Public Relations

Intro to Digital PR

Heather Sliwinski Leave a comment

What does a day in the life of the digital public relations professional look like? Today, your practice can be described in two simple words: you are “always on.” When the Internet became our stomping ground for public communications, reaction time had to be much more immediate. Of course, social media continued to fuel the “always on” feeling even more because networks don’t rest and brands have to be prepared. When you accept a position in PR, you quickly learn the nature of the job requires attention at all times of the day or night, and new skills and practices are constantly in development.

My book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional,” presents many new practices that demonstrate this notion of “always on.” As a matter of fact, if you break down the average day of the digital PR professional, you will quickly see why you need to incorporate this idea of “always on” into your everyday activities and your daily regimen.

As a digital PR professional, you’re “always on” because you are:

Technology Savvy: PR people don’t have to code databases, unless it’s something you want to learn. However, you do need to know how to create a WordPress blog and build profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other major social channels. Understanding where and how your audiences participate on different platforms, with a good working knowledge of strategic use, is also critical. If you can’t answer questions about Pinterest vs. Instagram or Facebook vs. Tumblr, then you need to roll up your sleeves and learn those differences quickly. Ask yourself a simple question: How will you guide your executives’ brand communication if you can’t answer these questions for them?

Proactive: There is no sitting back (ever) and feeling complacent that your stakeholders have what they need. You must be proactively “listening” or monitoring their conversations, feelings, ideas and ways they want to interact with you. Being proactive means that you are using the latest technology to fully understand these conversations and the consumer perceptions they expose. You’re learning how to engage as a better partner, employer, resource and problem solver. Of course, actively listening and being connected through social media will also prevent negative dialogue from escalating into unexpected crisis situations.

Flexible: Thinking your day will be the same every day is almost asking for the impossible. Are you really able to predict what your day looks like? As a best practice, you can plan your initiatives, but in the age of public communications, your daily interactions may change drastically from hour to hour or even minute to minute. Having the flexibility to respond to your stakeholders in real time is where digital PR professionals can truly serve their brands. You also have to be open and willing to explore new ways of communication as technology continues to advance and platforms improve their functionality.

Strategic/Critical Thinker: PR professionals use tactics to support their communications programs. However, we are not just tactical doers. On the contrary, brands are looking for strategists who focus on a planned approach with goals and objectives in place, show a deep understanding of their audience, develop messages that resonate with stakeholders, reach people where they congregate and use measurement that will capture the desired actions. Sending out news releases, tweeting and posting to Facebook are the tactical elements of a communications program. Why, when and how we participate, through specific channels, is the strategic thinking required for communications success.

Accountable: PR professionals have to take accountability to a higher level. Accountability tied directly to the bottom line is the accountability that executives love to see. However, that’s not always possible. The good news is they also want to see communications impact in the form of customer satisfaction tied to positive sentiment and testimonials, editorial coverage across different media (including social media), reputation maintenance and greater awareness of the brand, which is often a part of the ROI puzzle. PR doesn’t always have a direct tie to the bottom line, but when our results are a part of a larger marketing and sales picture, the accountability becomes more visible. Another key takeaway here is that you can’t work in a vacuum and your accountability should be a part of a larger team effort.

Of course, these are only a few of the skills and practices that should be on your digital PR checklist. Call it a part of the job description of the future, or what you might see in a job posting for a PR position. Either way, it’s your opportunity to blend great PR skills with new media communications. To truly embrace the “always on” mindset, you must commit yourself to newer skills and practices on a daily basis and as a part of your professional development.

 

Deirdre BreakenridgeDeirdre Breakenridge is CEO of Pure Performance Communications. A 25-year veteran in public relations, she teaches at NYU and speaks nationally and internationally on the topics of PR, marketing and social media. She is the author of five business books, with her most recent book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional,” published by Financial Times Press in May 2012.

Intro to Crisis Communications

Heather Sliwinski Leave a comment

Almost 17 years ago, I started my career in public relations after a five-year stint as a trade journalist.  Since I have a social butterfly/people-person personality, I thought PR was all about mingling with the celebrities, traveling and promoting great news journalists were sure to write about.  After I took off my rose-colored glasses, I realized PR wasn’t always peaches and cream and often involved using skill sets like crisis communications to protect my company’s image and brand.

I started my career in technology PR and quickly discovered strategic crisis communications were must-have skills to survive in one of the most stressful jobs in the professional landscape. Why do you ask?  At most of the companies I worked for in the telecommunications segment in the 1990s, acquisitions, restructurings, layoffs and management upheavals were commonplace. Therefore, it was essential for me to develop crisis communications skills early on in my career to prepare my company for the worst.  Thinking on my feet, developing strategic counseling and planning skills were drilled into my DNA as a PR professional early on.

Fast forward to the last few years. What’s been the big trend in PR?  Whether you are a new PR or veteran PR professional, no one can forget the crises that have affected big companies like Chick-fil-A, BP, News Corp., Penn State, Netflix and HP. The common theme in many of these crises is that the PR and marketing teams didn’t develop solid communications plans to react to the media quickly enough and preserve their brand’s image.  Whether your company is in the technology, healthcare or travel and tourism field, you always need to be prepared for potential situations involving lawsuits, accusations of impropriety, sudden changes in management and other volatile situations on which your stakeholders — and the media that serves them — often focus.

Crisis communications is at the heart of my current job today.  My company provides essential information that helps customers across all industries and government predict, assess and manage risk. We provide products and services that address evolving client needs in the risk sector, while upholding the highest standards of security and privacy.  To that end, upholding my company’s standards of compliance in a highly-regulated industry is a natural extension of why crisis communications is so important.

For me, every day is different.  I have to stay on top of what’s happening with my company in the media landscape by reading and studying trends, including privacy and security changes, regulatory and compliance issues, to name a few.  In addition, I avidly monitor the news and potential crises through social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  In a highly-regulated business like mine, it’s essential to respond appropriately to media inquiries as well.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my job is helping our spokespeople and marketing teams develop strategic messages that help protect, preserve and raise our brand in key markets like financial services, government and insurance – ultimately so we can influence the key influencers – the media and analyst community.

Therefore, developing an issues or crisis communications playbook is the way our small communications team prepares for a potential crisis that could involve a technology issue, an executive appointment, a natural disaster or on-site employee issue.  This is our guide or instruction book for communicating quickly and decisivively to our key publics, including the media, the industry analysts, partners and customers, charities and investors.

Change continues to be the only constant in my job.  However, here are five for new professionals looking to add crisis communications skills into their careers:

  1. Take courses on crisis communications through PRSA and other outlets like PR News.  The only way to effectively learn how to become an effect crisis communications pro is by learning from the experts who have years of experience managing them the right way.
  2. Ask your key spokespeople what the five biggest risks would be to your organization’s business.  Asking the hard questions and preparing the answers to potential risks your organization faces, will help you prepare your talking points, Q&As and issues management playbook in the event a crisis happens.
  3. Study what has happened with some of the biggest PR crises over the last few years and learn from their mistakes.  Mistakes are bound to happen in the PR profession because communications aren’t always effectively managed or rolled out. But you can magnify those mistakes by a magnitude of 10 when a crisis is mishandled. So you can learn from what other companies or organizations have done to repair or resurrect their images and brands in the wake of disasters that will help you in the long run.
  4. Put your crisis communications skills into practice.  Start small by simulating a crisis communications drill.  Once your crisis playbook is developed, set up a war room and temporary phone lines and prepare your spokespeople to be trained to take questions from the media.  Practice makes perfect and drills help to make sure you are properly prepared if a true disaster happens.

Crisis communications is far and away one of the most difficult PR skill sets to master, but you need to learn to be prepared in case your company has to deal with a crisis.

 

Stephen LoudermilkStephen Loudermilk is global media and analyst relations director at LexisNexis, where he heads communications for the company’s Business Services and Screening practices.  In his spare time, he is actively involved in PRSA, where he serves as chairman of the Technology Section and treasurer of the PRSA Southeast District.

The Press Release Isn’t Dead: Writing for the Digital Age

Heather Sliwinski 2 Comments

In an age where established corporations are challenged by Internet startups and consumers order dinner on their smartphones, every industry is learning to adapt to modern advances in digital technology. In fact, industries are finding ways to harness these developments and capitalize on them.

Public relations is naturally at the forefront of this ever-changing landscape. A discipline responsible for communicating with diverse audiences needs to be where those audiences are and speaking their language. This change applies not only to mass consumers, but also to information and content gatekeepers – another role that has been transformed, not nullified, by the Digital Age.

As traditional media shifts, traditional media relations is feeling some growing pains as well. One of the basic tactical issues PR has to deal with is whether the press release is dead or alive. After all, it’s true that PR has evolved far past the elements conventionally associated with it. Modern campaigns commonly involve social strategies and larger-than-life activations that blur with what’s historically been seen as marketing territory. So it’s only natural that we pause to question whether press release dissemination – sometimes scorned as a pesky push tactic – is still relevant.

The truth is, no matter what you call it or what form it takes as digital continues to evolve, the function of the press release is, and always will be, needed.

Think about it like this. Scores of additional media targets have cropped up as the digital space expands. There are all sorts of individuals you might want to reach, from social media influencers to bloggers, that are increasingly difficult to differentiate from traditional journalists. Everyday consumers have been elevated to the level of news editors, as social media and consumer reviews live in the same space as the journalistic pieces we’ve always thought of as “media.”

It’s a tricky landscape to navigate, but success ultimately boils down to your ability to hold an early, active and formative role in telling and shaping your own story (or likely your organization’s or client’s story). Of course there are many ways to do this, like driving traffic to your site’s media center, fostering a social dialogue or sparking word of mouth interest. These methods are all good things, but the tried-and-true strategy of directly targeting those individuals who are writing and talking about you is still as effective as ever.

A press release is an opportunity to tell your organization’s story with the added credibility of your own proactive authority and voice. There will always be a need to do this, even if the look and sound of it changes from a standard document to a video pitch.

But just because the press release is a timeless PR tool does not mean we can let our approach to it stagnate. The Digital Age has altered the basis of what makes an effective pitch.

To really grasp this, we need to think more like journalists than ever. Keep in mind that their reality is shifting a swell. The 24/7 news cycle is morphing into more of a speed-of-light operation, and journalists are now expected to develop content for traditional outlets, websites and social media. In short, they are the busiest they’ve ever been.

On top of this, easy access to digital information and dissemination has created a much higher volume of incoming pitches. After all, just about anyone can write a pitch and blast it to contacts with a few clicks of Mail Merge. Journalists are weeding through an unprecedented amount of information that’s being hurled their way.

These trends aren’t going anywhere, so we need to be mindful of them as we craft our press releases. The demand for substance is higher, as the digital shift has ushered in a keen focus on content curation and has removed all tolerance for self-promotional language that gives neither journalists nor consumers what they’re seeking. The information inflation highlights the need for credible communication, and that’s exactly what you and your press release are positioned to deliver.

Besides the basics of thinking like a journalist and answering the questions you anticipate them asking – yes, the five W’s and all – you can take several steps to implement new digital trends that will help your press release cut through the clutter.

  • Use a multimedia news release and include elements that can be repurposed for news websites and blogs. Provide infographics, videos and hi-res images that your media target can easily repost.
  • Always consider search engine optimization. Remember that press releases are often housed on corporate websites or widely distributed online. Include keywords and links to relevant resources.
  • Take advantage of online distribution sites, like Vocus’s PRWeb, to help your information reach mass consumers just as quickly as traditional gatekeepers.
  • Make your content simple to share via social media. Be sure your headline fits in the 140-character Twitter limit, and incorporate links that allow readers to automatically share the release on top social platforms.

The form of the press release might change, but the facts, stats and newsworthiness still need to be there. There will always be a need for stories, as long as you know how to drive your story home.

How about you? What’s your take on press releases in the Digital Age?

 

Keri CookKeri Cook works with Hill+Knowlton Strategies’ consumer marketing practice in New York. She graduated from Liberty University with a bachelor’s degree in communication studies and writes on topics ranging from media relations to marketing trends, to corporate strategy and crisis communications. While completing her undergrad, Cook was named PRWeek’s 2012 Student of the Year.

Five Lessons for Integrating Social Media in PR

Heather Sliwinski 1 Comment

I remember being a junior in college and setting up a blog for a class assignment. At the time, blogging was still a new form of communication for our industry (wow, that makes me sound old!), and I remember wondering when I was going to use it. Little did I know, blogging and using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter would become part of my everyday job.

As public relations professionals, we strive to find the best medium for distributing our key messages to target audiences. We are challenged with making our messages succinct, timely and transparent. And with social media, our job really is no different. Social media is just another tool in our kit that doesn’t necessarily replace traditional media but instead complements it. In fact, when done correctly, social media is treated as a channel rather than a tactic.

I’ve learned five lessons in my career about social media’s role in our profession:

  •  Don’t set out looking for a job in ‘social media public relations.’ I think every practitioner should have a working knowledge of the platforms that exist and how they can potentially apply to client strategies. It’s part of our job to know all the communication tools out there regardless of whether your title has social media in it or not. Yes, I leave Twitter and Facebook open all day. That doesn’t mean I’m on it every minute, but it needs to be easily accessible to make sure nothing is missed. For me, it’s just like having my email open. Plus, you never know when a reporter is going to post that they are looking for a source. Trust me, it will happen!
  • Social media is constantly evolving. Whether it’s a new photo sharing site or changes to the way brand managers get Facebook Insights, there always seems to be something new to learn. Don’t ever grow overconfident in your social media skills.
  • Try new things. When I hear of a new site, I usually try to use it on a personal level before trying to incorporate it into any campaigns. This step would be the research part of the RPIE process. You wouldn’t start a campaign without research, and you wouldn’t jump into social media for a brand without doing that research. Using it personally will give you great insight into how a user will be viewing and interacting with your brand.
  • Listen, listen, listen and then listen some more. If you don’t listen, then you really shouldn’t have a presence on these sites. People want to interact with your brand, and they want to be heard. It takes time to build the relationships, but it’s worth it in the end. After all, the goal for using this channel should be dialogue and engagement.      How can you accomplish that without listening?
  • Be careful what you say. Given the real-time nature, it’s easy to want to respond quickly. However, it’s  important to think through your response and even have someone do a quick review of it before posting. Once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.

How are you using social media in your postition? What other things should new professionals know about social media’s role in our profession?

 

Christina MortonChristina Morton is an account executive at Fry Hammond Barr, a national advertising, public relations and interactive marketing agency that’s been connecting people and brands for more than 50 years. Fry Hammond Barr has offices in Orlando and Tampa.

Intro to Education PR by Kirsten Khire, APR

Zaneta Chuniq Inpower 1 Comment

Are you ready for a PR career in higher education?

By Kirsten M. Khire, APR

This year marks my 10th anniversary working in higher education public relations, following seven years in journalism. When people ask me what I do, I can predict some of the reactions. “It must be so nice to have the summer off.” Or “What a fun laid-back job!” Oh yes, I’ve come to identify the stereotypes and misconceptions about higher ed PR. For those new PR professionals considering hoping to break into the field, I have more information about working in higher education public relations and communications.

  1. Truth: It’s a very rewarding career. I often tell new interns during orientation that we are promoting one of the best products in existence – education. It’s a universal need and it’s very fulfilling to watch students complete their degrees and succeed. It’s also a thrill to be around faculty members who are researching and teaching new ideas in the field. That energy is genuinely contagious.
  2. False: Higher ed PR pros have the summers off. In my experience, the summer season is definitely quieter in the physical sense because the students and faculty members are mostly on hiatus. But for me, it has traditionally been a heavy production period (particularly in terms of publications and web projects) and a time to plan and strategize.
  3. True and False: It’s a fun, laid-back job. Fun it is, laid back it is not. If you are working for a public university, you are dealing with a non-profit budget, probably budget cuts, and a very small staff. You learn to be creative with your time and your talents. This morning, I created a PowerPoint for the dean, ghostwrote a dean communiqué and gathered photos for 3 fundraising videos – all before noon.
  4. True: Higher education public relations provides a solid public relations foundation. Recently I successfully completed the PRSA Accreditation process. The work I was doing met all of the major PR campaign processes – research, planning, implementation and evaluation. I may not have the budget that a major soft drink company might, but the strategy involved in PR campaigns remains the same.
  5. False: Higher ed PR doesn’t have clear goals. Like any business, higher education has very tangible business metrics. These include student recruitment (tuition dollars), external research funding (grants and contracts from government, foundations and industry) and individual support (donations from alumni and “friends.”) These are extremely real financial goals, and the sooner PR pros plug into them, the better. Public relations can proactively boost the brand and lead to measurable results of objectives.
  6. False: You need specific training for a higher ed PR career. My path is a case in point. As a former journalist, I’m comfortable conducting interviews with faculty members on topics that are unfamiliar or need layperson translation. As with most humans (we are only that!), PR professionals have strengths and areas of growth. Some are wonderful at media relations; others have a background in marketing. The goods news is that universities need a good variety of communications professionals.

All of this is a long-winded introduction to say, if you are still interested in this career, read on. Breaking into higher education PR is not impossible, but you need to be strategic. Having experience in non-profit settings, writing about research and of course being an alum/alumna all help. Pursuing your master’s degree or Accreditation also can help. Above all, networking with and talking to current PR pros in higher education can provide you with insight into the field and valuable connections during the job hunt.

Kirsten Khire is an accredited communications professional with more than 17 years of experience in public relations and journalism, with a focus on strategic, digital, web and social media communications.