Unless you’re a major label, nobody cares about you. Not even a little bit. Hurts doesn’t it?
So stop trying to please everyone with a faceless, neutral mush of a “brand”, you’re in business now so by default you are going to forge adversaries no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try to be “great at PR”.
You may as well put this to good use.
In our case, we saw it as any easy way to generate traffic, back-links and stir up some hype. Our product is inherently disliked by traditional, pay-through-the-nose pay-by-the-hour copywriters who see us a not only a threat but somehow derogatory to their profession.
Who better to target for a bit of link baiting?
We emailed a few of them asking if they wanted to sign up and hey presto, several contextually relevant back-links from our furious competitor’s blogs.
Granted most of the posts were scathing attacks, some even plain lies, but aside from the envious PageRank we’ve now acquired as a result, a weird thing also happened.
It was obvious we had been purposely inflammatory, but people we’d never met seemed to find this affable and on a few occasions actually defended us! Further still, we actually acquired our first 4 big paying customers directly though a blog post attacking us.
Great PR is hard. Very hard. It’s time consuming, and we were in too much of a hurry to go down that route. So we put on out troll hats and began stirring up trouble…and it worked.
This is a risky approach, we don’t actually advise you list “start a fight” at the top of your launch to-dos. The takeaway is don’t lose sleep over bad PR and if people dislike what you’re doing, you’re doing something right!
Be honest with your opinion and share enough of your company’s culture so those who do join your following have a genuine reason to do so. They’ll be much better allies!