Posts Tagged ‘pr pros’
Summertime To-Dos
We have all heard of Spring cleaning and in the South, where I am from, we have freezer cleaning when it is hurricane season.(This basically means you use all of the items in the freezer so in case you lose power you don’t lose a lot of frozen items). Either way they are both dedicated times that you stop each year to focus on clearing out the clutter and reorganizing yourself.
While it is hard to stop in the PR world, summer is the perfect time to stop and clean up the shop. Add it to your Outlook calendar to save time for cleaning. Tackle those things that you wish you had time to do that would make life easier but you don’t have time to stop. Read the rest of this entry »
10 Ingredients to Make Your Event Execution Easy
Being in PR means that you plan and execute events to perfection and no detail is forgotten. Each PR pro has their style for planning and how they work to get it all done. There is a recipe for event planning which includes a little creativity, a little OCD, a little leadership and a dash of caffeine. When you put it all together you get some pretty stellar events that PR pros pull of every day.
Behind the scenes of the seamless event that you have produced there is an army of details that get you through. Here are some of the secret ingredients that help PR pros pull off perfection: Read the rest of this entry »
What Does a Blogger Really Want?
There are many articles out there on how PR professionals should seek, contact and engage with bloggers. We are focused on building a relationship with bloggers and converting them into brand ambassadors for our client. We hope that they will write amazing posts about our clients and it will spread through the blogger world like wildfire.
But as PR pros have we stopped to think about what the bloggers want from us?
I am a mom blogger, crawfishtales.com, and I have had the opportunity to be on both sides of the pitch. This has given me insight that I have used to mold the way that I, as a PR pro, engage bloggers. I constantly remind myself that bloggers are receiving multiple pitches just like a reporter and that I need to make my pitch stand out from the others. The best pitches are the ones that are thorough and have thought through the pitch from the bloggers prospective. Read the rest of this entry »
PR Pro’s New Title: Content Marketers
4 Reasons Why Journalists Still Make the Best PR People
The other day a client forwarded an email call-to-arms from his president urging Marketing, PR – and by extension us, I guess – to develop a nugget that best described the company’s “differentiators,” to win customers’ hearts and minds. “I have a better idea,” I fired back. “Let’s ask him. He’s the leader of this outfit and ought to know.”
I’m fairly certain that no member in good standing of a professional PR organization or advocate of the Stockholm Accords – you know, people with finely tuned sensitivities –would ever talk to a client like that, certainly not in response to a request from the CEO. Only an ex-journalist would be so brash. Having spent much of our careers wading through the guff churned out by government agencies, corporate PR departments, marketing dweebs and the leaders of both the free and less-than-free worlds, journalists have a low BS threshold and get down to business quickly. Read the rest of this entry »
What Every PR Rookie Ought to be Doing
Both the PR and media world have undergone great changes since I first got started in the field in the mid 1990s. When I first started off as a reporter, I spent several hours learning how to use the flywheel to resize photos. And just when I had that figured out, along came Photoshop, which made all that knowledge useless.
Today, change seems to be happening at lightning-fast speed. The advent of social media and the rapid demise of the print media have caused huge strains on PR practioners, who have to keep up with these developments. I am a technophile, but even I admit that sometimes it gets exhausting trying to keep up with the latest press release platform, social media fad or cell phone app.
Having said that, here are a few things that all PR rookies (and some old pros) need to be doing: Read the rest of this entry »
Can’t We All Just Get Along? – Good Reporters Keep Their PR Contacts Close
I have spent a lot of time reading about how birth order determines your personality.
Being a middle child, my personality has always been one of the peace maker and the bridge builder, which is why I want to call for a cease fire in the war between reporters and PR professionals.
Bashing PR professionals is getting quite passé. And at times it seems as trite as complaining about government workers. It’s easy to say government workers are slackers, but I used to work for the government and many government employees work very hard in a turbulent political environment. I just don’t see what can be gained from the endless sniping. For example, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington recently declared, “I don’t like PR people for the most part.” Nice. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Shiny Objects Disappear, Where Do You Get Story Ideas?
As PR pros, it can be difficult to resist becoming an ambulance chaser. Sometimes, those big shiny openings to pitch a client are nearly impossible to resist. But what about the times when there isn’t an obvious point of entry? When you’re on your own to craft the story from inception to execution?
A recent survey by Middleberg/Ross revealed that 98% of journalists go online daily to generate story ideas and access information. Clearly, the web is working for them, and maybe for some of us as well. Over the past year, we’ve become increasingly familiar with hearing journalists site social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as sources for story ideas. My question is, where are the PR people getting their story ideas? Read the rest of this entry »
