful strategy, including the Canucks “blue wig” grassroots campaign and rat advertising trial.  Throughout the presentation, I was reminded of the many low-hanging fruit PR opportunities I’d overlooked or forgotten previously.  He reminded us that there are PR stories in every company, and there are many more media outlets than you might think.  For example, in the Portland-area market, you may think there are half a dozen TV stations and publications along with maybe a few dozen radio stations.  Tisk tisk: each media outlet has multiple opportunities (editors, sections, shows, features, etc.).

While Herold hammered home the point that you need to pick up the phone and call (because it’s effective and nobody uses it anymore), he did understand the power of email and the Web as a marketing medium.  I know because I asked him about SEO and SEM PR after the presentation, and he admitted he kept the concept simple and not confuse the message with emarketing strategies and tactics.  Regardless of the old-school phone-based approach, the concept was innovative and highly inspirational.  I can’t wait to get back to the office and make a few calls.