Many things about public relations have changed in the past ten years, but there are still some constants. The main objectives of PR hasn’t changed, but the methods certainly have.

So, what hasn’t changed about PR?

• The essential PR plan. No matter your objectives, planning is the first critical move that any PR team must make. Regardless of what tactics you choose and the methods in which you conduct your PR, a plan must first be in place to ensure that: everyone involved is on the same page; tactics are derived from strategies; target markets are understood; and budgets, implementation schedules, and responsibilities are determined.

• The need to connect. Though connecting with the public is done in a very different manner today than it was 15 years ago, the point of conducting PR is still the same: to create a connection with someone, the customer, potential buyers, etc. In the past, this was done through the media. Today, this can be primarily done through two-way communication initiated through press releases that everyone can read (not just the media), blogs/websites, and companies simply talking to the public.
• The necessity of the media. I know I just said that you don’t really need media to connect to the public anymore, but you still need to utilize what the media continues to do. While you can do all of your communicating to the public without the use of the media, it would still serve you well to pitch the media for coverage online and offline. This sort of coverage is still seen as valuable because consumers still watch the news, still read the newspaper, and use the Internet for a source of new.
• The value of a network. This can be a network online, a network of media contacts, or a network of companies in your industry. These networks will be indispensable, especially online. Social media is shaking up the PR world, and as a company looking for valuable PR it is important to connect with bloggers, influential users on the various social media networking sites, and other companies partaking in the online community.
• The crucial act of crisis management. PR will always be the best source of information for the public in light of a crisis. As we’ve seen in recent events (BP, Tiger Woods, etc.), the PR team really needs to be aware, present, and fast-moving to take care of a crisis and to address the situation at hand. If they fail to do so, the company, brand, or image can greatly suffer. In most cases, PR simply needs to diffuse a situation; in other cases, it needs to serve as the formal apology, acceptance of responsibility, and revelation of plans to remedy the situation. The difference today is that a company really has no excuse to not take advantage of the many ways they address a crisis, answer a customer complaint, and even remedy a situation immediately before a crisis begins. Many companies ignore that opportunity, or don’t see it as a necessity.

Things have definitely changed, and companies need to be more proactive in regards to the responsibility new opportunities present. Buyers expect a company to be responsible, accountable, and working for the good for all consumers, the community, and the planet. Technology has made things more transparent and customers know more than they’ve ever known. This makes it a necessity for companies to be more aware of their actions and the repercussions they can have, if not just to be a morally responsible company.

Public relations is often seen as an alternative to advertising; I hope to change that, because it is not. While advertising and PR are often lumped together (and, again, one is often used as an alternative to the other), they are two different and separate activities that are both needed to propel a company forward. (For a start-up or for a new company looking to build their brand, advertising won’t do much good, however. Read more about why that is here: 4 Reasons Public Relations (Not Advertising) Builds a Brand.) They do, however, work well when used together as components of the company’s overall outreach program.

Though the economy is beginning to turn around, budgets for public relations still seem to be somewhat of a hard thing to come by. To get more of a budget allotted to you as the PR professional(s) in your company, you have to sell its benefits. How do you expect executives to want to give you a budget if the reasons for utilizing and partaking in PR activities are never defined? On top of selling the benefits of PR, try to tie the PR activities into other business activities, such as marketing and business development. They are, after all, becoming more and more similar with the tools and tactics available to companies online.

Public relations can be seen as a necessary evil, but it’s a rather useful activity for businesses to partake in; not only are you now able to connect with your buyers one-on-one (which was never done (or able to be done) in the past), but you can help to shape your public image. In this way, PR is crossing the lines that separated it from marketing. You can send out a press release, respond to customers, and be active on social media; these are all things that can help to shape how the public sees you. In the past, companies had to hope the media would portray them in a positive light. Now, when that’s not done, a company can respond in the attempts to remedy an issue/potential crisis or write a letter to an editor to ask for a correction.

What does this all mean for you and your company? Well, that depends. How connected do you want to be with your audience? How much do you value customer/buyer feedback? Do you want to stay up-to-date with what your buyers are looking for? PR can assist in all of this (and more). What you need to do first is to establish your needs, goals, and objectives and those of your buyers. Then, and only then, can you move forward by conducting proactive, effective, and well-planned public relations activities.

Public relations isn’t all that difficult, and more often than not it does not require the assistance of a “professional”. Doing PR correctly requires an understanding of your audience and your company, both being things that you can learn and know. From there, it requires an understanding of how to implement tactics that you’ve defined from your strategies. (For more on tactics and strategies, read ). It may make sense to hire a consultant to get you started but don’t be afraid to try things out.

Often times, marketing and public relations get lumped into one category. While the two categories have been growing more and more similar with the Internet and companies being able to do their own marketing and PR, there are still a few differences to keep in mind. Also important to remember is the existing differences between advertising, PR, branding, and marketing. These four components of business are all interrelated and need to work together to ensure that a business is successful. In order to understand how to use each of these components, you must first understand how to identify them.

Marketing is more closely related with selling than public relations. While the ultimate goal of both marketing and PR is to gain customers and business, PR is more focused on the relationship aspect of the buying process that a buyer goes through. Moreover, PR helps to maintain the relationships with current users and new customers, whereas marketing is primarily focused on gaining new business. PR also helps to maintain and build relationships between the company and the public.

Some state that public relations is all about building relationships. While that is true, PR also has a dual purpose in a company: to help maintain relationships, as noted above. Once marketing has helped to instill recognition of a company in a buyer’s mind, it is PR’s job to foster these relationships and ensure they continue to grow in a positive manner. This can be done through communication, honesty, and engagement of those audiences.

Reading materials from other blogs to see what my take on this was, I came across a few things that made me wonder: ‘What is the difference between marketing and PR?’ Other bloggers were stating that the difference between the two were that marketing asks buyers to take an action, whereas PR does not. (I disagree.) Some were stating that marketing has nothing to do with relationship building. (I disagree here, too.)

So, what does differ between PR and marketing? I think perhaps it boils down to the bottom line: marketing aims to increase sales and overall company performance. While that is an outcome desired from having great PR, that is not what drives companies’ PR. We do PR because we want to have another side to our companies that customers can see, talk to, and engage with. This PR side of our companies is a more personified and honest interpretation of our company that does away with the advertisements and marketing seen in our other business objectives. While we would love for this tactic to earn us more business, we know the ultimate PR goal is to build relationships with our customers, potential customers, communities, and general public.

Marketing, on the other hand, is looking to convince customers of something, whether that be that our company is awesome or that our competitor is not; we are trying to force-feed customers and buyers the beliefs we want them to hold. This is more difficult than what PR does, which is to allow customers to make their own interpretations of our company (with a little help). We want to put our company in the best light, but there is only so much we can do without reverting back to marketing or advertising. With public relations, customers are given more to go off of, and can create a message or idea of their own in terms of what our company means to them.

Public relations, then, is seen as more credible than marketing. When a customer comes to a conclusion on their own, it is easier to believe and it makes more sense to them than the overdone methods of advertising and marketing. There is a very fine line between marketing and PR that is being ever blurred with the available online tools. The Internet has made it easy to perform tasks that were once labeled marketing and are now classified as PR, such as distributing press releases to the public.

When it comes down to it, customers will embrace the company they like more. Getting a customer to like your company more cannot easily be done with marketing, though it is possible. It is easier for them to like your company when they hear about you from someone else (PR), when they read about you in a newspaper article written by the paper’s staff (PR), when they see your press conference on the news (PR), or when they see the news at your awesome fundraiser event (PR).

What do you think the difference between PR and marketing is?

There is a lot of talk about search engine optimization (SEO), and rightly so; SEO can greatly assist in your marketing and PR efforts, and may even help to reduce your advertising costs. When using SEO properly, you can increase your traffic and search engine strength without having to spend as much on ad words or other forms of advertising. Here are a few quick tips that I’ve used that have helped my blog traffic grow:

I was recently asked to do a short interview. Here are my answers, which I thought would be helpful to understand the basics of PR:

1. How do you define PR? What do you believe its purpose is?

   PR deserves a somewhat long definition as it encompasses so much of what a business does in regards to the public. The definition has definitely changed in the past 10 years and entails much more of a connection between the public and the company. In the past, PR was about talking to the media, getting press clippings, and sending our press releases that no one but the media saw. Today, PR is much more like marketing, and that can be attributed to the changes the Internet has created for business worldwide.

   Marketing entails, well, marketing, or your company. PR is about getting others to talk about your company. But, when you can submit your press release and post to your blog directly without having to contact the media, how to define that? It’s a line that is becoming more and more blurred. Some would call that marketing, others would call it PR since it involves press releases. A blog is a social media tool, which again, some people would consider to be a marketing venture and others, PR.

   To avoid picking sides, I’ll say that it is all a part of PR. You are putting yourself out to the online world and connecting with your buyers, making “Public Relations” public again. Your blog and other social media tools help to craft your image online; they also help to make it easier for others to talk about you online and to share your content.

   The only real way to define PR is to define advertising, which is the actual purchasing of space online, space in publications, etc. PR involves getting that space for free.

2. If someone came to you and said, “I want to do PR for a career” what are some characteristics you would tell them are necessary? Why?

   - Excellent writing skills. (Or at least a network of great writes that can help you learn to write, edit your work in the beginning, and assist you in your career journey.) Writing is such a large component of PR; a press release, a blog post, a speech, these are all writing based. Everything one does in PR involves writing, so the PR professional must be very good at this task. The reputation and brand of the company or client the PR professional represents depends on this writing being good.Personable. You need to connect with the public, media, and your buyers.

   Attentive. To detail, emotions, and one’s overall surroundings.

   Understanding. This goes hand in hand with the above; don’t push a customer, understand their needs and needs of the media when you are talking to them, and be understanding of the way the company you work for or represents affects the community at large.

   Common sense. This is necessary in all aspects of business, but even more so in PR. The PR professional is the face of the company, or in other cases the “behind-the-scenes” worker helping to mold the face of the company to prepare for a speech, press conference, interview, etc. PR professionals need to watch what they say and how they say, and know that all eyes are on them and the executives they help.

3. Do you see any similarities between the PR and journalism fields? If not, what do you see as the main differences?

   Yes; they both involve a great amount of writing. The main difference: journalists are writing on companies whereas PR is getting those journalists to write about their company/client.

4. How would you respond to people who say that PR has an agenda involved?

   PR is agenda orientated, at least it should be; why would a company create a PR plan without an agenda? That’s philanthropy. PR is meant to advance a company and connect with the public, which is a pretty good agenda to me. It being controversial is a bit silly, as most companies do it for the recognition. Where companies can differentiate themselves is by doing things to create PR without the intent of creating PR. That’s a fine line, too, though.

   While there ought to be other reasons to partake in PR than profits or sales, that is the overall end results companies are looking for when they embark on any PR campaign or venture.

5. What measures (if any) do you use to determine whether a PR campaign is successful?

   I’ll answer this with a blog post I did not too long ago that can be applied to evaluating the ROI on any PR activity.

   1. Google Analytics. This free tool can help you track traffic, traffic sources, and keyword statistics. This is crucial to your understanding of what is and what is not working online. You can determine if your efforts are paying off by seeing if your press releases, networking with other bloggers and getting them to link to your site, and participating on Twitter and Facebook are bringing traffic to your blog or website. Though this is the most frequently used tactic to measure the ROI of social networking efforts, there are other methods.

   2. Measuring traffic is an important way to measure ROI, but another method not used as frequently is to measure “soft metrics” that includes participation on your blog or forum, engagement with your online profiles/ social networking sites, and WOM (word of mouth). This is part of an active PR plan that monitors your online brand.

   3. Try searching for your blog, website, or company in Google. How are you faring? Having great content that changes and is linked to by other sites can increase your search engine rankings, which can result in more traffic. If they are not ranking highly, give it some time; seeing results and being able to determine any ROI takes patience. The Internet, though instantaneous in many ways, has a bit of a delay when it comes to seeing your pagerank (from Google), Alexa rating, and search result appearances. Know that creating great content and utilizing the right tools is the best way to ensure your website’s success.

   4. Conduct research and simply ask your customers what they think. This can help you to really pinpoint what your customers are feeling and what areas you can improve upon.

   5. Lastly, and perhaps in a more trivial manner, measure your followers on Twitter, Facebook, and now foursquare; for a brick and mortar company, foursquare can be a great way to measure your ROI and PR effectiveness.

6. What are advantages of working in the PR field today?

   The Internet makes PR a more accessible field to work in, meaning that more and more people can learn and work their way up that learning curve to advance their experience and knowledge. In the past, you had to work hard to foster relationships with just the media; now, you are working to foster relationships with the media, your buyers directly, and others in your industry to help advance your PR efforts.

7. What are some disadvantages or challenges of working in the field?

   Along the same lines, there is now more to do as a PR professional; there are more places where that PR person needs to be spending their time because the Internet has opened new avenues and opportunities for PR to be done internally, by the company, and without the help of media. That isn’t to say that media is unimportant, however; they are. There’s still a lot of value to having something like an article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

8. Where do you see the field of PR going in the future? How do you think it will change or stay the same?

   I’m not really sure; I think marketing and PR will continue to merge, and more and more companies are going to jump on the PR and social media bandwagons because it is so easy to implement. That ease doesn’t solidify their ability to maintain it, as we’ve seen in blogging and other social media platforms, but getting things started is easier than ever because you don’t need a PR boutique/firm to do it for you; you can bypass the media, connecting with your buyers directly.

   Moreover, you can have a two-way conversation with your buyers, which is something new and very valuable. I’m sure there are many changes coming, and the younger generations are going to help shape that for sure. Preferences are changing and so are peoples’ views of the world; this will definitely help to shape the way PR is done.

Want to add your take on one of the above topics? Feel free to do so in the comments!

Public Relations may be a bit intimidating, especially having never done it in practice, but know that everyone starts somewhere. The best thing to do: exactly what you’re doing now. You’re here, perhaps by mistake, but more likely because you want to know more about PR and how it can help you, your brand, company, product, service, cause, etc. PR really is applicable in all those areas, and it simply requires that you get started. (Looking for a definition of PR? Try this: What is Public Relations? | Brief Overview and Definition)

Here are some PR basics you should know and become familiar with:

1. The Press Release. While people think this is all there is to PR, this is simply one of the small pieces that make up the entire PR arsenal. This is a tool meant to assist you in your PR efforts and will help you to spread your message. For some tips on writing a press release, check out: 3 Important Things to Consider When Writing a Press Release

2. The Press/Media Kit. This is your company’s calling card. Use this packet of information to ask the media for coverage, share your expertise with others, and to give an overall introduction to who you are. Predominantly, these are used when sending a pitch to media to give the reporter, journalist, or writer more information on the company. It is also a collection of materials a company uses to send to prospective customers and clients. This can include a number of things, but normally includes company information and history, services offered, press coverage, and team players (key executives, etc.). It can also include advertising materials such as flyers, newspaper ads, or cards. (Here are some effective ways to use your media kit.)
3. Social Media. This includes the blog, social networking tools, forums, and wikis. These are all things you monitor, create copy for, and need to be a part of (so long as it makes sense to use for your company, situation, and audience.) Social media is a wonderful tool to utilize for most companies, and for a majority of the companies that do use it, it is a relatively low investment of funds. It does require time, especially if you want to see results.

   If you’re on the fence about implementing it into your own PR mix, and for more information on determining social media’s role for you, try reading: Public Relations & Social Media | Make Sure it Fits in Your PR Mix.

4. The Public Relations Plan. This is a pivotal component to your overall PR efforts. Moreover, it contains all of the pieces (with their individual pieces) above. This also takes time, and requires that you actually plan to have success in this area. This term may be a bit misleading, as it implies that plans are a one time thing that you do and walk away from. They are very much the opposite. A plan is created when you have a specific goal or objective in mind and need to create a plan in order to better define the strategies and tactics that you will use to reach that goal. From there, it requires maintenance, improvement, and perhaps termination if you find that the goal has been reached and the campaign is over.

   The main point here is that the PR plan is a blueprint for your next moves, how you plan to acheive those moves, and what the results were so that you can create an ever better plan to follow. Remember, though, that all of your efforts will have been done in vain if you don’t measure and analyze your ROI! Return on investment is often the only reason companies conduct PR activities, and even if it isn’t the only reason, you still need results to show to your board, investors, and shareholders to get future backing. This is such a large part of constructively creating better plans, yet companies often opt out of doing this step. This is especially important when measuring the effectiveness of your social media use. (For tips on measuring your social media ROI:Public Relations Strategies | 5 Ways to Measure Social Media ROI (Return on Investment) For a step-by-step breakdown of the PR plan: 6 Characteristics and 7 Components of a PR Plan That Works)

The key to using all of the above together in a successful and pertinent manner is to ensure that you do your research before just jumping in. To be successful and to create a productive and effective campaign, be sure to define your needs and the needs of your buyers. Additionally, be sure you can define your tactics and strategies well so that you can effectively carry them out!

Good luck on your PR adventures!

I recently read the Marketing Gurus by Chris Murray (highly recommended), and a topic that really stuck out to me was the concept of renovating a business, product, idea, solution, etc., instead of innovating a completely new one. The latter route seems to be the more popular of the two. The book review that this concept came from is a few years old (2004), and was written by Sergio Zyman titled Renovate Before You Innovate.

Here are some reasons I gathered from the book (and from my own experience and education) that help to reiterate this point:

- Companies often times look at only innovating a new product. What they do in turn is ignore (or forget) that innovation means revamping and creating anew to benefit customers, consumers, and the business. “When it comes to identifying organic growth opportunities, an amazingly large percentage of companies are one-trick ponies, focusing only on coming up with new products, excluding anything else. What’s worse, the emphasis is often on quantity over quality.”

- Customers are the only thing that matter. No matter what you tell them, what you sell, or what you do, nothing matters but what they think. As such, it is important to take into account the following benefits that your product offers your customers: (you may remember this from your marketing or consumer behavior classes)

1. Emotional benefits – how your product or service made them feel.
2. Functional benefits – what makes your brand superior over your competitors, in their minds.
3. Attributes – the things that benefit the above benefits.

- Horizontal growth is less productive and beneficial to a company than vertical growth. Spreading your resources thin can make it hard to do business. “Trying to grow a business through innovation means spreading resources horizontally, developing new brands, new customers, and new directions. It’s a tremendously risky and expensive path to take.” (pg. 270)

Overall, there are many reasons to renovate something you have to make it better instead of spreading yourself, your brand, and your company so thinly. Instead, build your brand and products vertically, ever improving their quality. While the concept of “new” can generate you some buzz, longer lasting buzz will be generated when you show buyers that you are dedicated to creating a better product from what they’ve already fallen in love with. Lastly, create effective measurements so you can see where your renovations have been successful and not.

Creating a public relations plan takes time, knowledge, and understanding of your company or client needs and wants. Here are some steps to ensure you capture those wants and needs in the plan creation process and that you create a plan that is relevant and useful to your company or client.

1. Know your company’s or client’s current situation. This is essential to knowing where the company now stands, where the company is able to go, what the company’s market/industry looks like, and what direction the company is headed. This helps to put things in perspective.
2. Know your resources. This can be a part of the first step, as it is a part of the situational analysis needed to understand where your company or client currently stands. This can help you better build your tactics and strategies while considering the budget, time, and other resource limitations the company or client may have.
3. Know your objectives and goals. Also essential to the PR plan having success, you must know where the company hopes to go. Like driving with no directions, a PR plan with no goals or objectives is an aimless action with no knowledge of what could come, or even what results are desired. Be sure that the PR plan’s objectives are in line with the rest of the company’s overall objectives, and ensure that they are clear to all involved.
4. Know and define your target audience(s). This means that you’ve defined your target buyer audiences and target media audiences. Each audience will need a different message and a different approach. Knowing these audiences will help you to frame your strategies and tactics so that you can effectively reach the people you hope to reach.
5. List messages and strategies you will use to reach the target audiences you defined. These should be in line with the goals and objectives listed earlier; if they are not, the plan is already off to a somewhat bad start. Know that your strategies and messages also need to relate to one another, otherwise there is some disconnect happening that needs to be addressed.
6. Define the tactics you will use to make the strategies you’ve listed a reality. These tactics will take the messages and strategies listed and make them happen. If, for example, a strategy is to enhance a company’s brand awareness, tactics could include community outreach, social media use, press conferences, etc. There first needs to be a strategy defined before tactics can be addressed and assigned to a message.
7. Create a time-line for implementation. This needs to be realistic but also challenging. Remember that there should be no lapses in the PR plan where press releases are being sent out, events are taking place, or media are being engaged. There needs to be constant reminder to the public that the company is alive and well, and that can be done with constant information being sent out.
8. Delegate obligations and responsibilities to your team or your client’s team to ensure all parts of the PR plan are completed. This helps to ensure that everyone is on board and that everyone knows their own responsibilities and duties. This is crucial to seeing the PR plan come to fruition. This step should be done with everyone involved so that no one feels over-burdened, left out, or given too much responsibility. This can also help to give everyone the feeling of responsibility since the plan was created with everyone together and not just one person’s say.
9. Create measurements of results/ success. To know if your plan is effective, create measurements and benchmarks for the tactics you implement. This is a place for the PR team to gauge the success of the plan and to see if goals were realistic. Creating measurements can also help to show what could have been done with the expertise and estimations of a PR firm or team.
10. Review the plan after implementation and conclusion of the plan. This is the time when all who helped to create and carry-out the plan can come together and share their thoughts on what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be done differently in the future. This needs to be done to ensure that future plans have a chance of being successful. This step can help to encourage group members to continue working for the company’s success by giving everyone a chance to talk and contribute to the next planing.

The key to remember when creating a PR plan is that all plans are going to be unique and different for each company, and even within the same company, they will be different for each plan objective/goal. Do your homework before creating a plan, and be sure that you work closely with the company or client to make the plan a success.

Consider some of the major brand short falls that have taken place lately. Do you still see Tiger Woods as a great golf player? Do you still think Toyota makes a great vehicle? Brand loyalty is a hard thing to break. Reason being: customers don’t want to be told their convictions are incorrect, and they usually stick their ground, regardless of being right or wrong. We confirm our beliefs whenever possible, and we ignore the conflicting information for as long as we can.

What is brand loyalty?

Brand loyalty, in marketing, consists of a consumer’s commitment to repurchase or otherwise continue using the brand and can be demonstrated by repeated buying of a product or service or other positive behaviors such as word of mouth advocacy.

Brand loyalty is more than simple repurchasing, however. Customers may repurchase a brand due to situational constraints (such as vendor lock-in), a lack of viable alternatives, or out of convenience. Such loyalty is referred to as “spurious loyalty”. True brand loyalty exists when customers have a high relative attitude toward the brand which is then exhibited through repurchase behavior. This type of loyalty can be a great asset to the firm: customers are willing to pay higher prices, they may cost less to serve, and can bring new customers to the firm. (source)

Why does brand loyalty keep people coming back?

People who liked Toyota before their recent recalls (and Tiger before his recent personal life story being shared with the world) probably haven’t changed their minds much. Just like in an election, people make up their minds and stick with that decision regardless of the facts. Conversely, people who didn’t like Toyota (for whatever reason) are now running with the recent story telling everyone they were right all along; the facts don’t matter for either person.

For example, if I bought a Toyota years ago and had the best experience imaginable, I would be pretty happy with Toyota. Then, I buy one of the unfortunate vehicles that needed a recall. I may be upset, but I would defend that decision I made to the end, up until I got my recalled car back. I wouldn’t even disown Toyota. (For the people who are not loyal to Toyota, their story is a very different one.) To reiterate again: loyalty is a hard intangible to break. Additionally, brand loyalty is a hard thing to buy. It usually can’t be bought, which is a good thing for companies who don’t have a large amount of money set aside for buying loyalty, but it also means that all companies have to try harder to grab part of the customer’s mindshare.

How do you foster loyalty?

1. Give consumers a cause. People love fighting for something, like Mac fans who have come to hate PCs because of the “cause” they adopted from Apple.
2. Give them reason to be loyal. This can be through great customer service, great products, or great price. Pick one area though, and focus on that.
3. Be consistent.
4. Be available.
5. Be responsive.
6. Be transparent in your PR activities.
7. React and respond quickly.

Pierce Mattie gives this interpretation of brand loyalty:

I’d like to think that brand loyalty is brought about not only because your mom wore the same brand of makeup your entire childhood or your dad wore the same brand of suits each day to the office, but because that brand offered something of value to you–quality, effectiveness and good ole customer service.

I got a few more questions about starting a public relations plan online, so I thought I’d share my answers. Below, find some tips on where to blog, where to submit press releases, and how to get traffic to your website from those press releases.

Blogging: WordPress Versus Blogger

Creating a blog through Blogger or WordPress is simple, fast, and easy. I recommend doing that instead of trying to build one yourself on your website as that can get a bit tricky and messy. Whatever method you decide, it is vital that you link to your blog from your website and make it clear that you have a blog. Also, try to keep a similar feel to your blog that you find on your website, perhaps even replicating the same design there; that can help to make the transition from the website to the blog (and vice versa) a little more pleasant and can help keep your “brand” visible in both places.

The only downside with using Blogger or WordPress is that you have to rely on their services to be working, their storage limits, and the limits in terms of design. For example, I was trying to update my blog post with links, and received an error message for half an hour. When it works, though, it works well.

If you don’t have an IT team or web design group and know little HTML or CSS yourself, using one of the two blog sites can be very beneficial and time efficient. (There are other sites that let you make blogs as well, but those two are the most well-known, making it easier to find plug-ins, widgets, add-ons, and templates.)

I like WordPress a little better than Blogger in terms of the use, but to my knowledge, I can do more with Blogger without the same run-arounds that WordPress makes you do. (For example, I tried to upload a custom blog template to WordPress, but ran into some issues as WP requires you to upload the template to an FTP site and then to your WP template folder; long story short, it was a pain, and I never did figure it out.)

Press Releases

So far as posting a press release to your blog, feel free to do so. A better solution: create a Newsroom or Mediaroom on your website to post press releases to, articles that you are featured in, news about you on other sites, etc. The media room creates a place for you to post press releases that will stay live as long as they are relevant. (If things change in the company that make a press release irrelevant or detrimental to keep up, take them down.) Sites that let you post free press releases to, like the ones I list here, may only keep your press release live for so long. Thus, posting them to your website can help increase traffic with the keywords you use there longer than the press release sites might do.

So, following from that, yes, people can find your press releases through Google, but you have to post them somewhere first for them to show up in a search engine result. That means that you must submit them to your blog and/or newsroom or some of the free sites at the link above. Then, search engines will help drive traffic to your website or press release. It is crucial that you use keywords that are optimized for search to bring in traffic. Be sure to pay attention to the longer keyword phrases that you may have read about in this post: SEO & Your Blog | Pay Attention to the Long Tail. It is very important to pay attention to the keywords you use in your website and press release copy as that can help to make or break your success.

Your Blog, Press Releases, and Calls to Action

Lastly, just to reiterate, make some calls to action clear in your press releases. Really drive traffic to your website if you post press releases on one of the free sites to help move people through the sales funnel. The first step is getting them to your blog and interacting with your website. People love choice and they love free things, so give them some free things and lots of options on your website in terms of places to click. Make it clear what their next step should be, like reading the recent study you did or the recent piece of advice you’re giving away on your blog.

Do you have any other tips for people looking to improve their online PR? Share them in the comments!

There are many benefits to using social media, many of them evident in the companies who are taking the time and making the effort. (For companies who may not be giving social media the attention it needs, benefits may not be seen as often.) So while the success of social media in your PR plans relies heavily on your output, it also depends on how well it fits into your PR mix. (Your social media efforts will not sell themselves…)

What is social media? It is the new media that PR and other business professionals now deal with in order to reach their buyers and target markets. Instead of needing to go through other media, like newspapers and TV, companies can create that relationship with the public themselves. Social media can include things like blogs, forums, wikis, & social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare.

There are a few things to consider when thinking of implementing social media. You can ask yourself the following questions:

1. Will your target market and current and future buyers benefit from your use of social media? If the answer to this is “no”, it may not be worth your time to implement one or more aspects of social media. Your use of the tools mentioned above needs to benefit the buyer just as much as it should benefit you, the company.
2. Will you reach your target market and current and future buyers with your social media efforts? Again, if the answer is “no”, your time might be better spent on other PR activities. This question addresses where your target market and buyers get their information. If they are predominantly offline, social media may not benefit or reach the bulk of your market, and small, marginal results may be seen. Evaluate where your time should be spent.
3. Will you use the medium consistently and frequently? Social media is not something that can really be done “half-time”; your results will only be half as good as you would like them to be. To really feel the benefits or social media and to see a return on your investment (of time and resources), you need to ensure that your output equals the input you hope to see.
4. Why are you thinking of using social media? If your answer here is to advertise your brand, product, and services, social media is not for you. It is meant to be a tool to engage your audience, target market, and buyers, not to sell to them. (That’s what advertising is for…) Instead, use these tools to share with them things of value like information on your industry, answers to questions, etc.

Be sure that you’re also aware of the results you may see if you do use social media, but do so improperly (as it pertains to your company). You can not only lose out on potential buyers (or donations, votes, whatever you’re trying to get), but you can even tarnish your brand. Customers may not remember you if you do everything the same as everyone else, but doing it poorly usually stands out in their minds. While social media is easy to use, implement, and cost effective, know the reasons you want to use them, the sort of commitment you can make, and the results you hope to see.

While working with a public relations firm can be beneficial in many ways, it may not be practical for your company to utilize their services due to costs or other constraints. There are some ways you can try to do your own PR, but know that there are times (now and in the future) when you will need guidance, assistance, and advice that a PR firm can provide.

When working as a company or business, your efforts ought to be spent on what you do best: business. Conversely, you knowing what you do best means that you are the best person to do your company’s PR because of that knowledge. So, how do you create a plan that works if each extreme seems to be the best option? Compromise, and create a plan that fits the current stage your company is in. In the early stages of your company’s life, know that some things will need to be done in-house to save on expenses. If that is the case, hire someone who knows what they are doing and can focus on that alone so you can focus on the rest of the business’ ventures. When you are able and can afford to do so, make hiring a PR firm a top priority as they may be able to save you future costs and do what needs to be done correctly.

PR firms and boutiques have a wealth of information they have worked hard to acquire. That information includes tools they utilize like their media contacts, their employees, and the tactics they’re discovered that work and do not work. These things are hard to acquire on your own if you are busy developing your business, product, or services. PR should not be seen as an alternative to advertising but rather a complimentary tactic that may be more beneficial to a company, especially in its early development and life cycle. As such, PR should be a tool you use in the very beginning of your business development. Advertising is meant to keep your company in the minds of consumers after publicity has helped to build your brand. (For more on why PR should be used first, click here.) In the beginning, advertising won’t do much good for your brand.

Until your company needs advertising and until you can afford a professional PR firm, here are some ways to create your own publicity:

1. Write. Hire an employee that writes well and get their assistance in creating exceptional copy that you can be proud to submit to the web, send to media contacts, or to send to your buyers/target markets. This can include writing copy for your website, blog, or press releases. To get your content included elsewhere online as well, be sure to write about other things concerning the entire industry your company is in. This can help you to get quoted in other blogs, business editorials, etc. Additionally, read what others have to say, where they have made mistakes, and where they were successful.
2. Contact the media. I recently conducted an interview with Liza Anderson of Anderson Group Public Relations. She mentioned that really knocking down the door is a great way to ensure your story is heard. Moreover, she recommended that you make your pitches concise, succinct, and complete. Also, remember that you don’t have to contact them just when you have a story to pitch; contact them about an article they wrote, connect with them online, or contact them after they write about your company to thank them or ask them to correct a mistake.
3. Host events. This can be a fundraiser, sampling of your products, etc. Just be sure to do the steps above to let the world know about the event. Be sure to invite media, especially those that are interested in your company or industry.
4. Give. This doesn’t have to be monetary gifts, but they do have to be things of value, which can be informational content. Buyers don’t want something for free that they won’t utilize; the effects of a useless free item are the same as not getting anything at all. Instead of wasting your time and energy in giving away something that customers won’t find valuable, share your knowledge. Give away advice and talk about your experiences.
5. Do research and share it. This can go hand in hand with the above point as something valuable, especially to people interested in your industry. Do a study and publish your findings; it’s also a good way to get mentioned in other publications, blogs, etc., and you may make some of your target market remember you.
6. Get involved in social media. This is a somewhat old tip, but some companies still have yet to get involved. This is an effective way to talk about your industry and company with other businesses and customers, so utilize this free tool to do just that. Also, be sure to monitor what others are saying about you on these platforms so you can respond and perhaps start a conversation.

What are some ways you create publicity without the help of a PR firm? Should companies ever do their own PR?

As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, the Internet has created an amazing amount of potential for PR practitioners and marketers. There are many benefits (and a few drawbacks) that the Internet has provided, but the main change that has come about is the ability to reach niche markets. These niche markets were often ignored markets that dealt with what the mass majority was being marketed to with, and at times found their particular needs met by a small brick-and-mortar company who took the time and accepted the risks that came with catering to a niche market. Because of the risk involved in targeting niche markets, these markets were often forgotten and never catered to. Now, these markets can get the attention they’ve long been lacking.

Niche markets can be a great potential market for your company to enter. They attract customers from the mass market they belonged to before their needs were unmet; they also help the larger market to grow. The more customers’ whose needs can be filled in a niche market, the more demand there will be for those products, thus encouraging companies to continue catering to niche market needs.

The best thing niche markets can do you is to give your company a entrance into the market. If you have a new product you would like to introduce into the market, start by focusing on a niche market where you can provide the best support you can. This will create a customer base who can give testimonials and recommendations. After catering to the niche market, you can move on to other parts of the larger market (or other small niches) and do the same thing. You can also group your product with other services or products from other companies to make it more applicable to the larger market. From there, outperform the competition; take over their niche market share; and offer something better.

This process can lead to market domination. If your end goal is not to dominate a market, then stay in your niche. With reduced costs, the Internet provides the ability to reach more and more people with less resources and in less time than traditional marketing or PR. Niches can be reached because they can be sought out; they can also find you. The Internet makes it possible for customers to come to you who offers exactly what they’re looking for. Niche markets can be infiltrated more easily than in the past, making your entrance to the larger market easier and faster. So take advantage of the reduced costs; take on that small risk to cater to a niche that you may have particular interest or expertise in and see where that can lead you.

What other reasons prove the importance of niche markets?

At any size, public relations is essential for a company’s success. As a small company, PR can seem daunting and a luxury for larger companies who can afford it, are already experiencing some WOM (word-of-mouth) or buzz, and who are already making profits. While it may be easier to perform PR tasks with larger budgets to play with, public relations is something small businesses should definitely partake in.

PR may seem like an expensive, unreliable source of advertising, but it very different; PR is not advertising at all, nor should it be seen as an alternative to advertising tactics. Public relations is what its name entails: relations with the public. It is a more honest and sincere interaction with buyers and the media. It can be a place for you to share another side of your company outside of the self-promoting advertisements you may use, which can cost much more than PR efforts.

The key to PR is to really convey yourself and your brand to someone else who will in turn talk about you to another person. It may seem like you are trying to convince them to like you (which may be the case), but it comes from their own interpretations and understandings of who you are that they begin to talk about you. Similar to high school gossip, which can be good and bad, real life companies, the media, and buyers will talk about you in both a good and bad light. Your task is to ensure you respond to what is said, encourage the good to be shared over the bad, and to be mature about it. Like the high school gossip that got a rumor started, your reaction can greatly influence its lifespan, believability, and overall ‘success’ as a rumor. (By success, I mean the impact it has on your reputation, its reach, and success in terms of expected results.)

As a small business, it is your responsibility to encourage the generation of publicity around your company. Media and potential buyers can’t really know much about you unless you help encourage the spread of your company’s buzz. This can be done by including a few things that are cost effective:

1. Press releases. Though press releases are cost effective and often times free to distribute, the main thing to remember is that there is much more to PR than just the press release. A press release can help your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts on your website and on other online press distribution sites, but that’s about as far as it will go. To get media attention and further coverage of your story, you need to connect with the media, referencing the press release that you sent them.
2. Your blog and website. Websites and blogs can be a great place to share information with buyers. This can also be the place where you can list your press releases that have been optimized for the Internet, further increasing your keyword traffic. Moreover, a blog can be a place where you can begin the relationship building process with your buyers by offering them something of value (which is key), encouraging them to participate in the blog, and also helping them to better understand your position. Unlike bigger companies who may not take advantage of this free resource, you can further advance your brand and image by being a personified company with something to offer to buyers and other bloggers. This is a great tool to get connected with others in the industry who blog as well, and can help you build your network as a company or business professional.
3. Social media tools. Along with blogs, these are great tools to use to grow your network. Use these free resources to get connected with others in your industry and with buyers alike. This can be another place for you to offer things of value to your followers, such as tips, resources, and relevant offers from your company. There is a fine line here that defines advertising and PR; many followers of companies online are not looking to be advertised to, but to offer something of value to someone who follows you, such as an offer or sale, can be beneficial if implemented correctly. Use these tools to give your company and brand a face and personality.
4. Customer service. This means paying attention to your buyers online who are responding to your content, sharing your content, or ignoring your content. There are lessons to be learned from each of those situations. Did someone share your content because they were mentioned in it, or did they share it because there was something great and of value there that they wanted others to experience? Take note of that and further improve your efforts in the future. Customer service also means taking responsibility and being a responsive company.

   As publicity grows around your company, it becomes ever more important to monitor what your buyers or potential buyers are saying about your company. This allows you to respond and potentially diffuse a bad situation and potential crisis. Moreover, offering great customer service for buyers who purchase your goods or services (or even return your goods and services) can help to encourage positive WOM that can further enhance your company brand and image. A little bit of attention can go a long way, and customers will share their experiences with others.

5. Media alerts and other invitations to cover. These, like press releases, are only as successful as you want them to be. If you send a media alert out, be sure to follow up with them to remind media about your event and to ensure that you get some sort of a response. The important thing here is to get a reply, even if it is a declination. This can help you plan for your event and to incorporate the media that will be present. Use these alerts to, well, alert the media of your event. This can be an invitation to the media to attend and cover your event with the hopes of further generating some publicity.

Overall, remember to listen to your customers, monitor your online brand, and utilize some of the free resources available to you as a small company. The above tasks are first steps in helping your company’s PR efforts to begin. There is much more you can do, and much more to the aforementioned steps than simply creating a blog or writing a press release; it takes persistent efforts and time to ensure your strategies work and to help ensure success.

As an employee of a small business, this blog has greatly helped to encourage people in my industry to get in touch with me, reach out, and to share my content with others. I made it easy for the content to be shared with the social media buttons, and I also made sure that my content is valuable and of a high quality by sharing what I know and what I’ve learned.

Are you a small business? Have your PR efforts proven to be successful?

The Internet has greatly changed the way PR is done; it has made it easier, and more difficult at the same time, for PR practitioners, professionals, and businesses doing their own PR. On one hand, PR has become easier to implement because of the immediacy of sharing information. Moreover, audiences can now be reached directly rather than having to go through a media contact or publication (though those outlets are still useful sources of coverage and publicity, and large outlets are still seen as trustworthy sources of information).

On the other hand, the Internet has made it more difficult for PR professionals in the sense that there the audiences that can be reached now includes the public, which is a drastic change from the “old days” of PR. What that means then is that PR professionals need to learn how to reformat their messages to create new, interactive campaigns and PR plans, and get ready to partake in two-way conversations, which is another drastic change from the old ways of getting publicity and doing PR.

So, how do you keep up? By being aware of these changes and adapting your techniques accordingly. Ways to do this include the following:

1. Recognizing the customers’ need to communicate with you. With the availability of that connection and communication taking place, (and especially other companies already doing it), your customers might expect you to be online and interacting with them there. With the tools available to you, this can be an easy step to implement. These include: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, foursquare, and others. A new networking site seems to pop-up every week with the hopes of going big like Twitter; evaluate each one in relation to your company and decide then if it makes to implement using them. Customers want to communicate and will gladly do so if you simply make it so that they can.
2. Actually communicating with your customers. Initiating or offering the ability for your customers to communicate with you is not enough; you must actively engage them to keep them coming to you with ideas, complaints, and concerns. This will help prevent them from going elsewhere if they have a complaint, and often times the users of your products are the best sources for product improvements and changes. Moreover, this can be a great way to learn how to tailor messages and campaigns to better reach your audiences.
3. See what your competition is up to. This can help you gauge where your campaign fits in. If you are able, find out the sort of success they are having. You can usually do this through financial reports (though attributing success to a PR campaign or plan can be a bit of a challenge), their blogs or websites, and through their news rooms and press coverage. With a little research you can see the effectiveness of their efforts and see where they’ve perhaps made mistakes. This is a great advantage of not being an incumbent company in an industry.
4. Do your research. This is something I say for every aspect of business and every venture your company attempts (and I may be beating a dead horse here), but it as important here as it is in other areas of your business. This is the best way of having an educated approach to everything you do and can greatly increase your chances for success. For this sort of business action, do your research on the new (to you or the industry) tools available online.
5. See what others in your industry are using. You may not use the same tools, but seeing where your competition is present online can help you to evaluate where you want to be present. Read up on the tools and try them out on your own before you publicly announce on your website or through a press release that you can be found on places like Twitter or Facebook. (Many blogs, including this one, can help you hear one interpretation of an online tool like foursquare.) Some of your loyal customers will find you without you needing to share your being on either platform, but know that doing some “behind the scenes” testing can help you to evaluate if you are, at the least, able to implement the tools into your business/PR plans.
6. Read, read, read. Along the same lines of the point above of research, reading will help you to hear what the online world is saying about a particular topic and can give you many different opinions. Subscribe to Google Alerts, RSS feeds, and find sources of information that you enjoy reading. Also feel free and comfortable enough to ask questions; many bloggers encourage feedback. As a company trying to improve and adapt their PR plans, you, too, should welcome feedback to get your buyers/audiences engaged, which bloggers should also be doing. Just familiarize yourself so you can know the difference between spam comments and ones that truly offer something of value to your blog.

Overall, the online world is ever changing, and with it, PR techniques are changing. Keep yourself informed so that you can stay ahead (or at least inline) with the curve to keep your company on the forefront of that change.

What are some ways you keep up-to-date? Were there times you wish you have been more informed in an area?

Are you still on the fence as to whether or not to implement Twitter or Facebook? Well, if you’ve done your research (internally and externally) and it makes sense (for you) to implement social media, be sure to include Twitter and Facebook as one of the online tools you can use. Below is a summary of a study from Ibtrax SEO Internet Marketing.

From Online PR News:

Online PR News – 12-April-2010 – Comparison of the Social Media marketing strategy advantages and applications of Twitter verse Facebook for businesses. This part of the analysis examines the effectiveness of Facebook vs. Twitter from a business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) Internet marketing strategies perspective.

What follows is a summary of a detailed study that was performed by Irbtrax SEO Internet marketing and took several months to complete. This is part four of a larger Social Media strategy study. To view a release containing the key findings of parts one, two and three visit:

Facebook-vs-twitter-for-business-social-media-marketing-analysis

Summary of Business to Business marketing advantages:

Twitter advantages- Twitter performed better in the general business to business marketing category due to its viral marketing benefits. Viral Marketing is a core business to business social media application for Internet exposure and expediency. The 140 character Twitter Re-Tweets (RT’s) that include links to popular or relevant business content can increase branding, drive website traffic and multiply outside of the Twitter network. Including being streamed in Google ‘Real Time’ searches and featured on many third party resource platforms. The study also concluded that it’s not even necessary to have a large group of followers to benefit from Twitter’s viral marketing advantages.

Facebook advantages- Facebook performed better in the business to business marketing category for select companies that are ‘personalities’. These are companies that are already universally recognized by their name, product or service. As such they naturally attract large followings and these followers often take the time to share relevant or important content among themselves and their followers.

Summary of Business to Consumer marketing advantages:

Facebook advantages- Facebook performed better in the majority of Business to Consumer marketing categories due to its format. A format that allows for the inclusion of photos, multiple outbound links, videos, surveys, promotions, direct engagement and other business to consumer applications. Facebook also facilitates the building of a large network of followers in the shortest amount of time to help market a consumer product or service.

Twitter advantages- Twitter performed very well in the Business to Consumer marketing category where mobile real time applications were vital. Mobile real time applications involve announcements that are time sensitive, distributed through a wireless network and intended for your target audience. Announcements of a spontaneous nature involving special offers, breaking news or notification of impromptu public appearances.

Conclusion- The larger study concludes that in order to maximize your Social Media Internet marketing results it’s best to create a presence on both. However, if trying to decide which one to engage first or where to spend the most amount of your available time- It’s important to perform basic Internet Market research, apply the findings to your target audience and weigh the benefits of each platform. The larger study also concluded that SEO combined with Social Media Marketing will yield greater potential results.

Social media may not work for everyone so it is important to evaluate its uses for your current company, situation, and industry. For more information on determining if social media is right for you and your company, read Public Relations and Social Media | Make Sure if Fits in Your PR Mix.

Have you had success with Twitter or Facebook? Share it in the comments!

At any size, public relations is essential for a company’s success. As a small company, PR can seem daunting and a luxury for larger companies who can afford it, are already experiencing some WOM (word-of-mouth) or buzz, and who are already making profits. While it may be easier to perform PR tasks with larger budgets to play with, public relations is something small businesses should definitely partake in.

PR may seem like an expensive, unreliable source of advertising, but it very different; PR is not advertising at all, nor should it be seen as an alternative to advertising tactics. Public relations is what its name entails: relations with the public. It is a more honest and sincere interaction with buyers and the media. It can be a place for you to share another side of your company outside of the self-promoting advertisements you may use, which can cost much more than PR efforts.

The key to PR is to really convey yourself and your brand to someone else who will in turn talk about you to another person. It may seem like you are trying to convince them to like you (which may be the case), but it comes from their own interpretations and understandings of who you are that they begin to talk about you. Similar to high school gossip, which can be good and bad, real life companies, the media, and buyers will talk about you in both a good and bad light. You task to ensure you respond to what is said, encourage the good to be shared over the bad, and to be mature about it. Like the high school gossip that got a rumor started, your reaction can greatly influence its lifespan, believability, and overall ‘success’ as a rumor. (By success, I mean the impact it has on your reputation, its reach, and success in terms of expected results.)

As a small business, it is your responsibility to encourage the generation of publicity around your company. Media and potential buyers can’t really know much about you unless you help encourage the spread of your company’s buzz. This can be done by including a few things that are cost effective:

1. Press releases. Though press releases are cost effective and often times free to distribute, the main thing to remember is that there is so much more to PR than just the press release. A press release can help your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts on your website and on other online press distribution sites, but that’s about as far as it will go. To get media attention and further coverage of your story, you need to connect with the media, referencing the press release that you sent them.

2. Your blog and website. Websites and blogs can be a great place to share information with buyers. This can also be the place where you can list your press releases that have been optimized for the Internet, further increasing your keyword traffic. Moreover, a blog can be a place where you can begin the relationship building process with your buyers by offering them something of value (which is key), encouraging them to participate in the blog, and also helping them to better understand your position. Unlike bigger companies who do not take advantage of this free resource, you can further advance your brand and image by being a personified company with something to offer to buyers and other bloggers. This is a great tool to get connected with others in the industry who blog as well, and can help you build your network as a company or business professional.
3. Social media tools. Along with blogs, these are great tools to use to grow your network. Use these free resources to get connected with others in your industry and with buyers alike. This can be another place for you to offer things of value to your followers, such as tips, resources, and relevant offers from your company. There is a fine line here that defines advertising and PR; many followers of companies online are not looking to be advertised to, but to offer something of value to someone who follows you, such as an offer or sale, can be beneficial if implemented correctly. Use these tools to give your company and brand a face and personality.
4. Customer service. This means paying attention to your buyers online who are responding to your content, sharing your content, or ignoring your content. There are lessons to be learned from each of those situations. Did someone share your content because they were mentioned in it, or did they share it because there was something great and of value there that they wanted others to experience? Take note of that and further improve your efforts in the future. Customer service also means taking responsibility and being a responsive company.

   As publicity grows around your company, it becomes ever more important to monitor what your buyers or potential buyers are saying about your company. This allows you to respond and potentially diffuse a bad situation and potential crisis. Moreover, offering great customer service for buyers who purchase your goods or services (or even return your goods and services) can help to encourage positive WOM that can further enhance your company brand and image. A little bit of attention can go a long way, and customers will share their experiences with others.

5. Media alerts and other invitations to cover. These, like press releases, are only as successful as you want them to be. If you send a media alert out, be sure to follow up with them to remind media about your event and to ensure that you get some sort of a response. The important thing here is to get a reply, even if it is a declination. This can help you plan for your event and to incorporate the media that will be present. Use these alerts to, well, alert the media of your event. This can be an invitation to the media to attend and cover your event with the hopes of further generating some publicity.

Overall, remember to listen to your customers, monitor your online brand, and utilize some of the free resources available to you as a small company. The above tasks are first steps in helping your company’s PR efforts to begin. There is much more you can do, and much more to the aforementioned steps than simply creating a blog or writing a press release; it takes persistent efforts and time to ensure your strategies work and to help ensure success.

As an employee of a small business, this blog has greatly helped to encourage people in my industry to get in touch with me, reach out, and to share my content with others. I made it easy for the content to be shared with the social media buttons, and I also made sure that my content is valuable and of a high quality by sharing what I know and what I’ve learned.

Are you a small business? Have your PR efforts proven to be successful? Click on this title’s post to leave a comment!

The PublicRelationsBlogger.com glossary defines word of mouth as: “The advertising of a product or brand that takes place between customers. This is promoted through ‘people networks’, referring to WOM as word of mouse as well. There is no outside influence or management from the company or brand.”

Normally, the last sentence in that definition is true. When it comes to astroturfing, companies are very much involved in creating that false WOM, though that is the extreme end of a company partaking in the WOM creation process. Companies can be involved in other ways that are not so bad and do not carry such a negative connotation as astrotrufing. That can include being actively aware of the WOM being generated about your company or client’s company, and responding when necessary. Doing these things can really help t alleviate the minimize the impact and repercussions of negative WOM. Negative WOM can include negative comments, false statements, and customer complaints. These things all need to be taken seriously and given the appropriate attention. Responding to these things can make or break your company’s success and online reputation and brand identity.

Companies do tend to respond to negative WOM, and according to a recent study done by by Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia, “direct engagement is the number one method of rectifying issues and addressing not-so-positive response.” (eMarketer)

Negative comments and false statements about brands can spread fast. Because consumers have the ability to create, publish and distribute their own content—as well as comment, debate, recommend and share their opinions—marketers and their brands are more vulnerable than ever. For instance, brands can be damaged by people who use Twitter to post false information. And they can just as easily be affected for the worse by employees who post prank videos on YouTube. (eMarketer)

Being a responsive PR professional takes tact and prompt action. Though the above tactics found in the study are all viable options to fight negative comments and WOM online, they may not work for your company, or there may may be one method that works better than others. Knowing which ones to use requires a great understanding of your target audiences, buyers, and your own company. Having that understanding can help you to ensure that you respond correctly and are able to respond in a manner that your customers/buyers will appreciate.

Do your homework, and be sure to allow yourself to find what works best by simply trying something; you won’t know if it works well for you unless you try it. Creating a PR or marketing plan is all about implementing tactics and strategies with educated reasoning and being able to evaluate how they are working for you and your company.

Creating an effective and successful PR plan requires an in-depth definition of your target audience. That can be rather difficult if you lack a great understanding of your target audience. A way to help alleviate that difficulty and to make it easier to cater to your target audience is to create a buyer persona for each customer/buyer that can be found in your target audience.

Though marketers and PR professionals have been using buyer personas for years, David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR explains it well and helps readers to grasp the concept. In an undergrad class I was taking, we were asked to create buyer personas in groups so that we could create better campaigns for a company of our choice. My group and I made a few buyer personas so that we would better understand how to market to Toyota’s buyers. That was a valuable component to our overall strategy of creating marketing and PR tactics to reach our target audience.

Scott writes,

Smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal ‘buyer personas’ for their target demographics… [I]f we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic. (New Rules of Marketing and PR, pg. 32.)

Whether you plan to market to them or to target them in your PR tactics, knowing who ‘they’ are is a vital part to getting that right. Scott continues on to say that “[u]nderstanding buyers and building an effective content strategy to reach each of them is critical for success.” (pg. 33)

Creating those buyer personas helped us to create more targeted activities and commercials that would make more of an impact and speak to the needs of those personas. For example, part of our new campaign was to be present at music festivals and to have contests (including one giveaway of a Prius). We were able to create that contest idea by first creating a buyer persona that had the characteristics of someone who cared about the environment, attended these festivals, and were finally earning enough income to purchase a new vehicle.

Say for example you are an online community looking to gain more members. First, define who your target market is. MyWorkButterfly, who aim to help mothers in the workplace, have a few target audiences. They can include the mother to be who is still working and getting ready to take a maternity leave, the mother who wants to return to work, and the mother who is already returned to work after having a child (or children). What MyWorkButterfly could do then is to create three personas that include as much detail about each of these buyers as possible. Each buyer persona will include different points of information which will in turn warrant different strategies to cater to each of their needs.

Scott features some commentary from someone who has been using these buyer personas for more than 20 years. Adele Revella (who has an entire blog dedicated to buyer personas) relays to him:

A buyer persona profile is a short biography of the typical customer, not just a job description but a person description. The buyer persona profile gives you the change to truly empathize with target buyers, to step out of your role as someone who wants to promote a product and see, through your buyers’ eyes, the circumstances that drive their decision process. The buyer persona profile includes information on the typical buyer’s background, daily activities, and current solutions for their problems. (pg. 119-120)

In essence, these buyer personas are a way to give a face to the customers who visit your site, who buy your products, and who generate WOM (word-of-mouth) for your company. Give the buyer personas names, going so far as to even give them a picture of what you think they look like. This can help to make the marketing and PR process more personal and more tailored to the people who are looking to you for a new or better solution to the problems they are currently experiencing.

For MyWorkButterfly, to target their buyer personas and to make them feel welcome on the site, they could have three different sections that target each one directly. There could also be places on the website that cater to all three audiences that talk about postnatal health and mental health, for example. The point of creating the three different spaces on the website is so that each persona feels acknowledged and better understood.

In PR, knowing who to target in terms of publications, your website, and the media is critical to your success. Like advertising, you must know who you are targeting before you can have any measure of successful communication. Moreover, make an effort to get your buyer personas involved in the communication process. Know how they like to communicate and get them acting. This also requires that your calls to action are clear, links are present, and that you make benefits of doing such actions apparent.

Have you created a buyer persona in your PR or marketing efforts? Has that helped you in your communication goals? Click on the title of this post and start the conversation!

Public relations can be a somewhat difficult task to master; measuring the results and the payoffs of performing those tasks can be even more difficult, but that doesn’t make either of them less important. Measuring the success or results of a PR campaign is critical to making improvements, seeing what works, and establishing what can be done (or repeated) next time.

Despite its importance, many companies are not measuring their social media ROI. According to some figures from eMarketer.com, only 16% do so.

That’s a pretty sad number. How are companies supposed to know if their use of blogs, chats, podcasts, and social networking sites is working? It seems common sense to want to know if your efforts being spent online are paying off, no? Perhaps it’s intimidating, foreign, and unimportant; “everyone else is using blogs, social networking sites, and participating online, so it must be working”. I hate to blow that theory out of the water, but that is simply not the case. Some companies will not benefit from using social media. (If your target market is completely offline, what use would it be to spend your time and other resources online?)

To make measuring ROI a little less intimidating, know that there are some ways you can (easily) begin to measure your ROI. While it may be difficult to really see the results of your investments in social media, (and some argue that the ROI from PR and social media is immeasurable), these things can help you to see changes in popularity, traffic, and participation online. These changes can then help you to begin to attribute changes in sales, WOM generated, and PR coverage to the possible ROI from your social media use.

1. To start, do some of the basics. That can include simply creating a social networking site profile. As a PR professional, you should have your own social networking site profiles including those on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. You should also create pages, accounts, and profiles for the company as well. There are more and more social networking sites emerging every month, some more successful than others, so be sure you keep up-to-date with the changes and experiment with the new sites. This method can help to measure your already present online presence and the presence you can create with effort and time.

2. Another basic to implement: Google Analytics. This free tool can help you track traffic, traffic sources, and keyword statistics. This is crucial to your understanding of what is and what is not working online. You can determine if your efforts are paying off by seeing if your press releases, networking with other bloggers and getting them to link to your site, and participating on Twitter and Facebook are bringing traffic to your blog or website. Though this is the most frequently used tactic to measure the ROI of social networking efforts, there are other methods.
   

3. Measuring traffic is an important way to measure ROI, but another method not used as frequently is to measure “soft metrics” that includes participation on your blog or forum, engagement with your online profiles/ social networking sites, and WOM (word of mouth). This is part of an active PR plan that monitors your online brand.
4. Try searching for your blog, website, or company in Google. How are you faring? Having great content that changes and is linked to by other sites can increase your search engine rankings, which can result in more traffic. If they are not ranking highly, give it some time; seeing results and being able to determine any ROI takes patience. The Internet, though instantaneous in many ways, has a bit of a delay when it comes to seeing your pagerank (from Google), Alexa rating, and search result appearances. Know that creating great content and utilizing the right tools is the best way to ensure your website’s success.
5. Conduct research and simply ask your customers what they think. This can help you to really pinpoint what your customers are feeling and what areas you can improve upon.

Keep in mind that this requires persistent, hard work. Know how to interpret data, where visitors to your blog and website are coming from, and where you can spend more of your time and attention.

What are some ways you measure the ROI of your social media? Is it measurable?

Demographics: n. Or, demographic data, are the characteristics of a population as used in government, marketing or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research. Commonly used demographics include sex, race, age, income, disabilities, educational attainment, home ownership, employment status, and even location. (Source)

Demographics are something used in many areas of business, from sales and marketing to public relations and advertising. While demographics are constantly changing, they can give you a good idea of what an area looks like, the changing trends (such as the average age of an area), and other statistics such as overall education of an area. Things like changing trends can be particularly useful in that they show the changes an area is undergoing; if the average age of an area is increasing or decreasing, you can have a better idea of which regions would be best to target when it comes to your new car, for example.

Additionally, there are also ethnographics. This information can also tell you about the groups of people in an area, but it focuses on the behaviors, cultural activities, and beliefs of a group, the overall nature. This can be more relevant to the PR and marketing team since creating respective plans really relies on the understanding of the behaviors of a demographic group rather than simply their education level or income earned. While I agree that having a particular amount of income and having received a specific level of education can greatly affect the way a group acts, there is more to it than simply race or gender.

Some find demographics to be somewhat limiting; they assume everyone in a group is the same, and they possibly help to perpetuate stereotypes. For example, assuming everyone who watches the Superbowl is the same can really limit the audiences you reach. Many of the commercials spoke to the mass audience that was watching the game and ignored the other smaller groups. While that may be the best way to utilize the million dollar commercial spot, in the long-run it can only hurt your reach. With the Internet, those small niches can now be reached in addition to the larger audiences. But, that’s for another post.

The important thing to remember is that demographics were used in traditional advertising and marketing campaigns and it seemed to work well, or at least well enough. With the Internet making it easier and easier to categorize and group people by the way they act, instead of simply the area in which they live, it’s time to consider really utilizing the tools available. Looking at a demographic group online, there are bound to be many differences, making it difficult to target them. To look at an ethnographic group online who spend their time in the same places, you can better see what methods would work to reach them.

PR and the Social Web wrote a post on this recently that help to corroborate my point:

In social networks we can build an accurate ethnographically detailed picture of our target audience based on what they do and what interests and excites them. Whatever part of the social spectrum they might come from the fact is that they have shown an interest in a relevant area. That’s an insight more powerful than any generalisation [sic] based on class, sex, race or place.

What are some benefits of demographics that still makes it critical to pay attention to them? What is your take on ethnographics?

Public relations professionals often have to prepare themselves, someone in the company, or their clients for an interview. That means that you must help them to be comfortable with the material that will be covered, ready to answer any questions, and acting in a professional manner.

As the PR pro, your role is to ensure that they have the correct information to share, know what to expect, and are presentable and respectable.

Here are some things to consider when prepping yourself or your client for an interview:

- Practice. This makes a world of difference. Prepare the interviewee with possible questions and do mock-interviews. This can calm the nerves and help to foster a comfortable appearance.

- Do your homework. This can help you to be better informed about the person who will be interviewing the speaker, what they cover, and what they look for. This can also help you to better perform and to be able to give the interviewer what they were hoping to gain from the interview. Don’t assume that you will know everything you need to know and don’t assume that the interviewer will be your friend. Know too that they are not out to get you.

- Be personable. Use first names, smile, and talk to the interviewer. (That is why you came to the interview, after all.) Be sure to speak to the interviewer instead of to the camera, and be responsive to questions you may not have expected.

- Be honest. Truthfully answer questions, but know what is information that can be shared and which information is meant to be kept within the company. Avoid saying “no comment”. While some PR pros will encourage you to say this if you need to, avoid saying so; this can raise some concerns and make you look bad. Try saying something about the topic, sharing only what you are able to share. Moreover, avoid gossip or something you don’t know much about; speculating what you don’t know can get you in trouble, and gossip never helped anyone’s image.

- Be humble. When necessary, you need to be able to admit to mistakes. You should also know that while this is the interviewer’s job, they are taking the time to talk to you, just like you are taking the time to be there. Respect their time and be sure to thank them for it.

- Be aware. Pay attention to their body language and be aware of your own. Also, be aware of your appearance; try to avoid distracting patterns and accessories and excessive make-up. Also be aware of how long you talk; pay attention to cues from the crew and the interviewer so you keep the interview the length they need it to be.

Just remember that this interview is a reflection of you as the PR professional and of the company the interviewee represents, so prep and polish them to shine on camera or the radio.

Have any tips to share from your own interview experiences? Click on this post’s title and leave a comment!

As a PR professional your goal is to help your client or company to eloquently convey the correct information to the public. Public relations requires excellent communication skills, which you cannot completely control in regards to the company executives, but you can help to choose the best spokesperson to share information. You can also help them by creating an excellent template and script to follow.

As the public relations specialist, manager, or team, it is up to you to coordinate press conferences, interviews, and appearances. Ways you can help to make them easier and less stressful is to create a speech or script for your spokesperson. The spokesperson can be the CEO, COO, someone from IT, or even someone from the PR team. The important thing to remember is to ensure that the spokesperson knows the topic they are talking about and that they have enough people skills to make them personable, responsive, and calm.

When choosing a spokesperson, consider the following:

From Strategic Public Relations, here are some questions to ask:

• Are they great communicators?
• Are they passionate and enthusiastic about your organization’s work?
• Are they likable?
• Do they have good listening skills?
• Are they insightful enough to understand what’s beyond the question?
• Are they patient and willing to educate?
• Do they value the media and the role it plays?
• Are they comfortable and prepared?

(pg. 100-101)

Your spokesperson should understand the company message and be able to convey that to stay on that message. They should believe in what they are talking about; it is easier to share that information if they are fully behind the message and idea they share. Believing in something can also help to ensure that they are passionate about it. Moreover, finding someone who can communicate, has interpersonal skills, respects the media and their time (and understands why the media is important), and feels prepared.

A great way to ensure they are prepared is to help them become prepared. That includes helping them to feel comfortable talking openly and being honest. Being open and honest makes it easier to feel and come across as being comfortable; being the opposite is often times visible to reporters and the public. Practice their speeches with them, give them possible interview questions, and let the reporter know some topics that you would like to be covered in the interview. You can even ask for the reporter or journalist to offer questions they plan to ask.

Some key points to remember when composing a speech:

• Be truthful. Honesty is vital. While you may not be giving the speech personally, you are responsible for the reputation of the client or company. You
• Do your homework. Talk with the spokesperson you have in mind and practice the interview so that they can be prepared. This can help you to write the speech based on their own responses and can also help them to feel more connected to the speech; reading something someone else wrote for you may be a little difficult.
• Do some research. Learn about the event they will be speaking at, the topics they will cover, and the reason they are there. This can help you direct the speech in the right direction.
• Speeches are tools. They can be used to inform, advocate, or perpetuate an idea, company, product, or service. You can use the speech as a way to correct information, to announce a new venture, or to help advocate a great cause. These can help generate PR and WOM (word of mouth).
• Choose an interesting topic. Get input from the speaker. Choose a topic that is interesting to them so that they can be better involved in the speech, making it a better speech to hear for the audience.
• Make it personal. The speaker should be speaking in first person as if telling a story about themselves, their involvement in the company, and why they are giving the speech. This makes it easier for the audience to relate to the speaker and makes it, well, more personable.

Lastly, remember to make the speech conversational. In most cases the speech should be like a conversation between colleagues or peers. Keep it light and short; less is more when it comes to a speech. Attention spans can be rather short, and hearing a short, quality speech can be much more memorable than a lengthy, fluffed speech. Remember too that as the PR professional, giving a speech or 2 (or 20) in your career is normal. It is your responsibility to address the public at times, and even partake in an interview.

What are some tips you have for writing and giving speeches?

Writing is a large part of the public relations professional’s job. (OK, almost all of the PR pro’s job involves writing.) That means that you must be an exceptional writer, proofreader, and conveyor of information. Though a lot of what is said about you online and offline depends on what you write, customers and readers of publications will ultimately read the work of another individual, such as a journalist, reporter, or blogger. With that, your responsibilities as the PR person expand to include the monitoring of that information. Being aware of what is being said about you gives you an advantage over the companies who see little importance in doing so.

Some benefits of monitoring your company’s buzz or WOM (word-of-mouth):

1. The ability to respond when something said about you is inaccurate or improperly portrayed.
2. The ability to compliment, share, or congratulate when you enjoy an article written about you or your client.
3. The ability to react to complaints from customers or clients.
4. Overall, the ability to curb or avoid a crisis.

One way you can do #1 and #2 is to write a Letter to the Editor. These are used primarily for #1 to help correct mistakes (which can poorly affect your company), but using it for #2 is also a great way to perpetuate and promote good WOM and can help to encourage a positive rapport with the media who covered your company.

From the Public Relations Writer’s Handbook by Merry Aronson, Don Spetner, and Carol Ames, here are some great rules of thumb when considering writing a letter to the editor:

When writing a letter to the editor to correct a mistake, be sure to include the following:

• The date and location of the incorrect article
• The information that was incorrectly printed
• The correct information that should have been printed instead
• The name and title of the writer of the letter

Additionally, when writing to criticize the conclusion a reporter may have come to (inaccurately portraying the company or client) stick to the following recommendations:

• Avoid being emotional in your response
• Support your statements with facts
• Keep the letter brief
• Avoid threatening litigation
• Make yourself and your opinion clear and succinct so that it is easily understood
• State your case in a professional and tactful manner
• Maintain a good rapport and relation with the media

(Public Relations Writer’s Handbook, pgs. 260-261.)

Keep in mind that a critical letter to the editor is to be used with caution; the last point above, “maintain a good rapport and relation with the media” is key to your PR success. If you do send a critical letter, try not to alienate them with abusive, emotional, and overly critical comments. Moreover, if a story or article features a critical aspect of your company that was true, do not write a letter to the editor about it; this may perpetuate things and draw more attention to the story.

Letters to the editor can be great tools, however; it can show the media that you are in tune with what they (and other media outlets) are writing about you. It can also improve your media relations when you send a complimentary letter to thank the author for writing the story. Lastly, they can be used as a publicity tool to “present a positive positioning statement about the company’s strengths versus its competitors. Letters to the editor often present excellent opportunities for positive publicity, whatever the initiating context or pretext.” (pg. 246)

Have you experienced some benefits from writing a letter to an editor?