One of the most common questions potential clients of our Atlanta public relations firm ask when they call us is, “ How much does public relations cost? ” This is a difficult question to answer, and we’ll do our best to explain some PR investment guidelines.

Investing in professional public relations is a lot like buying a new car. With so many different models and options available, the costs vary considerably. A four-door Chevrolet sedan costs less than a similar Mercedes, and even the price of the Chevrolet can almost double when you add leather seats, a premium stereo, alloy wheels, power windows, power door locks, GPS, a DVD player, a rear-view camera, a sunroof, seat warmers, hybrid capabilities and other optional upgrades.

When basic transportation is available for around $10,000, why do so many people buy loaded luxury sedans costing so much more? And why has a Ford pickup been the best-selling “car” in America for years?

It’s because most people understand that getting what you want – and need – when you buy will save you from regrets later. You can add speed control to a used car, but it’s usually more expensive and not as good as what you could have gotten from the factory.

You use your car to drive to work, the grocery store, soccer practice, the golf course, the mall, the airport, romantic dinners and perhaps to entertain clients. You want to ensure the car you buy will be reliable, comfortable and enjoyable for as long as you own it. You’ll also want a car that best represents your image in business and the community.

The same things should be true of your public relations agency. You rely on your PR counsel to develop your brand and help grow your company. You need to be comfortable with the firm’s people and practices, and you should expect to enjoy the fruits of their efforts – more customers, more investors, better employees, a strong brand and a great reputation.

Unfortunately, many companies focus only on the price of public relations, ignoring the true cost of choosing the wrong PR firm: poor results, a diluted brand, a tarnished reputation and a long-term contract designed to keep you from “trading-in” a firm that isn’t helping you reach your goals.

Keeping with the car analogy, let’s list some options that can affect the price of PR:

• Media relations – earning positive news coverage for your company, its products, services, leaders, experts, opinions and ideas
• Social media – managing your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media programs
• Spokesperson training – teaching you how to ace interviews and stay on message
• Crisis communications management – developing a crisis plan and protecting your company and its reputation during a crisis
• Internet reputation management – cleaning up negative reviews and websites from search engine results
• Company naming and branding – putting together the right image for your business
• Thought leadership – helping your company’s leaders become known as industry visionaries
• Public speaking engagements – spreading your brand message by booking your company’s leaders as speakers
• Award entry and recognition – earning you and your company the attention you deserve
• Special projects and misc. – let’s get it done

As you can see, there are several options available. When a client asks us to provide a price for our services, the first thing we do is determine which options the client wants – and also what might be needed instead – and how important those options are to the company.

Just as a family with four kids is going to need a minivan, SUV or a larger car, a company with many office locations and divisions is likely to need more services – or at least more in-depth services – to handle the large operations. An individual or a couple might be happy with a 2-seater, but whether that’s a Smart car or a Ferrari is going to depend on their unique needs and preferences. How fast – and how far – you want your company to grow will determine how much work a public relations firm will have to do for you.

Developing and implementing a media relations campaign for a new product, service or project for a company that doesn’t desire or require other services will cost less than a comprehensive public relations service to develop your company’s brand nationwide, including national media relations, social media management, executive training, developing a crisis PR plan, scheduling you and your leadership for speaking engagements, positioning you as a go-to expert on your industry and earning your company the awards and recognition it deserves.

Several PR firms work on an hourly-fee basis, charging you $100 to $300 for every hour they work on your behalf, and most require a retainer. Their business models are similar to a taxi with which you have to sign a year-long contract. As long as you don’t want to go far, it might be cheaper than buying a car. But if you plan to drive every day and your goal is to really get somewhere, a fee-basis firm can cost you a fortune. If you don’t use them as much as you thought you would, you’ll lose the unused portions of the retainer.

AXIA doesn’t require a retainer, nor do we charge hourly fees beyond such. First, we implement a four-month trial period based on an agreed-upon investment, which is either payable upfront with a prepayment discount or payable monthly. In the four months, we want you to have a chance to see what we can do for you and your company and get to know us and our unique approach to PR. After that, most companies see the benefits of AXIA and become clients for life.

Do-it-Yourself Public Relations

Public relations isn’t rocket science. There are plenty of books, articles and resources to help you do your own PR online or through other resources. AXIA recently introduced a series of free e-books designed to teach you everything our experts know about the ethical practice of public relations. We’ve also redesigned our newsletter, AXIA’s 60 Second Impact, to do the same thing in snippets that take less than a minute to read.

While PR isn’t magic, it is hard work and requires the attention of a dedicated, seasoned, intelligent professional. Don’t be fooled by companies and websites that promise to make it cheap. Some of them promise to deliver hundreds of press releases for a fraction of the cost of a professional PR firm. The truth is, most of those news releases are delivered to low-traffic websites that lack credibility and no one will ever see them. The rest will show up in the already overloaded inboxes of editors and reporters who will never read them, or who have opted out of their poorly written, spammy mailing lists.

You can develop relationships like we have – over our 10-year history as a firm and our decades of individual experience – with USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, Cosmopolitan and hundreds of other major news media outlets we’ve gotten our clients featured in, but why should you? Like the food and beverage experts at Dave & Buster’s, the communications experts at Verizon and the industry experts at Brightway Insurance (who experienced a 300-percent increase in call volume two weeks after we started a PR campaign for them), you are the expert at what you do.

And AXIA is the expert at public relations.

How much does public relations cost?

How much do you want to grow?

Contact us today for a free, no-pressure consultation and investment recommendation.

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Kotkin Enterprises is still in business, but a crisis last December nearly cost owner David Kotkin everything. The launch of a much-anticipated new product was crushed, his and his company’s reputation was severely damaged, and Kotkin Enterprises’ very survival was threatened. The public relations crisis was not only handled poorly – it  was actually caused by his PR firm.

If you’re a CEO or business owner, you’ve probably already thought about how you’d handle a public relations crisis. Maybe you already have a crisis PR plan, maybe you’ve discussed developing one with your leadership team or maybe it’s just something that keeps you up at night when you see other companies being ripped apart on the nightly news.

If you don’t have a crisis public relations plan, the time to get one is now – before the crisis arises. The first step is to choose who is going to speak for your company during a crisis. Whether you hire an outside firm or decide to go with someone on your staff, your spokesperson should be someone with experience and expertise handling crisis PR, and who understands your company, its reputation and how important that reputation is to your success.

Most importantly, it should be someone you’d trust with your company’s survival. Because that’s what you’ll be doing. Choosing the wrong person can cost you millions, or – as is the case with more than half the companies that face a crisis every year – it can drive you out of business.

Kotkin Enterprises’ nightmare started Dec. 16, 2011 when a customer, “Dave,” emailed the company asking about the expected delivery date for the Avenger Controller, a new PS3 game controller. The Avenger’s launch was creating a great deal of buzz in the gaming community.

Kotkin, who built the Avenger for a company called N-Control, had hired Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing to handle communications surrounding the launch, apparently including customer service communications.

Christoforo’s first email was short: “Dec 17.” Two days later, Dave sent another email asking if his shipment was on the way. Christoforo first told him the controllers were still in China, and then that they were being held at customs.

Dave’s emails continued to be polite and Christoforo’s continued to be short and vague until after Christmas, when Dave asked whether a $10-off offer for new orders that appeared on the company’s website would be extended to customers who had ordered early and still not received their controllers.

That’s when Christoforo’s tone went from indifferent to belligerent. He started belittling the customer and eventually stooped to profanity and name-calling. Customer Dave, in the meantime, had begun sharing the email chain with members of the press, including Mike Krahulik, owner and publisher of the popular gaming website Penny Arcade, and organizer of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), a tradeshow where the Avenger Controller was apparently going to be featured.

Krahulik interceded on Dave’s behalf and quickly became a target of Christoforo’s ire, who responded by calling Krahulik a “douchbag” and referring to Dave and other customers as “Little kids unhappy with a PRE ORDER,” adding, “unless you’re his boyfriend then you should side with the company.”

When Christoforo apparently realized the potential fallout of his actions, he tried to backtrack – but Krahulik was having none of it. Their email exchange ended with Christoforo threatening to put a team of 125 people “on a smear campaign of you and your site.”

When Penny Arcade published the entire email exchange, Christoforo became an instant Twitter sensation.  Media outlets publicly disowned him. Actor Wil Wheaton, a veteran of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory and hugely popular in the geek-loving gamer community, slammed Christoforo. Even Geico Insurance took a shot at him.

The formerly much-anticipated Avenger Controller, which David Kotkin had originally designed to make it easier for handicapped players to enjoy the gaming experience, received hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon, and the controllers page on the GameStop website disappeared. Other reports of poor customer service and delayed product shipments from N-Control began appearing.

Kotkin reacted quickly to distance himself from Christoforo and Ocean Marketing. But without a contingency plan in place, confusion reigned in the following hours and days. For a while, an under-aged former intern became the defacto spokesperson for the company on Twitter.

Christoforo later refused to turn over control of the company’s social media and email accounts, forcing staffers to resort to G-mail accounts and a blitz campaign to let the public and press know how to contact the official spokesperson.
Now Christoforo has filed suit against the company, casting himself as the victim.

Should Kotkin Enterprises have known Ocean Marketing was the wrong firm to trust with its reputation? Probably. Christoforo’s unique use of the English language should have been a red flag early on that he was not a trained communications professional.

It’s also hard to imagine that the vitriolic personality that showed through in his email exchanges would escape the attention of anyone he interacted with regularly.

More importantly, his track record handling major accounts should have given any potential client pause.

Kotkin has rebounded and the Avenger Controller is apparently a good product, which helped. But it’s hard to imagine the real cost of this disaster to Kotkin Enterprises’ reputation and bottom line.

Could the same thing happen to you? Probably not in the same way. But in companies everywhere, there are eager young employees who may be tempted to cut corners on safety and highly-paid executives who may be tempted to fudge on a report.

Since you can’t be everywhere, it’s best to plan ahead for when things go wrong and pick the right people to handle your public relations when the crisis arises.

Check out potential PR firms’ track records and ensure they understand your company and will protect your brand and reputation. Start putting together a crisis public relations plan today, or let experts you can trust guide you through the process.

Your company’s survival may depend on it.

Download our free ebook: Managing Public Relations in a Crisis

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Defense attorney, fighter pilot, international airline pilot and Axia PR agency client Randy Reep is a hard guy to keep down. Just ask the Florida Bar Association, which featured Randy in the latest issue of The Florida Bar News.

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Five executives from Axia Public Relations client Foundation Financial Group recently went over the edge, and it was all in good fun as part of FFG’s corporate social responsibility program.

For the second year in a row, The North Florida Council of the Boy Scouts of America challenged northeast Florida business leaders and residents to raise $1,000 or more each to rappel down the side of downtown Jacksonville’s AT&T Tower for its Over the Edge event. Over the two-day event, 92 people rappelled down the tower.

“The Foundation Financial Group team enjoyed supporting The North Florida Council of the Boy Scouts of America from 450 feet in the air,” said Foundation Financial Group CEO Mark W. Boyer. “It was an exhilarating challenge and all for a good cause.”

CEO Mark W. Boyer, President Kris S. Williams, CFO Tanya L. Mauro, CIO Rolf Wilck and COO of Subsidiaries David Gueterman raised a total of $6,000 for the event. Mauro was ranked among the event’s top five fundraisers, raising nearly $2,000. The council’s goal was to raise $80,000 for the event, which organizers say it surpassed by more than $18,000.

Axia Public Relations client Foundation Financial Group's CEO Mark W. Boyer and CIO Rolf Wilck prepare to rappel 450 feet off downtown Jacksonville, Florida's AT&T Tower on Friday, May 18, 2012. The FFG executives were participating in Over the Edge, a charity event that benefited the North Florida Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Axia represents Foundation Financial Group, one of the nation’s fastest-growing financial services companies, which specializes in mortgage lending, property and casualty insurance, life insurance, retirement services, personal taxes and corporate tax services. Foundation Financial Group operates multiple regional centers as well as a branch network of retail storefronts across the Midwest. Foundation Financial Group offers mortgage refinancing and first-time buyer lending through traditional financing, as well as Federal Housing Administration and other government-backed home loan programs. Foundation Financial Group enjoys an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, the highest accreditation the BBB gives, and an industry-leading Federal Housing Administration compare ratio. For more information, visit ffg.com or call 866-334-1001.

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CoMergent Acquisition Group selected The AXIA Public Relations Firm as its public relations agency of record for a national PR campaign to launch Tappocity, a unique bargain shopping e-commerce platform where consumers name their own prices to buy electronics and other goods from competing retailers.

Tappocity will debut just prior to the Internet Retailers Conference & Exhibition in Chicago, which is the world’s largest e-commerce show. The company is currently seeking additional retailers, manufacturers and customers to join its innovative platform. Visit www.tappocity.com for more information.

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