Elevate Your Brand through Storytelling

Ever wondered how a simple press release can transform a business? Join us as we sit down with Mickey Kennedy, the founder of eReleases, to uncover the secrets behind crafting compelling narratives that capture media attention and drive sales. From his humble beginnings waiting tables to mastering the art of storytelling at a telecom research startup, Mickey shares his journey and the evolution of his press release distribution business. Learn how he created a vast email database of journalists and why meaningful stories are the backbone of effective PR.

Discover the magic of a unique selling proposition (USP) and why it’s crucial for your business, especially if you're a startup. Mickey offers practical advice on how to identify your business's unique traits by engaging with customers and leveraging unique resources or services. For coaching businesses in particular, he emphasizes the importance of detailed case studies with data and client quotes to establish credibility and stand out in a competitive market. Mickey also discusses why reliance on price competition alone can be a dangerous strategy and how focusing on what makes you unique can attract both media and customers.

Unlock the secrets to writing a successful book and providing unique value in this insightful discussion. Mickey shares his experience with Perry Marshall's marketing book and how breaking down content into daily emails can foster engagement. He also reveals his philosophy of offering valuable PR secrets for free and how strategic press release efforts, such as conducting industry surveys, can significantly elevate a company's credibility and visibility. Don't miss out on Mickey's invaluable PR tips and his free masterclass at ereleases.com/plan.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

So your boy got a little too excited and forgot to have the guest introduce himself. Mickey Kennedy was amazing. We talked a lot about PR, life and different strategies. I asked him about a couple of situations in my life, but nothing crazy or outrageous, just honest to God, had a good conversation. I left it with a lot of good knowledge on pr and how to approach things. So also, he's just a really fun guy to listen to, so enjoy so, um, I run uh e-releases.

Speaker 2: 0:35

It's a press release distribution business. I started in october of 1998, so a little over 25 years. Um, I finished my mfa uh, about 27 years, and my original game plan was to wait tables and write poetry. And I did that for a summer and realized that I don't know, your back and knees hurt from being on concrete for 10 hours a day, and so I just decided I need a safe office job and I got hired by a telecom research startup in Washington DC and I was employee number three because I had writing as a background and an English degree. They were like hey, write press releases for us and send them out.

Speaker 2: 1:13

I did that a few times, got no real pickup initially, but then I started to figure out what journalists were looking for. I was just publishing some pockets of our data and I realized they wanted stories behind the data and so I'd flesh those out and then talk about those. And those did start getting lots of media pickup. And I was faxing at the time and I think over the next year or so a lot of journalists started to call and say in the future, could you just email these to us? And so I just thought, hey, I could put together an email database just contacting journalists.

Speaker 2: 1:49

I spent a little over a year reaching out to journalists and just asking them if I could put them in my database. I was originally going to be technology oriented, but what I found is, as I talked to journalists, they'd be like, oh, my beat changed. I no longer do technology or consumer electronics, now I'm sports or I'm business. And so it's just like, ok, I'll just keep record of everybody. And and then when I launched in October of 98, I had about 10,000 journalists and I was just a matchmaker, you know, getting clients and sending their press releases to these journalists, and we were having pretty good success.

Speaker 1: 2:35

That's interesting. So just the evolution going from you know the working as the waiter, to the office job. It's almost it's like a cliche, but it's almost like the stereotypical. Like you, you start off as a waiter but realize there's greater things. What, what about the press release system? Did you like the most?

Speaker 2: 2:49

I liked how, if you told a compelling story, you could get lots of media attention. So the startup that I worked at I mentioned, we published telecom data and you know I was like, oh, here's our most recent telecom data for inbound and outbound traffic to the US, for Caribbean countries, and nothing happened. And I did notice that one country had way more traffic than everybody else. So I was like, ok, let's explore why. And I found out it was the center of 1-900 numbers. And so when I wrote a press release about that and wrote about the story and sent it out, we got picked up in the Economist, Financial Times, washington Post, wall Street Journal and three telecom trade publications after you know nothing before that. And so I just felt like, wow, you know, this is really, you know, really great.

Speaker 2: 3:37

It drove a lot of sales, drove a lot of interest. We started talking about, you know, data being a predictor for economic growth, like if you looked at a country that was not industrialized and all of a sudden it started having growth. If you looked back you could kind of see it through telecom growth three years before. And so we published a release about that and that got the attention of hedge funds and investment firms, and all of a sudden we were getting tons of orders from a whole new audience that we never had and I just thought, you know why aren't other people trying this? And I just felt like I wanted to be out there and sort of help people sort of, you know, get their messages out and get access to the media.

Speaker 1: 4:19

That's really cool. I didn't know about the correlation between the phone number and the sign of growth. That's really cool. I didn't know about the correlation between the, the phone number, and the uh, the sign of growth. That's really cool. Um, the one thing you touched on and you've hit it twice, and I want to double down on it is the story behind the press release there. There must be a formula to that story, though you can't just be like my name is blank. I grew up in kansas, blah blah right.

Speaker 2: 4:41

So press releases are generally written in the third person, their announcement, and it's sort of like top down, what's the most important thing? You want to make sure that the entire message answers the who, what, when, where, how and why. But at the end of the day, what you're announcing, you want to make sure it's meaningful and it can fulfill a story arc, because journalists, even if it's a small article, like to have a story arc, and everybody knows what a story arc is. We've been telling stories since we've been sitting around campfires thousands of years ago. It has a climax or it has something, and then it sort of settles down and take things that get announced through press releases. We get a lot of product launch press releases and it's usually like here's a new product that we're introducing, here's a list of features, here's a page to learn more, and boom, they send it out and, of course, not much usually happens because there's not much there for a journalist to write a story about. But if you were to talk about your journey, what caused you to create the product, that could be something you could put a use case study in there. Very few people release something that they haven't had people try out.

Speaker 2: 5:57

And so what was the experience of someone? This was a company that was losing 12% a year and not profitable, but they used your logistics solution. It made them more efficient and all of a sudden, at the end of the trial, they achieved a 9% profit rate, which is just phenomenal. And then you have a quote by them.

Speaker 2: 6:17

And so a journalist looking to cover this would say oh, you know, I have an audience, you know, is this important enough that they would either entertain or educate them, and ideally both? And they're like oh, you know, I have an audience, you know, is this important enough that they would either entertain or educate them, and ideally both? And they're like oh well, this is an interesting product. We've got a great little story that illustrates its value. Yeah, that would attract a journalist. And so so many people think about it. As we've got this product, we want to sell more, so let's just just list the product list features. But they don't think about the needs of the journalist and and the the need for there to be enough elements for them to create a story yeah, no, that's very true.

Speaker 1: 6:55

I, as I think about it, it's I don't personally read a lot of press release, but the few I have, it's it's usually the, the compelling story where it was like the underdog, ceo, like I, just I couldn't find a product, so I made it myself and it was just like, oh, wow, okay, cool thing yeah, I mean personal stories and journeys are really important.

Speaker 2: 7:15

Um, I mean, there's a reason that everybody that appears on Shark Tank usually opens with their personal story where they're vulnerable or they're sharing an obstacle or what inspired them to create the product or the company, and the reason for that is it really just sort of immediately creates a human interest element. There's this immediate empathy that you feel for the other person and it really helps to humanize them and you know, that story and that journey and that arc is an important element to a lot of people's success in getting people interested in them and interested in covering them.

Speaker 1: 7:55

Yeah, so I'm just curious. One thing that I've been thinking about and I'm sure you get this a lot with your press releases is the new ai startups. How do you help them find people and correspondence for like a press release, for a, let's say, uh, like a? If you talk into this app, it'll transcribe what you say and then give you an AI summary. How would something like that work with your mechanics and stuff?

Speaker 2: 8:20

So I mean, if you're looking for us to write a release, what we try to do focus on is you know what is unique about your product or service, what's your story of creating the company and what's your unique selling proposition. What do you do that's different than everybody else in the marketplace? What you talked about using AI to transcribe it I think I know of like 14, 16 companies out there that do it, and I've used one with Zoom for, I think, almost two, three years and it's done a great job. So I would think, if you're editing that marketplace with AI based on what you described, they're not doing anything new and I don't think a journalist would be attracted to it. But if there was an element that they were doing something different or they had their own different spin on it, is that spin important enough to interest an audience that journalists represent?

Speaker 1: 9:16

That's a really good answer actually, thank you. Yeah, there's a friend of mine. He's working on something like that and I keep telling him I'm like you're unique, but I can't explain why you're unique, kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 9:27

Yeah, that's really important and you know it's really. If you're a startup and you sort of realize that you're very similar to a lot of things, that's your moment to sit there and say what could we do to enhance this product or tweak it or a slight pivot to make it much more unique. And really the best thing to do is talk to people, talk to people who use products like that and say, have you tried this product? And some people will say, yeah, but it doesn't do this. Or I would love a product that would just do X, y and Z. And if you get a few people saying the same thing, you can potentially say that could be a direction that we could consider. And I do think that you know I deal with people all the time who, when I ask them what's unique about their business or what do they do, they often say I'm just a commodity business, I'm just located in the Chicago area but I'll ship anywhere. But there's literally 60 companies across the US that do the same exact thing, selling the same exact widget, and I'm like whoa, you are in a bad business, because the only way if you are selling a commodity and you're selling it the same way, with no distinction from everybody else. The only thing you're competing on is maybe proximity, the belief that being closer will get it to them better. But he said I can order it from any warehouse anywhere, so the delivery is the same for anybody. You're only competing on price, and that's a terrible thing because eventually it will drive prices down to the point that you're just making razor thin margins.

Speaker 2: 11:05

I've also had conversations with people who said that. And then they're like well, you know, we really do great onboarding. And I said tell me more, tell me more. And they're like oh well, we have a library of like 600 hours worth of videos that you can go in and do a search for doing any action with this very complex CRM. And it's there and they can immediately implement it. And I'm like OK, how hard would it be your competitor to create that? He goes well, there are some competitors that have soft videos that they add every once in a while, but they've got like 12 hours and we've got hundreds of hours. And I'm like okay, it seems like it would be very hard for someone to create hundreds of hours to compete against you.

Speaker 2: 11:48

That is your unique selling proposition. And they said oh, we don't tell people about it until after they bought. And I said that's stupid, because if I'm looking at two companies that are basically a commodity and price is a consideration, I'm going to just go with the cheapest and then find out. Luckily, maybe you have this great onboarding library and resource that anytime someone's stuck using the CRM, they can go to a video that they can easily search and be able to implement it.

Speaker 2: 12:26

I said do you know how many people buy CRMs and then are just devastated that they spend tens of thousands of dollars on consultants because they can't figure out how to do these little intricate actions and things like that? I said this is your unique selling proposition and so, yeah, you have to be able to create something that is unique and really defines you differently, and there's lots of different ways to do it. I mean, there's some companies that Amazon started competing on how quick they can get it to you, and then you know other little things as well, but everybody has sort of something that they do a little bit different than everybody else, and you just have to figure out what that is for you.

Speaker 1: 13:10

So what would be some of the steps to figure that out? Let's say it's hypothetical, like a coaching business that, like a lot of people, especially during COVID, want to be a coach. So what could someone offer that's unique, that no one else could offer? Is it like a one on one, consulting, a deep analysis of your business, kind of thing?

Speaker 2: 13:30

I think for a coach it is who you are and kind of what your track record is. Who you are and kind of what your track record is, and so you know. I don't think people are going to go and say, based on the number of people I've consulted, x amount have grown. But I think that having case studies I don't think testimonials is enough, but having case studies where you include quotes from the person but you also show you know numbers, like include quotes from the person but you also show you know numbers, like I provided coaching to this person. This was their obstacle, you know, and this was the outcome. And ideally people like numbers and data if they can get that in there and then having an amazing quote by them and that you know really shows value.

Speaker 2: 14:17

You want to go beyond a testimonial because, I'll be honest, a lot of people have testimonial fatigue and uh, it, it, it doesn't, you know it's. It's so easy to just sort of get friends and family to build testimonials. I think it's what people think and uh, it, it, it, it. It's harder to get that actual data and uh, and get those numbers and build something out to really show an actual case study. But I think that having some solid case studies, you know, maybe having a book that's done really well in the marketplace, you know, those are things that position you as a thought leader, give you credibility, boost you. But, that being said, you could also not have a book at this point but still have articles that have been written about you, or you've written articles yourselves and submitted them to, like, say, the Harvard Business Review or other places that really give people comfort that this person is legitimate and you know they're recognized in the industry that's interesting.

Speaker 1: 15:22

You mentioned the book idea. It's one thing I've been humoring is writing like a business book. But I was like there seems to be a lot of traffic, a lot of people doing it, especially with like russell brunson's like write a book and you get clients, kind of thing. Um, it seems very salesy and pitchy and I don't like reading the books. So what I did when I was doing security work, I helped a logistics company improve their morale and the productivity went from, let's say, 100,000 products to almost a million products a day and injury rate was plummeted. And I don't know how to reference that into a book.

Speaker 2: 16:03

So I think that you kind of have to, if you're going to write a book, position yourself different from all the other books out there in the marketplace and I think you know, show a distinct point of view. You know you're adding something and you're not just sort of building on what's already out there. I mean, you can build on something and grow from it, but I think the people who do are the least successful are those that sort of just you know, get basic information spit out through either AI or a ghostwriter and they're really not writing about something that is completely different than everybody else has ever talked about in the marketplace. What's your edge, what's your little thing? And so I wouldn't recommend people writing a book unless they have that. Or maybe you just kick the can a little bit until you figure that out what your little edge is. But I do think that books do work. You just kick the can a little bit until you figure that out what your little edge is, um, but you know, I do think that books uh do work. Um, they add a lot of legitimacy. Um, you know they can be self-published, uh, you know. But you do want to make sure that you uh are uh, giving something of high value, and I think one of the you know, the easiest ways to look at it are look at books that have mattered and have generated, you know, many, many hundreds or if not thousands of Amazon reviews. They usually have a hook, something that is sort of like overarching theme, but then they get in there and they give you solid anecdotes, they give you solid information.

Speaker 2: 17:50

You know, a long time ago, because I started this business as a poet, I didn't have a lot of marketing experience, so I bought a marketing book online. It was about teaching me how to do AdWords and it was with Perry Marshall and I bought the book. And then he also had an upsell for the audio book. It was just an MP3. It wasn't through Audible or anything at the time and so I did that and I meant to listen to it, I meant to read the book. And then I started getting this autoresponder where each day he was feeding me little gems and I'm like God, this guy's so smart.

Speaker 2: 18:27

And then he's like after I learned so much through the emails, the daily drip of emails, I did a meeting with him where I went to his house with three other people for two days and for half a day he looked at my business, dissected it and we addressed AdWords, but I would say 95% of it was just addressing my business, like you need to improve this landing page, you need to do this, all of these things. And my head was just swimming. And then he's like, oh, I also have a marketing mastermind of, like you know, 14 to 16 people that we meet three times a year. And I was like, yeah, I joined that. I got so much out of this whole experience. And then later he told me. He said I said I am kind of embarrassed but I keep feeling like I have to go back and either read your book or listen to your audio book. But and he goes. Let me guess he goes. You got my emails and then that's what got you into action and you learned a lot. And I said, yeah, he goes.

Speaker 2: 19:29

My emails are the book he says people don't read. They're not. A book is intimidating. Very few, a lot of people buy it intending to do it. Very few people read it and he goes. So I just give people the book broken down in autoresponder series. He goes, you can get all my autoresponder series. Never even buy the book, and you'll learn the same thing that's in the book. And he's just like and he goes. And then there are people who then will get everything and he goes.

Speaker 2: 19:58

A natural progression is in video Do a bunch of videos, give it. Give the book away for free. And he says people will watch the videos and then go still buy the book. Give the book away for free. And he says people will watch the videos and then go still buy the book. And he says and then they'll still want to work with you. They're like I learned all this, I want someone else to implement it. And he says he goes, I give all my secrets away. He goes, I don't lock them away. And then once you pay a big fee, he goes I give it all away freely. And he goes. And some people just you know they're not going to read the book. Some people aren't going to listen to the audiobook. Some people will read the autoresponders because it's like it's a very small commitment.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Each day you get a little email with such a strong nugget and I do imagine that it's a bridge. Well, yeah, that it is a bridge, that it's not the exact literal book, but he's condensed it, and then from there they go on and do other things with him. But he says he's got some people that then want to say I've read all this but I don't want to actually implement it in my business. I want to just hire someone. So at the time he was working with someone, he would just pass you along to them. And so I think that you know that speaks to the value of what you have to communicate. So I think that you know that speaks to the value of what you have to communicate.

Speaker 2: 21:12

I've read books from experts where I felt like they were holding on to all of the value and they were just giving you anecdotes of people they've helped and principles, but no real tools, no real resources, no real actionable tips, and you know that works for some people. But you know, for me I give all my stuff away. I mean I have a free masterclass on my website at ereleasescom slash plan P-L-A-N, where I have an hour-long video masterclass for free. I give people the best secrets in PR, the types of press releases that work in and out, and I've had so many people say I don't get it. Why do you give this away?

Speaker 2: 21:48

I'm like if you learn how to do amazing releases, you're going to do them. They're going to work and you're going to keep at it, and so that's my goal, and I want to get my customers to do better, more strategic releases and have more wins, and I think that, going back to coaching, I think that if you're going to write a book, I think it has to have actionable things that can make a difference in someone's life and for a lot of people there, you know there is a hook, there is something that is very meaningful, that they found a pattern with many people that they've coached, and in that pattern it is this and this is how they want to approach it. Maybe it's a metaphor or something like that, and I think that's kind of how a book sort of coalesces from you know, becoming an idea that you can then start to implement and start to build out.

Speaker 1: 22:41

So it sounds very similar to a press release. You have to think of the book, the unique proposition, the angles, how to. Yeah, you could use, like, let's say, you use Jordan Peterson style of explaining, although that's very long at times, but more elegant and long and poetic, but then you're maybe more blunt like David Goggins. So that's interesting the correlation between the best release style and reading the book.

Speaker 2: 23:09

And I think some of the best content does both. And especially, you know, if you're in business and you're doing a book, you know in a business book you definitely want to focus more on the education and the entertainment. But you can't ignore that, because if you're just all facts and tips it can be kind of dry. And I think that's where sometimes putting anecdotes making it personable so you can kind of envision things and stuff like that, uh, I think that that, uh, that can make a huge difference oh, 100, I agree.

Speaker 1: 23:52

Um, I'm reading bruce lipton's the biology of belief, and the first, like few chapters, were great. He was explaining his backstory and then, as he's going into the mechanics, I'm like, oh god, this is the driest lecture I've ever heard. Oh my, I don't know if I'm going to get through this in time. Right, is there anything in particular I might have missed that you want to talk about?

Speaker 2: 24:15

I guess the big thing is that when you do press releases, you do want to make sure you're doing strategic ones that are important. If you look at the world of press releases out there, and even the releases that we normally get, more than 90% of them don't generate any earned media, and that's what we call it when a journalist writes about you and so you just have to be careful that when you write releases, you're not looking at what other people in your industry are sending press releases off, because the majority of them aren't helping them, and so you kind of really want to focus on the ones that are meaningful, the ones that focus on unique selling proposition, the ones that incorporate story, the ones that introduce data and put data in there. Even doing a survey or study within your industry is a slam dunk easiest way to get earned media and to really position yourself as an expert in your industry in a way that you don't even have to be an author. I've had companies who were. One in particular is almost a link farm, and they would do top 10 rankings of lots of verticals in lots of spaces, like top CRM for salespeople, you know, top software for architects and all these different verticals and it was, it felt to me like a link farm.

Speaker 2: 25:39

Years ago they started doing surveys for each of these little verticals and after doing that for a few years on average, they got eight to 14 articles for every press release they did all going back to that one little vertical drove their SEO up. Everybody in the industry knew about them and today they get approached repeatedly by all these different industries and say can you give us a comment on this space? This just happened, this merger or this thing? They have established themselves as experts just by using PR and getting that word of mouth out there, that huge credibility, and it has been really meaningful for them. And at the time, years ago, they were doing 30 plus of these surveys a year for each of these little verticals and they were doing them annually and it worked out really, really well for them. They are known as big deals now and people pay a huge premium to be considered for these rankings and stuff like that.

Speaker 2: 26:44

So it really shows that with media attention, it elevates you and really puts you out there as someone to trust, because it gives a signal of trust to people when people write about you in the media and it really helps to increase conversions, drive interest, drive traffic, drive sales, and that's really amazing. And again, for anybody who's thinking about PR, I would recommend the first place to go to is that free masterclass at ereleasescom slash plan P-L-A-N, again completely free. It really is very digestible. Less than an hour, it really is very digestible. Less than an hour you're in and out and I guarantee you'll come away probably with a brainstorm of half a dozen ideas that you could do. That would do strategic types of press releases for your business. Um, that would result, uh, and and definitely not a 90 failure rate as opposed to what, uh, so many releases do that's's really cool.

Speaker 1: 27:45

Yeah, I'll definitely link that in the description for everyone too. It's been an absolute honor and a pleasure to chat with you. I learned so much today.

Speaker 2: 27:54

It was great talking with you.