Standing out and keeping resilient in the PR industry with Shane Allison, Public Address

Shane Allison is the CEO and founder of Public Address, a media relationships management platform that helps PR professionals develop stronger relationships with journalists and secure more coverage.

Being a part of the industry for almost a decade, he has seen the pros and cons for his clients and the media. He’s also celebrated a few wins including the Provoke Media’s Innovator 25 Asia-Pacific class of 2020, winning the 2018 PR professional of the year and the inaugural Mumbrella neXt Award for PR talent. 

With this, he comes in to drop a wealth of knowledge that you can absorb!

 

What you will learn in this episode:

• Why PR is a great long term investment
• How to turn around bad PR
• Ways you can reach out to journalists and get top of mind
• How to be more confident and tough in your industry
• Methods to deal with negative comments
• The media management platform, Public Address and its goals

 

Notable quotes:

• "Even if LinkedIn isn’t a relevant channel for you and your brand, it’s a great way to continue to shape and refine your thoughts and to make sure you’ve got an opinion on where your industry has gone"
• "All a journalist wants is appropriate content which is going to be relevant to the readers, guides, listeners or viewers… Shape your message, make sure that you've got a strong, compelling opinion"
• "For startups and small businesses, it’s about backing yourself the same way you would to a client and to the media. Making yourself available. Treat media like a client"

 

Resources mentioned:

• Public Address
• Sinorbis
• Talktrack podcast

 

Book recommendations

• Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

 

What business would you build on Mars?

I think what I would do is start the transportation/logistics business, right? Because you look at, uh, you look at the founding of Mars and it's analogous to the founding of America. You know, it's a group of settlers to a new land building and building new communities and what connects communities? Logistics.

So whether it's a railway, whether it's fibre on Mars, whether it's, starting off with a small pack of runners who just help people move stuff between the different houses in the first settlement. I think I would start a logistics and transportation business. The thing that I would do to promote that is actually by providing a really excellent service because I think people get caught up in PR and go “We need to PR this. We need to spend a lot of money on this''. 

There's no point in spending money on something if you don't have great service and great customer service to start with, I think people look to PR to fix problems, whereas PR can't fix a broader business problem. And if you're getting the basics right, your PR  out will completely bird sail.

Whether it's through word of mouth and that word of mouth then reaching a journalist or people speaking about it online. It’s actually getting the basics right which count more than anything

 

Reach Shane here:

• On Linkedin