One of the most common ways of promoting small businesses is with news releases.

This old, yet still effective, promotional tactic, is often misused because small business owners write news releases like advertisements. That just doesn’t work.

Why Many News Releases
Never Get Used

If you write news releases that concentrate on your business instead of providing relevant information for media audiences, you’ll fail and waste the resources put into them. In other words you’ll get no return on your promotion investment.

For news releases to get to audiences, they must first pass the gatekeeper. A “gatekeeper” is the person who makes decisions about what will and will not be “published” through a medium.

For example, editors make “publication” decisions at traditional media, both print and broadcast. Similarly, if you want to publish a guest post on my site, I’m the gatekeeper and I publish instructions for guest posts.

If your post doesn’t follow my instructions, I won’t publish it as is. I may work with you to fix it, but gatekeepers at traditional media will not. They are just too busy. So you have to get it right the first time, or it’ll be trashed. And if you send gatekeepers several junk news releases, they’ll start trashing yours without even opening it.

Relevancy Theory Can Help
You Publish More News Releases

I did my doctoral dissertation on news releases and determined seven elements that make a difference in publication probability. I found that news release relevant to a medium’s audience most likely to be published.

As I continued to study news releases, I formed a theory that I call relevancy theory. To limit the length of this post, I’ll briefly summarize ideas from this theory that will be most helpful to you in getting your news releases published.

Relevancy Ideas For
You to Implement

• If gatekeepers perceive a release to be relevant to their audiences, they will be inclined to use it.  And the more relevant they perceive a release to be, the more likely they will use it.
• To be relevant, a news release must provide practical value that can be readily applied to audiences’ lives.
• One way to make news releases relevant is to localize them by using such a local tag. This means that the first paragraphs interest the specific target medium by relate to audiences’ interest in familiar people and organizations.
• Releases with audience service affect the day-to-day lives of audiences, by announcing coming events of interest to many, by helping them better understand current events, and by making it easier for audience members to do some common activity better.
• Gatekeepers prefer news releases that provide readers with possible solutions to problems.
• The more relevant information is to an audience, the greater the effect it will be on that audience.

Promoting Your Business
With News Releases
Conclusion

No matter what media you’re targeting, I know you’ll get better results with your news releases if you use these relevancy ideas.

If you find these ideas helpful, you may also want to see my last post on promotion. Just click the following link:

3 Credibility Issues That Matter When Promoting Your Business

If you’d like to know when I publish more ideas that will help you in your small business, subscribe to my blog. I’ll send you weekly post summaries and a copy of my matrix Market Segmentation report. Just complete the form below:

Posted 3-5-10:
Promoting Your Business
With News Releases

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Three credibility issues that matter when promoting your business include:

1. Type of Information
2. Information’s Relationship To Reality
3. Source Of The Information

If you’re a small business owner wanting to promote your business through media, knowing these 3 credibility issues can mean the success or failure of your promotions.

Below I provide brief summaries of research related to each of the three credibility issues that matter.

Credibility Issues That Matter
1. Type of Information

• Even negative information can enhance supportive attitudes,
• The amount of information has greater influence than the positive or negative connotation of that information.
• Communicating only positive or neutral information is “viewed by numerous markets as an attempt to gloss over weaknesses, and
• Results in “an ethos of distrust on the part of many segments of the market.

Credibility Issues That Matter
2. Information’s Relationship To Reality

Message persuasiveness is lowered to the extent that the position advocated in the message is attributed to a particular communicator characteristic rather than to external reality.

This relates to two types of communicator bias:

• Knowledge bias – the recipient’s belief that a communicator’s knowledge about the external reality is not biased.
• Reporting bias – the recipients’ belief that communicator’s willingness to convey an accurate version of external reality is compromised.

Credibility Issues That Matter
3. Source Of The Information

• Credibility is conferred upon an individual acting as a source of statements when the press covers him/her.
• Credibility conferral results from an implicit message about the person who is covered in the story.
• The implied message is always a favorable one.
• The news agency providing the coverage is the source of the implied message about the news source.
• Source credibility is enhanced when the coverage of the source is by a news agency of positive credibility.
• When a source is quoted regardless of who provides the coverage, qualification to speak is legitimized.
• Mechanical organizations with vertical and hierarchical communication structures, tend to get bad news coverage.
• Organic organizations with lateral communication structures, perceive their news coverage to be the most fair.
• Mixed organizations (mixed communication structures) are often by-passed by the media.
• The media’s reliance on outside sources for covering mixed and mechanical organizations inevitably results in bad and mixed news.
• Organizations receiving primarily good news are profit-making, have a high level of openness and credibility.
• They act as partners in the news dissemination process by subsidizing news through news releases, and by developing relationships with media representatives.

Credibility Issues That Matter
Conclusion

By implementing this research on these three credibility issues that matter when promoting your business, you can improve your business promotions through media.

To read my next post on promoting your business, see Promoting Your Business With News Releases.

You can get more marketing information like this by subscribing to my blog. I’ll send you weekly post summaries and a copy of my matrix Market Segmentation report. Just complete the form below:

Posted 3-3-10:
3 Credibility Issues That Matter
When Promoting Your Business

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This marketing messages monthly roundup covers four posts to help you improve your verbal and visual messages.

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Technology and human communication may not appear to have much in common, but they do. And knowing what they share can improve all your communications, including your marketing.

The idea that technology and human communication share elements is the basis of information theory, and it’s grounded in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon and Weaver developed a model to explain how information moves across machines.

Many communication experts have found that this technological model represents human communication well. It has been applied to enhance understanding of personal and media communication.

According to the model, technology and human communication messages contain the same elements. These are:

• Information
• Redundancy
• Noise

Technology And Human Communication
Share Information

According to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, information is a measure of our freedom of choice in selecting a message to transmit. You can read more about information selection at

How To Improve The Communication Process With Market Segmentation

Information, as this theory defines it, isn’t about meaning. So it provides a different way of considering how people as well as machines process information. It first establishes that in all communication there is a sender and a receiver. A signal transfers a code – words, dots, numbers, etc. – across a medium. The medium can be wires, waves, paper, etc.

The receiver gets and decodes the coded message. How true that information is to the original one transferred determines the faithfulness of the communication.

Technology and human communication use the same process to transfer information from the sender to the receiver.

Technology And Human Communication
Use Redundancy

The trick when coding information is to choose symbols so that the message will be decoded as it was coded. I’m not a computer techie, but I’m told that all computer information is coded with the numbers one and zero. That code makes sense to computers so they can communicate with one another. But I couldn’t read that code without computer software translating it for me.

The same is true for human language. Many modern languages use symbols that we call the alphabet, but the Chinese language uses entirely different symbols. I can’t read Chinese because I don’t know the symbols.

Thinking of information this way also provides a different perspective on redundancy. I normally think of redundancy as repetition. If something is important and I repeat that something multiple times in a message, I’m more likely to transmit that information to my receiver.

However, in technology and human communication, redundancy relates to the part of a message determined by rules governing the use of symbols. So again Shannon and Weaver weren’t considering meaning in, but the structure of information.

Technology And Human Communication
Have Noise

Technology and human communication have noise. Noise is anything added to the signal that is not intended to be there.

Consider this technology example. When you’re watching television and you get “snow” that’s something that’s not a part of the original message. It’s noise added somewhere along the transfer medium that detracts from the message.

In human communication, noise also comes from the transfer medium. For instance, if you and I are talking when a jet flies by, the noise of that jet interferes with me hearing the sounds that you just coded into your message.

Noise can be offset through increased redundancy for both technology and human communication.

Technology And Human Communication
Conclusion

This post provides just an overview of Shannon and Weaver’s theory. It’s covered in most communication books, including those on mass media theory.

My point here is not to cover the theory in detail, but to help you to understand the commonality between technology and human communication. If you’re a blogger or have an online business, you use both kinds of communication so knowing what they have in common can help you to become a better communicator.

And because so much of marketing involves communication, you’ll also become a better marketer.

Technology is used online to implement viral marketing. You can read more about it at the link below:

5 Disadvantages Of Viral Marketing 1-2

If you have trouble keeping up with technology demands, you’ll want to  check out Internet Marketing Technologies Demystified.

If you like this post, you can get weekly summaries of my posts so that you always know when I’ve posted something that you want to read or comment on. Just complete the form below:

Posted 3-6-09:
What Technology And
Human Communication Share

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If you want to know how to improve the communication process, you need to understand selective communications. Once you do, the importance of market segmentation becomes abundantly clear.

The selective communication process explains what messages that people expose themselves to, which messages they pay attention to, which ones they perceive and which they retain. The illustration below demonstrates this communication process.

Each circle in this illustration provides a level of defense against messages. People reject messages at each of the defensive circles. This rejection is represented by the red lines going to the outside edge of a circle and then bouncing off and going outside all the circles.

The red lines indicate that people filter communication noise from information that they deem important and reject the noise so that it fails to pass through a level of defense.

In order to leave your message with your target market, you have to know enough about its members to pass each level of defense until the message is retained. Each level of defense is discussed below.

How To Improve The
Communication Process:
Selective Exposure

The outer dark blue circle represents Selective Exposure. People allow exposure only to communications that are in agreement with their existing attitudes.

By revealing those attitudes, market segmentation enables you to improve your communications with your target market.

How To Improve The
Communication Process:
Selective Attention

The second circle, in light blue, represents Selective Attention. People pay attention only to those parts of a message that are consonant with their strongly held attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. In communication, these are known as affectors because they influence everything that people do.

How To Improve The
Communication Process:
Selective Perception

The third circle, in gray, represents Selective Perception. People only decode information that agree with their affectors. If you don’t know what those affectors are, you’ll never communicate effectively with your target market members.

Market segmentation provides you with psychographic and behavioral characteristics that reveal your target market members affectors and enable you to get your message through the Selective Attention and Selective Perception defensive circles.

How To Improve The
Communication Process:
Selective Retention

The inner red circle represents Selective Retention. If a message has passed through all the other barriers, it will be retained. You will have achieved your goal of communicating effectively with your target market.

How To Improve The
Communication Process:
Conclusion

By understanding how people select and filter out messages, you’ll understand how to improve the communication process. Using market segmentation will enable you to understand your target market well enough to get your messages through the selective communication process.

To learn about a simple and quick market segmentation process click the link below:

Matrix Market Segmentation

If you need to improve your external or internal communications, don’t miss 101 Ways To Power-Up Your Writing. It contains writing tips and advice from a Fortune 500 writer. It will help you prevent embarrassing mistakes in English, and teach you to write with power and impact.

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Posted 2-2-09:
How To Improve The
Communication Process
With Market Segmentation

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