Q: What is your company all about? A: Open City Communications, Inc. (OCC) is a public relations firm exclusively representing small and mid-sized businesses, including start-ups and home offices, in all industries. It provides full-service public relations representation, defined as increasing a company's visibility through media exposure as a means to build sales and sales leads, to a sector of the economy which has traditionally been unable to obtain agency representation. Q: How does your organization define public relations? A:Public relations is part of an overall marketing strategy to reach wide audiences via today's information channels (defined as radio, television, consumer media, trade media, the Internet, and public speaking engagements). Unlike advertising, in which an organization pays to have its message reach the population, public relations relies on the media to spread the organization's message. This provides a higher degree of respectability for the organization, for many people judge media coverage as a sign of credibility. Public relations, when practiced correctly, can help to increase an organization's sales, sales leads, and industry recognition. The dedicated publicist can also identify new sales avenues, potential business partners, and work in the creation of a new product line or corporate sales strategy. Public relations, though, is not about publicity. Publicity is strictly getting your name mentioned in the media with no return except a happy ego. Public relations which has no ultimate effect on an organization's growth is vain and meaningless. Q: Why should a small or mid-sized business or non-profit consider public relations? A:Smaller organizations generally lack the budgets, personnel quantity and track records of their larger competitors. Thus, getting their messages out is a particular challenge since (1) they don't have the money for a big-time advertising blitz, (2) they don't have the in-house staff to coordinate a wide-ranging marketing campaign, and (3) the outside world may not even know the organization exists! The challenge then becomes: how to compete against the bigger guys without breaking an already-tight budget? Public relations can leapfrog a little-known organization into the forefront of the media, with positive results. For example, Rhode Island Soft Systems, Woonsocket, RI, offered a Signature Font product for which we achieved coverage on page one of the Wall Street Journal, in major business publications such as Business Week, and in major computer trade journals. As a result, the company received inquiries from major entities including the United States Postal Service, Microsoft, Perot Systems and Delrina. All of this response came from executives reading about the product in the right publications. Q: Why should you work with smaller companies when most public relations firms won't? A: Most public relations firms ignore smaller businesses because these companies cannot meet the "take it or leave it" retainer fees and the monthly expenses, which usually seem to grow with each passing month. And those companies which can are usually ignored because the agencies would rather focus on the bigger cash cow accounts. OCC realizes that its client base generally has a tight marketing budget and cannot afford steep and expensive surprises in the billing process. Therefore, OCC provides clients with a monthly flat-fee that covers all expenses except out-of-state travel on the client's behalf, trade show support, special printing projects and direct mail. These latter expenses, however, will be charged to the client with the original receipt for costs incurred. OCC clients will never worry about financial surprises. Q: How do you determine fees? A: OCC provides potential clients with a monthly fee that would best suit their current marketing needs, based on the clients' marketing budget. OCC does not believe in a "take it or leave it" attitude to fees (or anything else, for that matter), hence this approach. Q: Is the agency's performance tied to the fee level? A: No. That kind of work ethic doesn't play in our office. Q: How long do you work with clients? A: OCC prefers to work with its clients for the course of one year at the agreed upon fee. At year's end, there is a review of the work accomplished and the current fee agreement. Should the client wish to terminate the working relationship, 30 days advance notice is required. However, we will consider special limited projects and three-month trial periods. Q. What can your clients expect? A: A full-scale public relations campaign which will serve to increase public and/or corporate awareness of their company, products and services. We don't believe in publicity for publicity's sake. Rather, we strive to achieve awareness which can be leveraged into increased profits or sales leads. The ultimate goal here is to grow the clients' business. Q: And have you been successful? A: The OCC client base has been featured in major media outlets on local, national and international levels. Coverage has included all major daily newspapers (including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, Daily Variety, Investor's Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor) and broadcast outlets (Japan's NHK-TV, Canadian Broadcast Corp., CNN, MTV, ABC, MSNBC, The Nashville Network, and NPR). Additionally, our clients have been featured on all of the major news syndicates and wire services (Associated Press, Dow Jones News Service, Newsbytes News Network, Knight-Ridder, Reuters, TASS, United Press International and others) and in major consumer and trade magazines (including Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, U.S. News & World Report, The Nation, New Republic, Playboy, AARP's Modern Maturity, Inc. Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Entrepreneur). Our clients have also been featured in global media, with coverage in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. OCC has also arranged for columns and articles authored by clients and trade show speaking opportunities. One former client, MicroHelp Inc., saw its product UnInstaller V.2, become the best-selling Windows software product of 1994--an achievement which the client credited to OCC. Another client saw sales of its product jump 7,000% in only two months after signing on with OCC. Two clients used their respective media coverage to leverage vendor relations with Fortune 500 companies. And yet another landed a book deal thanks to our work! OCC's success proves that our philosophy is correct: today's smaller company can well be tomorrow's standard bearer. And you're welcome to speak with our clients about the quality of the service we provide.