- Generate Leads. Positive publicity for your products and services can generate sales leads for you to follow up.

- Word-of-Mouth. By increasing awareness of your company, people and products, media coverage provides fodder for word-of-mouth machine.

- Shape Attitudes. From employee communication to publicity, PR tactics can be used to tell your story convincingly to key publics.

-Refine Customer Service. Those who believe PR is about one-way, top-down spin doctoring - I hope - are relics of past. Two-way PR, in which company actually solicits and listens to customer feedback, can provide kind of edge companies need today in this age of commoditization.

So, don't be incredible. Make PR an integral part of your business strategy.

Many people hesitate to ask for referrals because they are not sure how to do it. Just be honest. Tell your customers that referrals are very important to growth of your business, and that you want to grow it with people just like them. Remind them that people they know will benefit from your service way that they have. Then, ask.

Tell your prospect that you'd like for them to give you names of three or four people who might benefit from your services. Pull out a sheet of paper and pen and look expectantly at them. If they can't immediately give you names, ask some prompting questions. Such as:

Who are your three best friends? Who are most successful business people you know? Can you think of anyone who would benefit from my services?

Write names down and keep writing until customer runs out of names. Then, go back and ask for contact information for each one.

Thank customer in way you feel most comfortable. Some people like to send a gift, others will just drop a note of thanks. Some wait to see if referral becomes a customer and then send a higher end gift. Do whatever works for you, but do thank them and keep them in loop, letting them know about your follow up and outcome of your prospecting.

So, don't just sit there in your tree. Get out there and kill something.