Truly a great interview!
And here we go with part 2 of my chat with Steve Turner! Honestly, I learned so much in this interview and I’m so glad that we were able to have Steve on as a guest!
About Steve:
Steve Turner is the author of PR THAT WORKS-Real Strategies. Real Campaigns. Real Results and is the co-owner and principal of Solomon Turner PR in Chesterfield (St. Louis) MO. A firm he and his partner, Shelly Solomon, founded in 1990. An award-winning agency, Solomon Turner has been named one of the top PR firms in St. Louis for 17 consecutive years by Small Business Monthly. Mr. Turner has helped corporations, organizations and nonprofits build their brands and reach their marketing objectives for over three decades. Mr. Turner has worked with such brands as Anthony (Tony) Robbins Seminars, Brian Tracy, Coldwell Banker, Northwestern Mutual, and SSM Healthcare. A frequent media contributor, he has been quoted and/or featured in the Associated Press, Forbes, Everything PR, Industry Leaders, Parade, PR Week, Small Business Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal. He was named a Rockstar Publicist by Authority/Medium magazine and has appeared on TV, radio and podcasts. Steve has spoken to several business groups and organizations on public relations and marketing and is a highly-regarded speaker. His blog, PR THAT WORKS, has generated over 60,000 views and continues to grow. He also founded The PR Channel on YouTube to serve as an education tool for young PR professionals, business owners and students. Steve is a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he received a Bachelor of Journalism degree. He has written hundreds of columns for blogs, PR journals, and books. His book, PR THAT WORKS, is available in paperback and kindle format on Amazon and other booksellers. For more visit https://solomonturner.com or https://getprthatworks.com.
Contact Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveturnerpr/ https://x.com/steveturnerpr https://instagram.com/rockstarpublicist
Steve’s Plug: https://a.co/d/07ED1v7J
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:09)
Welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. I’m Sean in St. Louis. And once again, we have part two now of this great interview I did with Steve Turner. Steve Turner is from Solomon Turner, which is a PR agency here in St. Louis. They’re one of the top PR firms in the area. And he literally, as you’re going to hear, wrote the book on PR. He wrote a book called PR That Works, Real Strategies, Real Campaigns, Real Results. You can find it in the show notes.
You need to read it. It’s really, really good. And he is going to walk you through some of the things that he talks about in the book in this episode that are practical, things that he actually did that he had experience doing, not theory, not just big ideas, not a memoir, but real practical advice. And if you are in small business or mid-sized business in particular, and you don’t have a PR department or PR specialists working for you, you’re going to learn some stuff. You’re going to find some ways that you can apply this to.
So I’m really excited for you to hear part two of this interview. ⁓ Again, Steve has done so much. can check out his bio in the show notes. Here we go.
Sean Jordan (01:15)
Well, let’s go back to the positive side of PR. And I want to know, how do you launch a PR campaign? What’s the right way to do it?
Steve Turner (01:22)
Well, the first thing I would I tell people is why do you want to do PR in the first place? What’s your objective? And again, if it’s just to see your name in the paper, you know, get go on an ego trip. Hey, I was in the post. I was in the business journal. I was on TV. I mean, it’s great. And maybe you’re building your personal brand and a little bit about the company, but that’s not really the end game. What you want to do is come up with a clear, defined objective.
help the sales team sell 100,000 toy trucks and then figure out how PR can help in that instance. How is that our growth plan? This is where we want to be at the end of the year. How is PR going to play a part in that? And that’s where you kind of go back and say, okay, well, here’s the objective. This is what we’re going to do. What are the strategies that are going to get there? All right. Number two, what, who’s the audience? Who are we trying to reach? ⁓
We want the end user of those trucks. So those are going to be parents of young kids for the most part, right? So how do we reach them with our message? And then that is the third part is the message of how are these trucks great? Why should they buy them? And how are they different than all the other products that are out there? And number four is the delivery system. Which medium or mediums or media is best to reach these people? Is it social media? Is it, you know,
reels on Instagram, on Facebook and things like that. Is it TV? Is it trade journals? Well, there’s probably a little bit of an audience for all that stuff. And so you kind of put that together. And then the fifth piece of that is measurement. How do you measure it to make sure it’s working? So in the case of let’s just play out this toy truck scenario a little bit, which I think I talk about in the book. ⁓ So you can do a lot of things. Maybe you
Sean Jordan (03:14)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Turner (03:18)
bring in focus groups with kids to play with toy trucks and see what they think. And maybe after a while you start getting positive vibes. So you do it again and you invite TV cameras in to film some of this, or you film it yourself and you put it up as video. Hey, kids love our trucks and get that out there. And then you invite trade journals to talk about your company. know, we’re in the toy truck business. We’ve been doing this for 20 years, you know, kind of thing.
Well, they start talking about the history of the company, the CEO. So you start getting some trade journal talk and then maybe you kind of pitch those stories to the daily newspaper and then the local business journals and things like that. And then if you’ve got like phenomenal growth or a really great angle on this, maybe you could pitch it to national journalists. So you rise above with maybe the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or somebody like that. And so you keep playing it out that way. And all of sudden,
working with the people that are actually, you know, designing the trucks and doing all these things, you can really escalate this. And that’s where PR would come in. So you can get all kinds of stuff, maybe do a special event, maybe, you know, have a toy store, take your toy trucks out or a, you know, a Walmart or a Target or something and have a special day, a special place in the store. going to, we’ve got these new toy trucks coming in.
It’s kids day, let’s play with them, you know, and you could videotape them, you get the TV stations. I mean, there’s all kinds of things you can do that you can’t do with advertising. So if you have that objective, that’s number one. And that’s the most important part. You really need to reason why you’re doing this as opposed to just doing it. You know, we’ll throw some stuff against the wall and see what sticks, which a lot of a lot of companies do. But
If you have that good thought out strategy and the right objectives, it’s good. And then the measurements, the thing where everybody says, well, what’s the ROI on something like this? Well, if you do it right, you’ll have a good ROI and you can tell. And if you’re in the toy truck scenario, you can see if the trucks are selling or not. And if they are selling well, maybe you put more money into this thing. Maybe you look for some different angles. If they’re not, let’s adjust and figure out some other strategies. Maybe this
this and this aren’t working, or we’re just getting lukewarm response. Let’s figure out something else where we can get more media board to make this thing happen. If you could do that and measure it, then you’ll get a much better return on investment. This was our objective. Here’s everything we’ve done, and here’s a return we’re getting on that. So if we’re getting 10%, 20%, 30%, 50%, 100 % return on investment, this is a great campaign as opposed to just kind of, well, I don’t know.
A people mentioned it and we’ve all been there and seen that. So the better the objective, the easier it is to execute and the easier it is to deliver an ROI you’re happy with.
Sean Jordan (06:22)
And you make such a great point because I talk about this all the time that marketing as an umbrella, including PR and sales and advertising and all those other things, it’s all about strategy. It’s ultimately tactics to help to improve your business operations. And it’s really about thinking about not just what does everything cost, but how do these activities work together so that we’re generating a real return on what we did rather than just
did this PR campaign benefit us in this one particular discreet way? Well, maybe it didn’t, because as you said, it didn’t work. But maybe somewhere else it did. And so the ROI comes from the whole of the tactics and not just from one individual thing that you did. And I think a lot of businesses have trouble thinking that way, because I don’t think that a lot of times they are very strategic about how they employ this stuff. It’s more of just kind of a, we’re going to slot in a little bit of budget for PR here. We’re going to slot in a budget for advertising here. We’re going to do
⁓ digital buys here, we’re gonna do influencer buys here, whatever, and they’re not really thinking about it as how is it all working together? And so I think that’s one of the major hangups that I see a lot of times with how this stuff is applied is that there has to be a strategy behind it for it to work and there has to be a focus on are we improving and getting better and do we need to tweak in order to be the most successful we can be?
Steve Turner (07:43)
Yeah, campaign integration is very important, which is, you know, what you’re saying. ⁓ How does marketing and advertising and PR work together to achieve that goal? So, yeah, I mean, if you’ve got the message in the advertising and the marketing, that’s really well thought out and it’s getting some response, put that into the PR as well. You know, you can make shirts that people wear with the logo on them or the tagline, you know, of your company and different things like that.
Sean Jordan (07:48)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Turner (08:14)
You you do special events and people are wearing these things. And I mean, you’re just reinforcing that over and over and over again. So you get great legs and mileage out of it. And then people start seeing that on social media, you know, in reels and video and TV coverage. Those kinds of things are terrific. And if they’re all working in lockstep, your results are going to be great across all the board. Like you’re talking about marketing and advertising and the PR is supporting that.
and creating new customers, new relationships, new stakeholders as you go along. So those are the kind of things you want to focus on.
Sean Jordan (08:49)
Totally. mean, one of the companies that I always point to as being the masters of integrating all of these things is McDonald’s. You hey, I used to work for them, as I mentioned. But I mean, they came up with that jingle, ba-da-ba-ba-bam, and they have that slogan, I’m loving it. And those have lasted them for a couple of decades now. And they can reference that in their media. They can reference that in their advertising. They can reference that on any of online stuff they’re doing.
Steve Turner (08:56)
Ha ha ha.
Sean Jordan (09:14)
And then they can do a stunt like putting, know, Grimace’s birthday meals out where they have the purple shake and people are doing dances online. And they can take advantage of that because they have an apparatus designed to see where those things are really hitting hard and then to push on it and to try to get more exposure out of it. And they absolutely use PR in their strategy. You can just see all the favorable press that they’re able to get because they do.
Steve Turner (09:38)
Yeah, yeah, some of these companies are, you know, masters. ⁓ Apple is another one. I mean, they’re amazing. mean, they before they even launch a product, hey, Apple’s product launch date is so and so. And that’s like all over the media. I mean, they haven’t done anything except announce a launch date for new products. We don’t know what those new products are, but everybody jumps on board and goes crazy. And then if it’s a new iPhone, hey, I got an advanced copy of the new iPhone.
Sean Jordan (09:44)
yeah.
Steve Turner (10:07)
You know, and they’re like, feel like king for the day. You know, I was able to get one of these new phones and they’re doing video. I mean, features on TV. I mean, this is like the greatest thing ever. So they’re masters of the game. And it’s amazing to me that they’re able to generate the press that they are just by being Apple. I mean, it’s like if they say something that doesn’t even affect the product or a service, it’s just we’re planning this day.
people go crazy and it shows up everywhere.
Sean Jordan (10:38)
Yeah,
the announcement for an announcement, right?
Steve Turner (10:42)
It’s right.
mean, that’s amazing, isn’t it? But they do it and it’s the thing. I mean, I’ve even seen it where they televised the product announcement live on CNBC or these networks. So they get like an hour of coverage, just introduce a new file. Well, who wouldn’t want publicity like that? Here’s our latest iPad and people are talking about it and everything for a hat. ⁓ It’s amazing. It really is amazing.
Sean Jordan (10:53)
Mm-hmm.
So everybody wishes they could be Apple or McDonald’s or any of these other large companies, but a lot of smaller businesses, they don’t have the same kind of budgets. They don’t have the same kind of departments and resources that these larger companies have. how can they get the attention of the media and get some publicity?
Steve Turner (11:28)
Yeah, I think I would, we tell people to start small and think about what you have asset wise in house to get some things going. There’s some real easy things you can do. ⁓ the example, the Sunday paper has people in business. So if you hire somebody, it’s free, doesn’t cost you anything. Put a few lines together with a photo and send it to the business department at the post dispatch and it’ll show up there. If you want to spend money a little bit, the business journal kind of has that.
which will, and they’ll do more in depth on the new person. So there’s easy things like that you can do. You could hire a freelancer if you don’t have anybody on your team that understands PR to do some writing and put together kind of a mini campaign to get things going. Maybe there’s some trends things coming up on the editorial calendar of the business journal or something. Maybe you’re doing something internally that’s really creative and different.
that might catch the eye of a TV producer. And, you know, they can make those connections for you and send out some stuff. Maybe there’s some trade journals for your industry. If you’re a business to business type product, maybe they can connect you with editors of some of those trade magazines for your business. So there’s a lot of different angles. It doesn’t have to be a major thing, but start small. ⁓ Why are you different? Why are you in business in the first place?
What is your main differentiator between you and the competition? And if you can discuss that and say, okay, let’s start there and let’s put a campaign together that kind of hits those highlights, those points, how are we going to do that? Well, that’s where you bring in an agency, you know, a small agency or a freelancer or somebody to help you through that and, get those things documented and then kind of work the campaign from that. So you take small steps.
You do easy stuff first and then you start building on that. ⁓ One thing that’s kind of cool that we’ve had some success with is the business journal has a St. Louis character section. And I think most of the business journals have this where they focus on one person and it can be a very small business. Maybe it’s only one or two people in the company, but the person that owns the company does some really cool stuff. Like they’re an airline pilot on the side or.
they’re award-winning yoga instructor, know, different things like that. So they can jump on that and you get like a two page article in the business journal. And that doesn’t cost anything. That’s just pitching and, and, and, know, having the right ideas that they’re looking for to get in there. And that’s phenomenal PR. mean, you know, that’s great. So it’s little things like that, that you can do. ⁓
You know, there’s also a lot of digital magazines that don’t charge anything. And there’s a lot focused on St. Louis St. Louis Voyager is one we’ve been featured in that. And there’s probably four or five of those. Yeah. I mean, you can say, well, the readership is real limited. True. But then you give those legs by putting all that stuff on your social channels and you get a live link on Google and Bing and all these other things. So there is a search engine benefit to that.
So people Google your company and they see 20 places where you got all this, wow, these guys are pretty good. Look at all this coverage they got. Even though they may not be known media outlets, at least it’s out there and people are writing about you. So that’s really cool. So yeah, those are some simple things that doesn’t cost too much to get involved. Just somebody that knows how to write stuff and knows how to pitch it to the right people can take you a long way at limited cost.
Sean Jordan (15:15)
Yeah.
Steve Turner (15:16)
And then you can build from there. ⁓
Sean Jordan (15:17)
Well, and yeah, and I think you make a great point too that ⁓ a lot of these things, they’re very inexpensive or they’re free. If you’ve ever read the business journal or ever read the post dispatch or anything and wondered how those people got featured, it’s a lot of times because they sent them something to print. They didn’t just pick them up out of the blue and say, hey, this happened at this small business. I heard about it. We should run an article on it. Somebody sent that to them. Somebody made them aware of it.
So they could print it and they probably even had a mechanism through which you could send that information so they could put it in their publication. So a lot of times I think a lot of small businesses kind of think, poor me, nobody’s covering me, nobody’s talking about me because I’m just too small. Well, yeah, but you have to talk about yourself in a way that gets them to want to talk about you. So ⁓ that’s really the key is beginning that, as you said, starting small with what are some things we can do that we can get our name out there a little bit more that are inexpensive or that just rely on a freelancer.
And then can we scale up if we start to see a good ROI on it where it’s getting us some return? Can we start to move up and do a lot more with it? Because maybe we do have a great story to tell that we’re just not telling very effectively.
Steve Turner (16:25)
Yeah. Another tactic and, and you know, this is another PR thing is you can post news releases with live links. some of that, some of that stuff is free. Some of it, there’s a small charge, but at least it’ll improve you in Google search and get some things out there for you with live links to your company or, ⁓ the type of industry you’re in. So that can be a benefit and it’s a very low cost. So that’s another tactic to take.
And then you kind of have to look around. We work with a interior designer that’s a specialist in window treatments in Scottsdale, Arizona. And in our research, we found that there is a publication out there that will cover local Scottsdale businesses and do feature articles on them at no charge. Well, this was ideal. So we had her in there twice now.
And, uh, you know, really like full page articles, you know, big picture, the whole nine yards, which is great, which you wouldn’t think about, but it’s out there. You just have to do the research and, know, look around the market. Uh, one thing, and I, we don’t have this so much in St. Louis right now, but I’ve been researching Kansas city for a client and there’s a lot of pop-up, um, digital newspapers that are starting to come out there.
Sean Jordan (17:25)
Wow.
Steve Turner (17:47)
So when you have a gap like the ⁓ Kansas City Daily newspaper, where it doesn’t do much with business anymore, there’s always a gap in there and you have the Kansas City Business Journal, obviously, and they do a pretty good job. But beyond that, there are all these like Kansas City here and all these things that are starting to pop up. And eventually those are going to be opportunities for you to get articles in there at little charge, if no charge.
and get them to talk about your company. And over time, they’re going to start developing audiences. It may not be thousands upon thousands of people, but there could be a nice niche audience that goes for this stuff for free. And so they’re filling a gap between not having, you know, with limited business information to having a lot of business information. And I think people will migrate to those kinds of places eventually. So it’s interesting. The more the big boys kind of
merge and purge and do all these things, the more opportunities there are for smaller players to come in and start making a place for themselves and offering things that fill the gap between what the newspaper used to be to what it can be now on a digital level. So keep your eyes peeled for those kinds of opportunities.
Sean Jordan (19:02)
You know, just a few weeks ago, I was at one of the breakfasts for the St. Louis AMA and American Marketing Association, for those that aren’t familiar. And ⁓ somebody was there who had just started a kind of pop-up paper in Washington, Missouri, which is just on the outskirts of the St. Louis area. Really was no news serving that area. And so they decided to start it. It’s all online right now. But these things are coming up. And I wasn’t aware of it until I met her.
And I’m sure, know, outside of that community, a lot of people probably aren’t. But if you were doing business in that community, it’d be really valuable to know because she’s looking for things to feature in her content. So ⁓ there’s always, always emerging opportunities in media. I think we, sometimes we get really fixated on the players that are known and we forget about all of the other people that are out there hustling to get stories too. a ⁓ lot of times they’re happy to talk about business because business is interesting.
Steve Turner (19:53)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s a lot of ⁓ niche publications too. ⁓ Substack is an interesting scenario where you have former journalists. Well, they are journalists, but they used to work for like the Washington Post or the New York Times or something. But now they have a sub stack in a specific area. Well, if you take something like engineering and maybe there’s an engineering sub stack that doesn’t have thousands of readers, but they may have a hundred, but they’re the right audience for you.
and they’re all somewhat involved with engineering and different aspect designers, producers, these kinds of things. And that’s the audience you want. If you can get into one of those columns, that’s really a great, great hit for you. That can be a home run as opposed to just getting something in the paper with a few paragraphs or whatever. So you kind of have to think about these niche type publications that reach your audience. It’s better to reach 50 people in your audience than reach thousands that aren’t.
And so you kind of have to think in terms of that, you know, podcasts, here we are, you know, this is good. mean, there’s podcasts for almost everything these days. And, you know, healthcare is a good one. Mental health, there’s tons of podcasts on mental health these days. mean, if you’re in that business, mean, boy, I mean, you could really get tons of stuff. ⁓ You know, it just depends on who you are and what you’re trying to do, but
Sean Jordan (21:11)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Turner (21:19)
If you put the pieces of the puzzle together, there’s lots of different things that are more niche oriented now than ever. And you just have to spend the time, do the research, uncover them and figure out what’s going to serve you best for the people you’re trying to reach your message, your credibility and the eventual return on investment of your time and money at the end of the day.
Sean Jordan (21:41)
Steve, this has been such a great discussion. And I just want to mention to our audience, too, that ⁓ if I ever have the opportunity to have Steve in one of my marketing classes, I’m definitely going to, because he’s got so much knowledge about the stuff. He’s been doing it for a while. But he’s got this book, too, and we’re going to talk about it in a second ⁓ that has a lot of these insights and more in it. I’ve read some of it, and it’s really great. Yeah, there it is again, PR That Works by Steve Kerr. Steve, I ask everybody to plug something at the end of our show. So let’s talk about your book for a moment. Where can people find this book?
Steve Turner (22:03)
Ha ha.
So we have it in paperback and Kindle at Amazon and you can find it, I know it’s at Barnes and Noble online and probably a few other places, but Amazon’s the main one. If you subscribe to Amazon, by all means get in there and grab it. So the book, the paperback, which I would prefer you get only because you’re gonna take notes. There’s gonna be things you’re gonna highlight. It’s not a novel, it’s something you’re just gonna…
blow through and forget about. I don’t know how, you know, people say they have trouble making, you know, there’s a way to do use Kindle and highlight stuff with it’s, it’s a technological nightmare. But, um, so I bought a book, uh, more than 20 years ago at the university of Pennsylvania. I just happened to be there working and I wanted to see what Penn was all about. And I went into the bookstore and there was a book on PR with all these great case studies. And so I bought the book.
because I had never seen anything like that before. And I still refer to it and go back and every time I say, well, I may need an idea on this. I see what they did to approach this problem. So if you think about the price of the book, and I mean, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s nineteen ninety nine. But, you know, if you can afford a dollar a year and you hold onto the book for 20 years, I mean, yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, it really doesn’t cost much. I mean, the Kindle’s nine bucks. can buy that. But
I just think it’s a great value. The reason I wrote this, first I was going to do a memoir about my career in PR and things like that. And I was talking to people that are actually in the business and they said, no, no, we need something that tells us how to create a strategy, how to do tactics, how to put an actual campaign together. That isn’t one of these college textbooks that’s, you know, $200 and 600 pages and has stuff in there. We’re never going to use all these theories and things.
And we don’t want anything on behavioral economics. I mean, we don’t understand it. And even if we did, you know, how are we going to apply that? I’m like, yeah, you’re right about that. So I just said, well, let’s talk about it. I talked to a few people and I said, well, I’m just going to write it. And so that’s how I got started. I took some of the best things that I did and then I hired an editor, which I think if you’re going to self-publish, you absolutely should hire somebody that’s been through the wars that knows more about it than you.
Sean Jordan (24:12)
you
Steve Turner (24:37)
And she just really, she cracked the whip and took out the chair and said, okay, this is, this is what we’re going to do. we, you know, the stuff I had, she, you know, we put our heads together and we worked a lot of it. And then she came up with some things and I added to it. And at the end of the day, I think we have a really nice book with not only 28 strategies, but 14 case studies, which I think are really the meat and potatoes of the book.
There’s things if you get stuck, if you’re planning a campaign, you can go back and research all this stuff or look at the book and say, OK, I mean, I even did it. I looked at my own book. I was thinking, how did I do that again? I mean, there’s stuff here about classic car dealer, about a book promotion using podcasts and other things. How do we promote this book about Jeeps and how we found these groups of Jeep owners who were a cult among themselves on Facebook and started promoting the book to all these Facebook groups?
And there’s hundreds of thousands of these Jeep guys, which I had no idea, no idea whatsoever, because I don’t own a Jeep. But once we got into the research of all this stuff, all those things popped up and fantastic. So, ⁓
Sean Jordan (25:39)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
and I think that’s the case studies are such a valuable part of your book and what I’m excited to read more of myself because ⁓ they’re not just about the theory or the ideas, they’re about practicality. Here’s how you actually approach this problem and here’s how you solved it using these tools.
Steve Turner (26:07)
Yeah, this is what we did and it’s not theory at all. mean, this is we took, you know, the pedal to the metal, the pen to the paper, the keyboard to the screen, whatever. But these are things we actually did and work we done. And this is these are the results. I mean, not everything is a home run, but a lot of it really helped move the needle for some of these companies and big and small. I mean, some are pretty small players. You know, we had authors and then speakers and.
how we ended up working with Brian Tracy and then Tony Robbins and doing all these things, how we got involved into the Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa home run race, uh, where we did a press for the guy who was supposedly going to catch the ball that was worth a million dollars. Didn’t turn out that way. He gave the ball back. That’s the whole story. But things like that, that are in the book that people can relate to and say, well, gee, how did he pull that off? I mean, some of these things we had to pull off in a week.
I mean, these were like, you know, put everything else on the back shelf and, and, know, just jump right in. Cause these are phenomenal opportunities that only come along maybe once in a lifetime. Like the Jackie Robinson original baseball contracts, being a big sports fan and baseball fan with my background, the guy called me, Hey, you know anything about baseball? Yeah, I think so. No, I think about Jackie Robinson. Yeah. I think I know a little bit about that. Well, so we got into this and they hired us and you know,
We were on every TV station in town, every radio card, network, the whole the whole nine yards. And, know, he needed an intense week or two of promotion on this thing. And we pulled it off. So, yeah, you know, you just have to have the flexibility to do some of these things. But a lot of all this is in the book. And I think it’s great. mean, even if you’re a college student, I know if you’re a college student, you got so many things to read already. But this is great for that.
I mean, this will take you to a place that probably isn’t in the textbook. And that really gives you a real world feel for some of these things. Not every PR grad is going to work for Nike or Apple or IBM or Pepsi or Coke, whatever. You’re going to probably work for either an agency and it may be a small agency or where you’re going to wear all kinds of hats and learn different techniques and things.
Or you’re going to work for a small business that maybe has just enough budget to bring a PR person on, on their team to run things for that. So you’re going to need a lot of experience and thoughts and ideas as you go along. And I think this book helps you kind of cover that gap between the theory and the text of, you know what? Here’s what we did in college. What are we, how am I going to do this now? How am I going to get ahold of the post dispatch or the wall street journal, you know, or all these things.
How am I going to cover all that ground in between? Well, you know, this book will help you get there. So that’s the intent of the book. And plus there’s interviews with four top PR people in the country that I knew and sought out. And they’re just phenomenal. And we’ve got those interviews and the people, especially newbies will get a lot out of those.
Sean Jordan (29:24)
Well, let’s say top five because you’re in there too. ⁓ I want everybody to check out the show notes so can find out how to get that book. we’ll also have ⁓ Steve’s contact information as well. If you’d like to contact him and ask him any questions, I know he’d be really happy to help you out. But Steve, I want to thank you so much for being on the Marketing Gateway. It has been a pleasure. I just feel like I’ve learned a lot in the last hour, ⁓ even though I’ve read some of your book and knew some of this stuff already. So thanks so much for sharing everything.
Steve Turner (29:50)
Thank you, Sean, really appreciate it. It’s been great.
Sean Jordan (29:55)
Wow, ⁓ gosh, I know I say this every time. I get so excited when I have these kinds of interviews because I just walk away full of ideas. ⁓ I love talking about PR because it’s one of the areas of marketing that we don’t talk about enough when we’re training students and getting them ready for the world, at least on the business school side where I teach. So I am so excited that we have this great interview to share with you and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed Steve. And by the way, I hope you will check out his book.
because it’s in the show notes. His bio’s there too if you want to reach out to him. But his book is great. It’s inexpensive. It’s very readable. The chapters are nice and short so you can just read through them a little bit at a time. But you will get so much out of it. I know I did. And guys, I just want to say we are so excited to have guests like Steve Turner on who know their stuff and who can talk about not only the great marketing we’re doing here in St. Louis and PR as well, but also
just the wonderful minds that we have here that are contributing to businesses around the world from St. Louis. It’s so exciting. So if you know of anybody that is local to the Midwest or to St. Louis that would like to be on the show, please send them our way. We’d love to have them. I’d love to interview them and share that interview with you. But in the meantime, hope you’ll be back for our next episode. I am Sean in St. Louis. This has been the Marketing Gateway. We’ll see you next time.
Leave a Reply