Tag Archives: public relations

Manny Otiko

PR Jobs Require More than Good Writing Skills: Ex-journos find life is not so easy on ‘The Dark Side’

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Hands breaking pencilAn old joke in the PR business is that all reporters hate PR people – until they need a job. Then you’re the first person they call. Public relations would seem like a natural extension of the skills you acquire in journalism — writing, news judgment, editing and graphic design.

However, the PR business has taken a huge hit over the last few years, and many laid-off journos are finding that those PR positions, which they hoped to move into, are just not there anymore.

When the economy plunged into a recession one of the first areas that companies cut back on was marketing and public relations. In addition, when business credit dried up many companies simply could not afford the monthly retainer for a PR firm. And for the few PR jobs that do exist, journos are having to compete against recent college grads, who are often more attractive because they are cheaper to hire. In many cases these jobs have been turned into non-paying internship positions. (That is a whole column itself.) Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Using Metrics to Reduce Uncertainty

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Ruler with imperial and metric measurementsSometimes we all get too caught up in perfection. If you work on that report 10 minutes longer, will it be closer to perfect? If you search one more time, will you find every single mention of your brand or company across the Web? There’s a point at which additional effort isn’t worth the reward.

I often find that there is a misconception about the purpose of measurement. Whether in PR or social media or physics, for that matter, the purpose of measurement is to reduce uncertainty. Note the word “reduce.” Continue reading →

Nathan "PRCog" Burgess

You’re doing it wrong….

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Wrong WayWe’ve all seen the horrible horrible examples of things done wrong in the digital world.  You know the things I’m talking about – bad policies, bad designs, just bad bad bad stuff.  Below, you’ll find my own list of the worst of the worst and those of some other contributors crowdsourced from Twitter.  Do chime in with your own net horror stories 🙂

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Keith Trivitt

Walk The Line

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Scale of justice, close-upA few weeks ago, I discussed some of the ongoing debate and insight within the PR profession about demonstrating our value among C-level executives. I wanted to dig into that subject a little further (it’s a personal interest of mine) with some fascinating research I found in MIT’s Sloan Management Review.

In an article published in the Summer 2010 issue, Larry Styble and Maryanne Peabody, co-founders of Boston-based management firm Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, address which types of employees and executives CEOs gravitate toward.

The authors’ basic point is that for many successful CEOs, who they align themselves with within their executive suite often comes down to assets and liabilities. That’s right; in a way, we can boil down the value of any company’s executives to whether they see the world as full of opportunities (asset enhancement) or full of threats (liabilities reduction). Continue reading →

Tory Patrick

Do you know what people are saying about you?

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From Blaugh.com

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

How does this relate to public relations? Well, if you aren’t monitoring and measuring the World Wide Web, does that mean people aren’t talking about you?

Nope.

One of the most difficult parts of PR is that you cannot control what others say about you and your clients. If what they are saying is good, well then by all means, let them sing your praises from the rooftops! If what they are saying is bad, what can you do? And how can you do anything if you don’t even know it’s out there?

­­­­But how exactly can you measure something as vast as the Internet? Continue reading →

Manny Otiko

Media Disasters Prove that PR Professionals are Needed

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Business man sitting before documents and phoningI often say that no one understands why a media relations representative is important until they are in the middle of a PR disaster. This realization is something that might be going through the mind of rap musician Wacka Flocka.

Mr. Flocka has recently become an Internet cause célèbre because of his less than inspiring interview on a BET show. During the show, Flocka stumbled and mumbled through his way through an interview and then dropped this gem. When asked about the November elections, he said, “Voting cool, voting good, … but I don’t know nothing about that s***!” (His words, not mine.)

There are so many things wrong with this media disaster. First of all, didn’t anybody prepare this guy for his interview, and didn’t anyone ask the interviewers what kind of questions they were going to focus on? And why would the interviewers ask a rapper, who can barely string together an intelligent sentence, what he thinks about the upcoming Mid-Terms? That’s like asking a vegan for directions to a good steak house. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Ethical vs. Unethical: A Lot Rides on Only 2 Letters

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Neon toys signMere weeks after the PR world was shocked with news of unethical product review practices of client-developed iPhone apps by Reverb Communications, the profession is again faced with revelations of supposedly unethical practices, this time stemming from the undisclosed use of paid spokespeople by the toy industry as supposedly third-part, objective experts on local TV newscasts throughout the country, as Los Angeles Times media columnist Jim Rainey chronicled last week.

This glaring example of ethical misgivings from the toy industry brings clear an ugly truth in the new world of public relations: what is often best for the client is increasingly winning out over what is most ethical and best for consumers.

And that’s bad news for anyone serious about seeing the profession evolve and thrive. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Finding Insights In a Data Haystack

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Close-up of a SpreadsheetSo you’re actively engaged in this whole social media thing, and you’ve even figured out how you’re going to keep track of it. You’ve chosen a few tools that came highly recommended, you plugged in all the right information and now those tools are collecting data for you. All the time.

Now what?

With seemingly unlimited amounts of data coming at you in real-time, how do you make sense of it all? I’ve often been advised to look at it from the CMO’s perspective. What are the big bullet points that they would need to know? What are the insights?

Forgetting for a minute that very few of us actually have any first-hand experience knowing what a CMO wants, I wanted to walk you through my process for gleaning insights. After working in the media analysis business for two years now, I’ve found that often learning what to do with all that data can be just as tricky as finding the right data in the first place. Continue reading →

Heather Whaling

HOW TO: Effectively Pitch Bloggers

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USA, California, San Bernardino, baseball pitcher throwing pitch, outdoorsThis week, I’m presenting at a local conference on blogger relations, which has me thinking about what separates the “good” blogger relations from the bad.

We’ve all heard that relationships matter, right? But, it’s not always realistic to think we can build a solid relationship with every blogger (or traditional journalist, for that matter) before the pitch. Especially if you work in an agency environment, with clients in multiple industries.

So, what’s the secret to effective blogger outreach?

Not too long ago, a blogger emailed this to me after receiving my pitch:

I really appreciate you taking the time to know a little bit about me before you emailed me. You have no idea what a difference that personalization makes. Or, maybe you do. But in case you don’t hear it enough, good job!

Personalization. You’ll notice this is the beginning of a theme . . . Continue reading →

Josh Sternberg

One Year Gone…

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Abstract circular collageIt started, as these things tend do these days, with an innocuous tweet; the tweet in particular was about Twitter lists. After a torrent of @ replies and emails, it was determined I needed to flesh out a post for a newly formed blog focusing on public relations as, it turns outs, there are some things that cannot be described in only 140 characters. And thus, my entry into the world of competitive blogging organized chaos.

That was a year ago. A complete revolution around the sun has come and gone since I first submitted a guest post to PRBC, a post in which I subtly make fun of both the blog and a little less subtly, the narcissistic nature of social media. As regular readers of this space, or even naturalized citizens of the world wide web, you know that not much has changed. Sure, there are more people coming here to read their daily fix of public relations banter, and sure, there are more people using social media, but what’s changed? Continue reading →