What is personal development? How does personal development relate to getting publicity?
What is personal development?
In the world of PR that I work in, personal development is a crucial element. The media responds to people at their peak. Driven people seeking to achieve their best attracts interest. What people create and achieve when they are out there pushing themselves and striving for incredible heights is galvanizing. You can be maximally effective in attracting media attention when you offer something that represents your best.
So I am constantly asking my clients to tell me what they can do or say that will help the people they can help the most.
When you give people your best, people will give you attention. They will respect what you say or offer. This is one of the most important rules of getting publicity. Be your best. Offer your best. Give your best. Entertain, educate, advise, help, do the very best you can.
And pack these golden nuggets of wisdom that you can offer into a news release of about 250 words or less so that you can communicate your best in ten to thirty seconds.
Okay, it’s not that easy to do, but if you focus on personal development, you’ll understand what I mean. This is a very powerful and important tactic. This is what lies at the core of the problem solving tips article or the talk show interview.
It’s worth the time and effort it takes to develop yourself personally and professionally.
It takes guts and time and effort. You also have to look inward and acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses.
You also need to decide to do something to better yourself. This is a choice. You choose to improve. You act to improve. You get better.
Of course, the alternative is to do nothing, and stay the way you are.
When you develop yourself you improve how you behave with other people. You communicate better. You deliver better advice, information, problem solving analysis, and you also learn to be more useful and more effective in a wider range of situations.
This makes you versatile and capable. People listen. They act upon your advice. They learn to trust you. This is what expertise and a track record of successful performance brings to you.
This is what comes from personal development.
Media are attracted to confidence, energy, exuberence, and they know quality when they see it. This is why personal development is so important to your ability to get publicity.
This video packs a lot of punch in a very short period of time. Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, Jeffrey Gitomer, Jim Rohn, talk about what it is you need to know to improve yourself.
Andy Andrews asks "what's the smartest thing your dad ever did?"
Andy Andrews, camera in hand, asked a number of people “what’s the smartest thing your dad ever did?”
The answers he got were quite remark-able. In this short but incredible video, you’ll meet some truly normal people and a few well known celebrities as well.
Andy points out the value of having a mentor. Mentors do more than just offer advice. They invest in the outcome. They participate in the development personally. They make sure that some steps are taken and some expereinces and results are achieved.
We could all use and benefit from having a mentor or two. Quality advice and strong active supporters makes a whole lot of difference in a scary world filled with challenges and risk of disaster.
The real question then becomes is what do you do when you receive guidance and help from a mentor.
So the next question I wish Andy would ask of people, is this:
What the smartest thing you ever learned from your dad?
I know my dad would love to hear the answer. Even though I’m in my mid-fifites, he might be really surprised and happy to hear me share this with him.
What is the value of publicists, publicity and public relations
Question came to me from another publicist, phrased as follows:
Why are we important?
I often get asked this question in the context of tracking and evaluating pr effectiveness and performance metrics.
More times than not, there’s no easy way to identify the tangible effects of media publicity and public relations. Very simply, the results are goal dependent. It depends on what the client is seeking.
With single books or products or event announcements and single outreaches, a relatively simple evaluation over a four to six month period will provide the necessary data in terms of impact on sales, or coverage, or people who attended, that sort of metric.
With multiple repeat publicity projects more complex branding efforts, it is necessary to track cumulative costs, cumulative publicity acquired, and related them to overall sales or actions or people transactions over time. A systematic outreach and tracking effort must be carefully designed, implemented and maintained. It may take up to a year to develop the necessary data.
The bigger problem is distinguishing the effects your public relations efforts are having in comparison to all your other direct marketing and management communications efforts.
Can you determine how each of your multiple efforts affects your bottom line? Are you really able to document and track the individual contributions of each effort?
Direct financial impacts may produce improved sales, and greater profits and/or improved cost savings. Indirect financial savings may produce good will and improved reputation.
Direct non-financial impacts may be to introduce you to new people that produce new ideas and critical business intelligence. These can result in refined higher goals and objectives, totally new initiatives, better alignment of your people and other organizations, internal and external collaboration and even contractual teaming or partnership opportunities. Changing attitudes can be reflected in public opinion or outcry and consequent decisionmaking by affected governments.
Publicity may improve your operational effectiveness simply because you are receiving more outside scrutiny and public fame and engagement with what you and your people and organization do. Your people may pull together and form a more professional, more efficient and effective team as a direct result of the pride they are experiencing in having received such wide-open visibility and public recognition.
Indeed, this last benefit may be the most important effect publicity can have on your total business performance.
There’s an article at my website I wrote several years ago that goes into far more detail. The title of the article is:
Jim Rohn describes how to become more valuable in business
Jim Rohn is a very bright, very funny, insprational and entertaining person and his ideas and recommendations will make you more valuable and hence you will be able to charge more. This wonderful three video series from Nightingale Conant explains what you have to do to yourself rather than what you have to do at work.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Want more? Visit Jim Rohn . He offers a free weekly newsletter.
Andy Andrews talks about Mastering the Seven Decisions - Video on You Tube
This is one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time. Andy Andrews lived a relatively normal life until the age of nineteen, when both his parents died - his mother from cancer, his father in an automobile accident. He left college and was homeless. Penniless, he lived under the boardwalk or slept in people’s garages in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The something amazing happened. He befriended another grizzled old homeless person, who gave him a remarkable gift- a library card. Over time, he read more than two hundred biographies of great men and women searching for the answer to how they achieved success. Andy sent people letters asking for advice. “How did you overcome your worst challenge?” he’d ask. To his utter surprise, many of them they wrote back. And he saved those letters and pondered and savored the incredible life saving advice that they contained.
Guess what! There is no secret! It took several years, but Andrews finally determined that there were seven characteristics that each successful person had in common. He also found out he could teach people these remarkably powerful principles by telling witty and funny stories that deliver profound meaning. He became a stand up comedian in Las Vegas and started writing. He eventually wrote over 20 books including The Traveler’s Gift, which has now sold over a million copies and spent seventeen weeks on the New York Times best sellers list.
His new book is Mastering the Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success , a companion book The The Traveler’s Gift. Andrews shares the very best of what he’s learned about how each one of us can achieve success and what it takes to make the crucial basics stick. It’s a roadmap to correct personal behavior that contains lots of helpful guidance for people at with problems at home, at work, and at play.
Andy Andrews believes that each one of us has the ability to change the world. He’s learned that even when you have nothing, every choice you make matters. Even more important, every choice you do not make matters just as much.
Andy is a believer in what is known as The Butterfly Effect. Even the smallest tiny action can have dramatic consequences. The flap of a butterfly’s wings, is inexplicably intertwined with the birth of a hurricane around the world.
Even the smallest things we do can have a tremendous impact on the world.
Andy is the first to point out that the seven principles, at first blush, don’t seem very profound. “They can have impact once you really grasp how they’ve been used by other people. Then they become an amazing key to releasing incredible personal power that allows you to explore the world of opportunity that surrounds all of us.”
The point of this is simple: Learn the Seven Decisions. They work every time.
How do you create something remark-able? Seth Godin talk on creating remarkable products.
The incredible Seth Godin talks about sliced bread and other marketing ideas in this amazing 18 minute You Tube video posted by the TED Ideas Worth Spreading.
Can you get your ideas to spread? How do you do that? What do you say and to whom? Where? You can also read my own thoughts and a process I describe on how to develop and create something ‘remark-able’ (e.g., worth talking about) in my article The Magic of Business (published as Chapter 27 in in Elite Books Einstein’s Business (Jan 2007) . Here is the link to a pdf file of the same article. By the way, the picture at the beginning of the chapter/article is me standing in front of a famous picture at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. My kids think this is proof of reincarnation. See the wrinkles? Same place!
The key to marketing effectively is to create something that certain people just really really like, and figure out where they are and how to talk to them. Pretty simple to say. very hard to do. But it’s a goal that you can describe in a phrase and that’s a big start.
Best quote in this video is when he points up to his presentation slide and says “That’s Soap Lake in Washington. If that’s nowhere, Soap Lake is right in the middle of it.” Followed by audience laughter…
