What Is Public Relations
Host: Isaac Mashman · April 18, 2022 · Episode 101 · 17 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, yo, yo, what is going on, everybody? Isaac Mashman here, and welcome back to your favorite podcast, Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through me sharing my experiences and knowledge in business, life and all things personal growth. Welcome to episode 101 and season four of Chase the Vision. Now, what is going to be different? Well, honestly, nothing except more content. That is the biggest thing. I wanted to go ahead and switch it up. Season three, from a technical standpoint, had 65 or 66 episodes, which means that whenever people are listening to the show, it can get more and more difficult trying to scroll down to the most recent episode. So I was like, you know what? Episode 100 would have been a great mark to close off.
I don't feel like podcasts are quite to the point where it's like a television show. It's not the same thing where you have season one of the show and then season two and season three. I'm not a fan of the whole idea of creating seasons and then having a break in the podcast. I think that that defeats the point. I could only imagine doing season one of the show: it's eight episodes, and then I have to wait another two months to do season two or season three. I guess for large channels, that would be great, but for this, come on now. I want to make sure that I'm providing value to you guys, keeping the momentum up, keeping the consistency up. So here we are. Today I want to go ahead and talk about public relations.
I know that many of you know that I have a public relations firm, Mashman Ventures, but I also know that many of you probably are wondering, well, Isaac, what the hell does that mean? What is a PR firm? What is public relations? I'm here to have that discussion in an unbiased, [or] slightly biased, way and tell you why you need to have a public relations firm in your own life. Now, public relations is the relationship with the public. That is the simplest way that I could break it down. A typical public relations firm bridges the gap between the corporation and the consumer, the company or business and the buyer, the client.
A lot of these massive oil companies have public relations firms, and whenever there is an oil spill, the PR firm swoops in and says, hey, this is the crisis management issue.
Let's direct the conversation. A public relations firm would be the people or the firm or the voice behind the campaigns that are considered PR stunts, or maybe the ones who came up with the idea of making Dawn dish soap the oil combatant degreaser that it is today, where they had the videos of the ducklings in oil being washed by Dawn dish soap. I haven't done research on that, but I can almost guarantee that a PR firm, or somebody on the marketing team that specialized in public relations, was the one who created that idea to better direct the conversation, so much so that even now you see the ducklings on the front of the Dawn dish soap container.
Maybe a celebrity is experiencing an emergency, maybe an unfortunate news article came out about them, or there was a leak or something like that. You guys probably can think of a few that come to the top of your mind.
The public relations firm is there to manage and navigate those crises that person, that talent, that individual is going through, same with a band. But the thing is, that is not a traditional public relations firm. That is more of a public relations agent, or the kind of PR firm that I run, although I don't specialize in, Mashman Ventures doesn't specialize in, crisis management by any means. That's something that I really don't want to dive into. We bridge the gap between the follower or fan and the public figure, the individual that is of the public's interest, directing the conversation, influencing the conversation, making sure that there is a level of credibility.
This is something that we work with a lot of our clients to do, to say, hey, if you're an average Joe in your own mind, you have to position yourself as somebody who the public wants to follow, and give them the reason that they should care.
Otherwise, you're just going to look like everybody else online, and there is absolutely no appeal to that. There's no attractiveness. So how do we position you? How do we make sure that people can trust you? It is on a case-by-case basis, but the techniques and the strategies virtually remain the same, and the concepts behind it, the philosophy. In my book, Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence, I talk about the what and why of personal branding. I actually break it down, and I say, hey, this is going to apply to whatever field you're in and whatever profession you're in, whether you're a creator, an entertainer, or a businessman, and no matter the business, your personal brand is going to be the way for you to generate free marketing.
So whereas traditional public relations firms bridge the gap between the corporation and the consumer, we bridge the gap between the fan and the public figure.
Or in the case of a follower and a celebrity, think of your favorite artist or musician, like Drake, for example. I'm sure that he has a dozen publicists that are always paying attention to what he does, what he tweets, what he says, because everything at that level is under a microscope. That is a scary position to be in, especially with no guidance, because you don't know what dirt from your past can come up. You don't know how one tweet could completely ruin your career. Sometimes it's great to have another person who just reviews that information and says, hey, this isn't a good look. In your mind, you might have the best intentions, but that doesn't mean the public is going to understand that or see it. So public relations is actually a vital industry.
I want to get a little bit more specific about the definition of public relations. As I said at the very beginning, it is a relationship with the public: how the public perceives something, the conversation, the voice behind a brand. A lot of this ties in with a marketing agency and a branding director or a branding agency, but it's something as simple as this: the name of a company can either give off the wrong impression or the right impression. Public relations firms don't typically work with startups who are just starting out, because then they have other people who are talking about the brand. But a public relations firm, and the idea of managing that relationship with the public from the very get-go, from the start, gives you a serious advantage, because now you're understanding, hey, okay, we do this marketing phrase.
We have this phrase, okay, but is this going to be misinterpreted? Is there a better way of phrasing this that would be a little bit more appealing, not so much from a selling standpoint, but from a branding standpoint and from a reputational standpoint?
Public relations is about [upholding], creating, defining the reputation of an individual or a company. That's where I really love it, because now we're able to take somebody from existing where nobody cares to [people] saying, hey, wow, this person is somebody that we could care about, from not popping up on Google at all to now taking up the entire first page of Google. And whenever they're in a conversation, they can say, hey, go Google me, and their reputation, their previous accolades, their press, their media do the speaking for them. Now, speaking of the media and any press articles, public relations is a lot deeper, a lot more expansive and intensive than, well, a media mention, an interview, a podcast interview.
A lot of these people today, these PR professionals, don't even have public relations firms, but they're PR professionals, and they say, hey, we can get you featured in the press.
They can get you on TV, or they can get you into 250 different directories, different articles. That is one aspect of public relations. That is something a PR professional would do, but they're talking about the low-hanging fruit of the industry. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for press. There is a place for media. There is a place for podcasts and other features and interviews and conversations. However, the point of building a strong personal brand or a strong business brand is to be able to get featured in the press and the media for free without having to pay your way to the top. If you have this conversation, this buzz, this hype surrounding your name, do you really think that you need to pay another article or an outlet to expand that message further?
Or wouldn't you think that, because of the buzz that is surrounding your name or your business, they'd want to come to you, because you are going to give them, well, clout, so to speak? Everybody says, oh, he's got clout. Why do you think rappers go and get features from other rappers? It's because the other rapper has a larger reputation. They have a larger awareness. That is, at its finest source, a perfect example of public relations at work: leveraging one person's credibility and awareness and knowledge to expand your own. There's a reason why certain musicians won't work with other musicians, because their reputation might actually be smaller than theirs.
Their awareness is smaller. Their fan base is smaller. You have to be very methodical because as you get bigger, you can actually go backwards and do things that harm your credibility that at one point would have actually helped you in your life.
Think about an actor who starts out doing these blockbuster movies, these A-list films, these classic films. Then as they get older in their career, all of a sudden you see a bunch of these really crappy movies come out that should have been on the Sci-Fi Channel alongside Sharknado, yet they have these big name actors. That can actually hurt that actor's credibility in the long run. People can say, oh, wow, look at this C-list movie that this person was in. How did he go from this to that? That can be an example of basically reversing your career, harming your career, when at one point, as a struggling or starving actor or entertainer, you'd be like, man, I absolutely want to be in this. Although it's not the greatest movie, this gets me exposure.
I could be the best actor in this movie. Then there comes a point where, chances are, you're harming yourself without even realizing it at the time. Public relations is one of the largest and fastest growing industries. The reason behind that is, well, the consumer market is getting bigger. There's this new conversation about green, green renewable energy. There's something called greenwashing, where a company can say, oh, we're environmentally friendly, yet they're really not at all. That's just a PR tactic in and of itself that is unethical, because now you're spreading lies. The PR industry isn't something that is here to manipulate the user in a way that is negative by spreading lies.
Now, public relations to a degree is a lot of manipulation, but it's ethical and moral manipulation. Obviously, this can be an argument where we could sit down and have a Socratic conversation.
A Socratic seminar where we're just going back and forth. But truthfully, public relations is here to take the information that is true and to expand it and to focus it and to highlight it. It's like whenever you have somebody on stage who's on Broadway or doing a musical, you have the spotlight on the second or third floor balcony that is shining down on this main person. That is the point of public relations: to shine that spotlight on the individual and to highlight the best features, to zoom in on the things that are going great, to zoom in on the reasons why somebody would care, or on the accolades, on the accomplishments.
That is public relations. So it's not here to try to cover up things, but that is going to be the case, for example, with an oil spill or something that is a political downfall of the opponent.
It's like public relations has its dark side, but so does every other business, in my mind. For every positive, there's going to be a negative. We're in a binary world, a binary society, where you have light, you have dark, you have up, you have down, you have left, you have right. You have sad, you have happy, and you have public relations in one way and then public relations in the other. That's why I also love it, because seeing these influencers and these PR gurus who say, hey, we can get you in the press, or hey, we can go ahead and get you followers, I'm like, man, this is leaving me with the blue ocean market, the blue ocean opportunity to come in and help people build out their personal brands the right way without resorting to those pay-to-win crappy tactics.
That's what I'm extremely excited about as I scale Mashman Ventures together with our team. I'm talking about the firm today because today actually marks the two-year anniversary of Mashman Ventures. The first six months, I didn't know what I was doing. The first year, [we] started picking up ground, and going into year two, after year one, man, things started to make sense. Just within the past, I would say, month, through certain challenges and certain situations, we've had more creativity with the firm and more results with our clients than ever before. So I'm super excited and thrilled to be scaling this company to a billion dollar company.
Fun fact: there is not one public relations firm that is worth a billion dollars. There's one PR firm that's been at the top of the food chain for quite some time, and they're not even worth a billion dollars.
However, with the understanding that public relations is an ever-expanding, ever-growing industry with a lot of growth (I believe there's like a 5% level of growth year in and year out), that means that there is definitely room for that expansion, room for different ways of monetization, taking the digital era and the idea of the consumer market and combining that with an industry that would typically have only been reserved for celebrities or businesses. What I mean by that is it's something as simple as doing a webinar, doing a digital product replay where somebody can purchase that and have a public relations firm giving them guidance, whereas 50, 60 years ago, the only people that had PR firms or publicists or agents were people in Hollywood or athletes or celebrities or, well, the businesses, as I mentioned before.
So, super exciting, but public relations is such a powerful industry, and a couple of things that I would tell you right about now, by listening to this episode, is to go ahead and start understanding what your reputation is and how it's affected by your actions on a daily basis, by the conversations you're having. What is the conversation surrounding you? Have you ever Googled yourself and found something negative about you? I've found some different people that I had in my Facebook network where I'm like, I know to stay away from you, because I ran a Google search and there's a Reddit thread saying, oh, this person's a scammer.
That's somebody who could definitely use a PR firm, that's for sure, to come clean, to have that conversation and to start directing what is going on. That's what a public relations firm, or public relations, [does].
[In and] of itself, it should just establish this awareness in your mind of what your relationship with the public is. What is your relationship with not only your friends and fans, but with strangers who are coming across your page for the first time? Are you coming across as a person who the public can trust, or as [just] another person, another individual? So keep those things in mind. I appreciate you so much for listening to this episode, episode 101 of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, blasting off, starting off season four, on to more phenomenal content, with episodes coming every Monday and every single Friday. Now, before you get running, I would ask that you pay the fee.
Now, the fee for this podcast is as simple as sharing it with a friend, a family member, a business partner, somebody in your life that you believe will get value from this episode, just as much value as you did, for that matter.
I ask that you do that for every single episode. I'm not here to run advertisements. As you see in this episode, I might mention my business or mention my book or mention other things that I have going on, but it's with a purpose. It's not here to just blast you with advertisements. I respect you much more than that, and I'm grateful for your listenership and for helping me grow this show. Now let's go ahead and take it to a whole new degree. Get it in front of new markets, new people, new ears, new audiences. Let's go ahead and continue chasing after the vision that is in your life, because I am chasing after and growing towards my own vision in my own life. So much love, grateful for you again. Until next time, have a fantastic and productive day.