For any PR pro who has jumped on the bandwagon and thinks that newspapers no longer matter, I urge you to read a great report just out from the Poynter Institute. The report sought to measure the total online and print reach of newspapers in their local markets, and the results may surprise you.
First: newspapers still reach a massive audience. The combined local market reach (online and print) of the top-20 newspapers is 47,370,687. That’s 15 percent of the U.S.’ 307 million population. (Note: The Wall Street Journal and USA Today were excluded because their local market isn’t clearly defined.)
via Poynter.org
I don’t know about you, but if I’m able to tap into even a sliver of that size of an audience, I’m absolutely going to give newspapers a bit more of my attention going forward.
I am pissed off. The PR industry has recently received one black eye after the other – and you know what? It’s our own damn fault.
Yes, I said it. The recent bad press for the PR industry (and individual practitioners) in TechCrunch, Forrester and the New York Times came from the work of horrible PR people. These ranged from bad pitches to scamming a small business.
That pisses me off even more than anything. Instead of being a source of news and information from the media – our industry is being looked at as nothing more than a bunch of snake oil salesmen.
While every industry has its share of bad apples, it seems like we’ve had more than our fair share. Sure bad news and our symbiotic relationship with reporters makes our follies easy fare to sell papers, but it’s still no excuse to promote shoddy workmanship.
A recent post at Ragan.com caught my attention. It was based on the premise that public relations has a definition problem. According to the author, Frank Strong, if you ask 10 PR pros to define PR, you’d get 10 different answers.
Sadly, he’s right and that’s the issue. Why are we having such a problem explaining what PR is? As Frank mentioned in his post, the Public Relations Society of America defines PR:
“Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” Continue reading →
A roundtable discussion of agency executives from the Worldcom Americas Region Health Care Practice Group indicated that interest, expectations and budgets for leveraging social media are increasing considerably across all sectors of health care clients, and budget increases are being instituted for 2011 programs. Agency experiences – coast to coast – were almost universally the same.
Worldcom is the world’s largest partnership of independent public relations firms with 112 offices located on five continents. The Worldcom PR Group’s Health Care Practice Group has 50 members worldwide, all of which have a specialty in the market segment. A dozen of the 20 Americas Region firms participated in the roundtable. Continue reading →
The CMO Survey looked at the rate of integration of social media within companies’ marketing mix, as well as how well social media is actually being integrated. Some of the results were quite surprising. Let’s take a look at the key takeaways:
Over the next 12 months, social media spending will nearly double to 9.8% of surveyed CMO’s marketing budgets, up from a current level of 5.6%.
In the next five years, that percentage will increase to 18.1%.
Service companies on the B2B and B2C will experience the biggest increases, as they look to promote product-focused digital and social media initiatives.
via eMarketer
That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that the confidence level among CMOs that they and their companies are successfully integrating social media into more traditional work and marketing strategies lags behind the increase in spending.
According to eMarketer, a full 25% of survey respondents said social is not effectively integrated at all within their companies. So, on the plus side, budget allocations toward social media are up — significantly — with the expectation that it will continue to rise in years to come. But, we still have a ways to go before we can say that yes, social media is as fully integrated and understood within marketing services as more traditional service offerings.
The timeliness of this report couldn’t have been better, as recent trends, revenue reports and a general feeling of buoyancy within the PR and ad industries point toward big agencies going into a buying and M&A frenzy to boost their agencies’ digital chops, as I wrote about last week.
As PRWeek pointed out in a recent editorial, “right now the conversation in PR is all about social media and digital, and no agency can seemingly have a glut of these skills and services on hand.”
The question is, will our industry’s bravado in the digital sector match clients’ expectations for top-level digital and social media services that just two years ago, we couldn’t match, and even now, ad agencies are chomping at the bit to reclaim?
Confidence is on the rise right now in PR; but do our marketing industry counterparts feel the same bluster?
Line Up 2, a small, easy-to-learn game for the iPhone is one of my favorite iPhone apps for killing time. It’s a very simple game that requires you to locate 3 or more blocks of the same color next to each other and tap them. Simple right? Rows continue to pile on from the bottom and if the top-most block hits the ceiling of the game screen your game is over. As you advance in the game the rows pile on faster until you hit a certain score and then they slow down again. Additionally, the longer the chain of blocks – the higher the score. So if you see a very long chain forming as the rows pile on you have to determine if you should wait to get the most bang for your tap score-wise or if you should just tap tap tap along. And did I mention you only get a set number of taps per round?
This simple game is a perfect analogy for the PR pro’s activities. Continue reading →
“I work to promote the president and the message that he’s trying — the messages he’s trying to convey to the American people. But I also work with the press to try to help you do your jobs, to help you cover the White House, cover the administration and report on what we’re doing here.”
— White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, explaining his dual role of serving the President and the press, Feb. 16, 2011.
A ha! Finally we have a high-profile public relations executive saying what we all know to be true but far too often neglect to properly explain: in public relations, like many other professions, we’re playing a constant back-and-forth internal battle between our clients’ best interests and serving the public good. Continue reading →
As the global economy continues to waver, things are looking positively rosy for advertising and public relations firms. With Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicting a 55-percent increase in U.S. spending on public relations services by 2013 (up to $8 billion annually), news has been rushing in from all sides of the major ad holding companies of expanding revenues and new digital opportunities.
The uptick in optimism started last week when Publicis reported a 19.8-percent increase in full-year revenue. Omnicom added to the fun after reporting 2010 revenues that were up 6.4 percent, which prompted this headline from the normally stoic Financial Times: “Omnicom heralds advertising acceleration.” Not a bad assessment of happy days to come.
In celebration of more than a year of using social media to leverage our networks and connect those in the PR industry who are seeking new jobs with those seeking new talent, the #HAPPO (Help a PR Pro Out) initiative is moving offline for a special opportunity to build relationships in person. As my #HAPPO co founder Arik Hanson recently wrote, “We’re taking HAPPO to the next level by organizing our first U.S.-wide live and in-person HAPPO Hour chat.”
Whether you are a job seeker, looking to hire, or simply hoping to meet some of your “Twitter friends” in person, I hope that you’ll join us For those in the New York metro area, I’ve been working with the other NY area #HAPPO champions (Tiffany Winbush, Deirdre Breakenridge & PRBC’s very own PRCog) and a team of volunteers to organize a casual event at Connolly’s pub. It will take place from 6-8pm on February 24th.
Here are a few quick tips to help you make the most of the opportunity to integrate social and face-to-face networking: Continue reading →
On Sunday, February 6 over 111 million people tuned into Fox to watch the Green Bay Packers challenge the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV. According to Nielsen, it was a record-setting television event. During the evening I was completely absorbed in the game, as would be expected for a serious Packers fan, along with the halftime show and commercials and it quickly became clear that there was messaging, branding, and PR at work on the screen at every turn.
No matter who you were rooting for, there were some key learnings that jumped off the screen and that could better our PR toolboxes going forward.
And with that, I present my Top 4 PR Lessons from Super Bowl XLV: Continue reading →
