All posts by Keith Trivitt

Keith Trivitt

Who Do You Trust with Your Client’s Biggest News?

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Rolodex Filled with Business CardsDespite all of my love for social media, digital communications, community engagement etc., something that is beginning to particularly strike me as a clear fact of 21st-century PR is that yes, media relationships do matter. A whole lot. And dare I say it? It does matter who you know. More importantly, how well you know/trust them.

Let me put this into a bit more perspective: Say you’re working on a pretty time sensitive client announcement that has a lot of moving parts (e.g. 2-3 parties involved with multiple executives/personalities and many different times zones), which requires you to be both confidential with how closely you hold the client announcement/information and also proactive enough so you obtain the desired outcome from the announcement with a little extra audience reaction thrown in from a good pre-announcement story or two. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

PR Spending Forecast: Are We Set for a Big Decade?

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Businesswoman Holding MoneyA Financial Times article from Friday, March 26 (online subscriber edition here; free PDF version here), noted that global advertising spending is set to rise 4 percent in 2011, as the advertising, PR and marketing industries start to see a surge in client confidence, revenues and overall re-emergence of the world’s economies. What I found particularly interesting was the note in the third paragraph of the article which explains that even with a strong overall global ad spending growth, the total 2011 global ad spending will still below 2006 levels, which is right about the time the US and UK—which are the world’s top spender on advertising, marketing and PR budgets—saw a drastic uptick in overall corporate market and stock values. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Is it Time to Introduce Analytics to E-mail Pitching?

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Businessman with graphI don’t usually write about the more tactical, day-to-day issues of PR and marketing, choosing instead to focus on the delicate work-life balance, thinking like an entrepreneur and why I think it’s OK to not have a traditional PR background. But today, bear with me for a bit, as I’m going to get pretty tactical on something every PR and marketing professional uses probably every single day of their jobs: the e-mail pitch.

Ahh, yes, the infamous “pitch.” Loathed by many, MANY, but in today’s smart phone-obsessed world, about as important as ever in terms of driving successful media outreach for brands and organizations. I won’t get into the whole debate about whether e-mail pitches should or should not be used, but there were a couple of interesting points I wanted to hit from Cone’s main points in the article on about how we can all make our e-mail pitches a bit more refined and increase the rate that our e-mails to bloggers and reporters will A) get opened; and B) actually get us some type of response. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Work-Life Balance is Your Decision

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Coffee Stained Sticky Pad with Broken Pencil and Telephone ReceiverThere is no doubt the public relations business is a busy, exciting and hyperactive assault on the mind, senses and body. Simply put: It is a profession that requires you to mentally (and sometimes physically, particularly with those pesky events) give it your all every day. And at one end of the spectrum, these indelible facets of the business are what makes it so great and such a wonderful profession to work in, but they can also be the downfall of many, the cause of extreme burnout, if not managed and dealt with properly.

Which is probably why there are so many damn blog posts, articles, books, and Web sites devoted to work/life balance and effective time management and whether you need to separate your personal life/time from your professional life/time, or if you should choose the new trendy time-management theory of “your job and your personal life should blend harmoniously and in perfect sequence with one another.”

I say bulls*** to all of that. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Exploring with an Entrepreneur’s Mindset

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Technology Concepts 1I’m writing this post at the tail end of a very busy, but incredibly inspiring weekend for me, so I’ll make it pretty short and to the point. My thought for this week is: EXPLORE. Always. In PR and marketing—and particularly in a service industry—it is imperative that we constantly keep our minds engaged and exploring new ideas, opportunities and thoughts. Even the most simple of concepts that come to us at seemingly the most random time (“Hey, a weather-map like visual feature of what is hot and cold could be really cool for client XYZ!”) may not be something you implement today, but those little random ideas have a way of stewing together over time and becoming your next big idea. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Storytelling Is At the Heart of Effective PR

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Red book, close-upI have been reading a lot lately. Really, way more reading than I was doing in previous months. From the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times on the weekend, to amNY and Metro weekdays, and a slew of business and advertising trades in between, I have been trying to immerse myself in two of the professional areas I have the most passion in: small business and media.

Despite the fact that many of the publications that I have been reading have their own unique audience (For anyone who hasn’t done it yet, check out FT Weekend. Honestly, one of the best papers you will read.), the underlying fact of the matter is that each and every one of them tries to do the same thing at the end of the day: tell its readers great stories in a compelling medium that they enjoy. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

It Takes All Types to Be a Successful Communicator

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Corporate CasualOne of the things I love about the communications profession is the fact that while walking down the street, it’s often difficult to immediately pick us out from a crowd. Let’s be honest: You can usually tell with one quick glance when someone is a real-estate agent, lawyer or an account (perhaps because each requires significant training and/or licensing in their respective professions that often gives them a bit of an aura of being . . . different from the rest of us, but I digress). But when walking down the street, you can’t really immediately pick out a communications pro. We just come in all shapes, sizes, demographics and personalities. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Thoughts from SMPR: Part 2—Stepping Away from the Rainbow

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Landscape view of a rainbow over green hills against stormy skyFollowing up on my post from last week about SMPR, I promised to go into a bit more detail about my second main point during that panel: It’s time we all step away from the social media rainbow just a tad and realize that many CEOs/C-levels don’t fully grasp the impact of social media. Therefore, we need to do a better job of helping them see a corrallary between getting a great placement in The New York Times and how many times that piece was retweeted, commented on or whatever the case may be.

The fact is, folks, many people will never get this, and we need to learn to be OK with that. In fact, we need to be better than OK with that; we need to help them understand why having blogger X tweet about our company is just as important in many cases as a write-up in Shoes Today. We need to put these great social media accomplishments that I know many of you are working hard to achieve each day into the context of what our executives know and understand. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Thoughts from SMPR: Part 1—This Isn’t Rocket Science

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Mature Businessman at lectern outdoors, holding microphone and documentsI had the rather unexpected honor of being a panelist at the recent SMPR event at Social Media Week New York for a discussion about social media use among agencies and client initiatives. The panel, hosted by my good friends Elliot Schimel and David Teicher, was a compilation of bright young minds discussing how their various agencies integrate social media initiatives within other client work.

I say “unexpected honor” because I was not initially slated to speak on this panel. Having shown up about 30 minutes before the panel started, I was chatting with Elliot and David about various social media topics of the day and the panel itself, and Elliot was kind enough to extend to me an invitation to be on the panel after someone had been forced to drop out earlier (great thanks to you, Elliot, as this was a tremendous event, and a terrific pleasure to be a part of). Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Yes, Virginia, Your E-Mail Pitches Do Still Make a Difference

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Global MarketI’ve written before about my belief that the near constant bashing of media relations has to stop, and how yes, despite how much I love social media and how much I believe in the true good of what it is doing in the PR and marketing business, there still is a time, place and relevancy to traditional PR tactics, such as developing strong relationships. Today, I’m going to give kudos to another one those of traditional tactics that the “gurus” love to bash, but if done right, can still have a major impact in our business: the e-mail pitch. Continue reading →