Archive
Google Trends Show PR Insights
Google Trends may be one of my new favorite tools. Not only is interesting to see fluctuations in hot topics of the day or things you’re interested in, but it’s great for PR campaign measurement too. Something public relations professionals constantly struggle with is showing ROI on media campaigns, which are often more tangential in nature. But, thanks to tools like Google Analytics, which can (hopefully) show traffic spikes on clients’ websites after major announcements or media pushes, and, now also Google Trends, the task of demonstrating ROI is becoming a bit easier. Read more…
Is the PR Industry Being Impacted by Rising Brand Journalism Trends?
At the start of every New Year, it seems that each industry sends out a list of top predictions for what’s to come… and PR is no different. There have already been lots of expectations set around 2013 being the year for further social media growth, the rising importance of visual representations, and increased measurement for ROI, to name a few. But, one trend that has caught my eye for 2013 is brand journalism. Read more…
How Basketball Equates to PR
While cheering on the Celtics in the NBA playoffs, I got to thinking how the rules of basketball are a lot like PR. While obviously two very different disciplines, there are many related aspects. Beyond the overall fast pace and otherwise constantly changing tempo, both basketball and PR have high-stress, performance qualities with tactics that often result in a win or a loss. Below are just some of the correlations I’ve broken down into “the good,” “the bad,” and “the ugly.” What other similarities have you noticed between basketball and PR? Think about it the next time you’re watching a game! Read more…
Tips for Breaking in to PR
Last week, while speaking at the Curry College Public Relations Student Association (CCPRSA) chapter meeting, some interesting questions came up with regards to how to break in to the PR industry. Several of the students in attendance were getting their graduate degrees and had come from very different disciplines than PR. While switching from advertising to PR may be an easier transition than, say, switching from finance to PR, there are some skills that transcend specific job descriptions and become universally applicable. Skills like writing, creative thinking or relationship building can be just as applicable to one job as it is the next. But, when specifically looking to transition to PR, what’s the best way to get started? Read more…
Public Relations; Balancing Stress with Success
Like many things in life, maintaining a career as a PR executive is a balancing act. Learning how to cope with the fast-paced atmosphere and tight deadlines while saving time to revel in the success of a campaign is something we all strive to achieve. PR professionals are notorious multitaskers; and while juggling multiple clients, deadlines and launches simultaneously may seem to be just another part of the job, there’s no denying that it can get extremely stressful at times. At the end of the day though, it’s all worth it! Read more…
How Good Are You At Social Media?
Well, if you’re working in advertising, the answer may be quite different than if you’re working in PR. According to a joint study by the Worldcom Public Relations Group and the Transworld Advertising Agency Network, public relations is taking the lead in social media, even according to ad execs themselves!
When evaluating work in the social media arena, 20% of PR respondents said their profession was “innovative” and 64% said the profession was “keeping pace.” By contrast, only 12% of advertising pros said their profession was “innovative” and 40% said it was “keeping pace.” And, while an astonishing 40% of advertisers said that their own industry is “falling behind” on the social media scene, 67% of advertising respondents praised PR professionals as either “innovative” or “keeping pace” with social media. Read more…
Social Media Tug of War – PR vs Marketing [STATS]
Online marketing tactics have been all the rage for quite some time now and the surge of social media has boosted its priority even further among many companies. But when it comes to implementing a social media campaign, who gets to sit in the driver’s seat – PR or marketing?
In the most recent Forrester Research Interactive Marketing Forecast, social media marketing is predicted to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent through 2014. This is faster than any other form of online marketing and actually doubles the average growth rate for all online mediums.
New research from AMI Partners shows that around 70 percent of SMBs actively use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to promote their companies with 61 percent of medium sized businesses maintaining that social media is a strategically important element to the success of their business.
So, with social media clearly still on the rise and infiltrating company business practices more and more, again, I ask, who takes control of social media efforts – PR or marketing?
Well, according to the sixth Communication and Public Relations GAP study, over a quarter of companies put PR in charge of 81 to 100 percent of social media budgets instead of marketing. PR was given strategic control of social media campaigns for nearly 25 percent of respondents, compared to only nine percent who gave control to marketing. What’s more, just over one-fourth of respondents said marketing has no budgetary control at all and approximately 22 percent said marketing had no strategic control.
In PR Week Lab’s recent virtual event, I attended a session by John Bell of Ogilvy PR and Scott Monty of Ford Motor Company in which they asked attendees who leads their social media programs within their organizations. The results showed PR taking the lead over marketing yet again. The poll found about 35 percent of companies entrusted their social media campaigns to communications and PR departments whereas only around 20 percent allowed marketing teams to run their social media programs.
Why is this? Isn’t social media another online marketing tool?
In Shel Holtz’s recent article, he notes some good reasoning on the subject from Jerry Swerling, who brings across three main points:
- Social media require a non-commercial approach
- Social media use dialogue to interact, not monologue
- Social media are free form, not controlled
These characteristics are ingrained in PR and communications, whereas marketing is a more controlled environment that may not be as able to adapt. PR professionals are naturals at conversation and relationship building, which is what social media is all about. And companies are clearly recognizing this by handing PR the reins.
Who do you trust with your company’s social media efforts?
Pitch Me, Baby!
Last week, I attended a webinar by David Pogue, New York Times tech columnist, called “Pitch Me, Baby!”, on how to pitch journalists in the new media world that has changed the way traditional reporters and bloggers communicate. The webinar was promoted as a way to learn the skills PR pros need to effectively reach journalists and bloggers, and persuade them to tell their story.
At the beginning of the webinar, it was comforting that Pogue openly recognized how difficult a PR person’s job can be sometimes, and he suggested the next webinar should be conducted by a PR specialist, teaching journalists on how to behave – ha!
While some of Pogue’s points were fairly obvious, like his point that no matter how interesting your pitch, product, or client is, you won’t get coverage unless you’re a match for what the publication is looking for, others were quite interesting. He started with some quick lists of do’s and don’ts when it comes to pitching:
Don’t:
- Call – it takes far too much time and an email is much more convenient as it leaves a record of correspondence and information
- Blast – make your pitches personal
- Talk like aliens – use plain English to avoid looking insecure, pretentious, or fake
- Make a press release your entire pitch – a press release does not serve as a pitch, need to put in a bit more effort than that
Do:
- Taylor your pitch to the reporter – even using his or her first name in the beginning is a good start
- Put the pitch in the body of the email – don’t use attachments
- Be concise – if a journalist has to scroll down to finish reading your pitch, it’s too long
- Summarize your pitch at the beginning quickly – use nice short subject lines that get to the point
- Use English – some programs have an auto-delete email feature that searches for buzz-words
- Include a picture – put this right in the body of the email, don’t make the journalists click through links
- Make it easy to find you for follow up and questions – also, get your companies to put you as their contact for press inquiries right on their site
Pogue’s big take-away point though was to save journalists time! Make your pitches short and to the point, including a link for further information if they’re interested, and make sure they’re on target with the reporter’s audience. Every PR pro should ask themselves, “Why do this journalist’s readers care?” before pitching a story that might not be a fit.
In terms of social media, Pogue mentioned that the new generation needs everything to be in real-time, doesn’t care about privacy, has an ego, and likes instant feedback. His equation resulted in:
Speed + Ego – Privacy = Social Media
At a conference Pogue was recently at, companies were polled and found 119 reasons to not use social media, including a fear of lacking resources and a fear of being slammed. However, Pogue advised everyone to throw these reasons out the window because when you hit the right note, it pays off big time with social media.
Pogue said, when engaging in social media, it’s important to search for your name, company, and clients to keep up with current conversations and then react to what people are saying. He also noted that it’s important to make following you worthwhile by being funny and interesting, without being sleazy (like his example of the Microsoft laptop “bribe” for reviewers).
Finally, Pogue noted that social media is a great tool because it allows you to go straight to the people and removes that layer of separation between the average Joe’s of the world and celebrities or companies. I agree – that is one of the many great attributes of social media and another reason it’s here to stay!
Quora
Does this ever happen to you? Get a notification that someone has started following your updates on a social network or site that you forgot you were on? This just recently happened to me with Quora and I was reminded why I signed up in the first place.
Quora is a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The goal is to have each section become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. The creators’ vision is to have Quora become a database of knowledge that will grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available on the site. Any information shared on Quora stays there forever for anyone in the future who is interested in a similar topic or who may have the same question.
What’s also good about Quora is that the same questions do not get posted over and over again. There is only one version of each question, which helps all the information and material be gathered in one place.
As of now, I’ve signed up to follow two topics – social media and public relations. However, as you can see from my profile page below, Quora helpfully suggests other topics they think you’ll like and lets you search for specific interests.
More information about Quora can be found here, but they do note that “almost any public space on Quora can be edited by anyone who knows how to improve it. This includes the text of questions and the details around them, what topics are attached to which questions, and the summaries of answers. Quora relies on the good faith of everyone using it to make it a high quality resource.”
What I especially found interesting was this idea of “inverse blogging,” which is when you follow topics, as I have with social media and PR, so the system shows you questions about what you’re interested in and know about. This is a way to create an audience of experts for anyone who wants to answer a question. It’s a way to monitor areas where you can show your expertise.
So maybe now that I’ve been reminded I’m signed up for this, I’ll start exploring a bit more as it seems like a pretty useful database! …I wonder what other networks or sites I’ve signed up for in the past that I’ve forgotten about. If you see me inactive on one, let me know! 
Blog Panel – Part 3: Public Relations, Looking Beyond 2010
This is the third and final post in the blog panel series I’m participating in with Krim Stephenson, John Sidline, and Frank Strong. Be sure to check out my first and second posts on how social media impacted 2009 and what it will bring in 2010.
Looking forward to the year ahead of us and beyond, I see several challenges and changes facing the public relations industry. The three main ones I believe will have an impact sooner than others are demonstrating ROI, affirming credibility, and adapting to mobility.
1. Demonstrating ROI
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Public Relations, a Look Ahead in New Media, Veronis Suhler forecasted a drop in advertising spending for 2009, and further in 2010, while public relations is expected to see an increase. This shows companies are recognizing the benefit of PR campaigns more and more. And if they’re willing to invest more in PR, they’re going to want to see more return on their investment. I talked about this briefly in my last post in terms of measuring social media, but I think this is going to be a trend across all aspects of public relations. Clients will start asking us to show how that article or press release upped their website views or generated sales leads, but it will be equally important to demonstrate the intangible aspects of PR like awareness and brand visibility too. A successful approach to doing this is something the industry as a whole is still struggling with, but one that will need to be discovered in order to meet these anticipated demands.
2. Affirming Credibility
Today, anyone and everyone can post on the internet, which means targeting key, credible publications is going to be more important than ever. But showing clients why such publications are credible and influential is easy among the big names like eWeek, ComputerWorld, Network World, and the like, all with high readership and longstanding reputations; however, the real challenge will be with new media. Blogs and podcasts that have been around for a much shorter amount of time, and whose readership is harder to measure, will be harder to affirm. Targeting ones that reach your clients’ key demographics and have a strong archive of relevant posts and topics will be essential in the coming years.
3. Adapting to Mobility
People can access anything from anywhere nowadays – so in the coming years, as this gets more and more pervasive, it will be increasingly important to penetrate all kinds of media. Since people now have the ability to choose what gets delivered to them on such a thorough level, you want to be visible each step of the way to become a key influencer. People no longer have to sift through the newspaper to find the technology column, they just simply subscribe to that column’s RSS feed and it gets sent straight to their smartphone. The consequence is that people no longer have that “wandering eye” that briefly skims over those other sections in search of the column they’re interested in. Without that “wandering eye,” they’re not likely to stumble across a headline that might be of interest, which they otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Public relations needs to get creative and target all types of media and industries to reach maximum viewers to catch their eye in new ways.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this blog panel series. Be sure to check out what the other panelists are predicting on their blogs:
