Tag: PR

Digital Press Relations Tips & Essentials

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A short, brief list of digital PR tips & essentials.

-PR blog posts and press releases views happen mostly on Mondays and Wednesdays. First thing in morning.
-Tuesdays are a bad day to issue a PR or a good story on your company’s blog….people tend to work and stay focus on Tuesdays.
-Fridays are bad. Fridays see very little traffic to content. Everyone is out to lunch on Fridays or gets in late to work.
-If you do send out a press release (wire), post it on your company blog as well = more traction.
-Ideal blog post length is between 1,000-2,000 words.
-Make your PR or story post link-worthy. Do not forget a great image (hi-res) or visual to your digital content like an Infographic.
-All Press Releases and PR campaign’s must contain complementary digital assets in order to get links. Links are symptomatic of good PR.
–Twitter is a PR wet dream. Use Twitter for media relations. Busy reporters & reviewers do not answer their phones and receive countless e-mails, but they do pay attention to Twitter! Twitter is a great way to link a press release or a quality company blog post. It adds traction and traffic (value-add). Twitter can also be used to Pitch. Before any pitch has been made on Twitter to @journalist follow them for a few months. Get to know them. If you like what they are doing and reporting, retweet them or give them props! Share their stuff and links to their articles. If @journalist needs info or asks for help, reach out immediately and make it your priority. Help them out, and they will help you out. It goes both ways. Let the reporter know you’ve been driving traffic to their story. Keep the pitch respectful and short. Example: @journalist Do you accept story pitches? @journalist I just sent you an email, take a look when you get a chance. Its a good fit for your outlet.
-Facebook. Yes, @journalist use Facebook as well. @journalist will use Facebook on their own or through their publication page. Share their stories + interact with their readers. Interact with them and become visible by liking and commenting on their posts. Establish a professional relationship.
-Build a journalist / reporter list for your niche. Need to build a good list of Press for your particular product or service? Start with research. A good shortcut is to use JustReachOut. JustReachOut is a website dedicated to finding reporters who have written about your particular product or service. Just add your company’s product category in the search box, and the engine will bring up reporters interested and have written about your industry. Connect with them and reach out.

Lastly, Monitor your analytics for referral traffic. Figure out what works, and what doesn’t.

Social Media Crisis Action Plan

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Whether your a big or small company, a celebrity or some kind of a famous personality with a large amount external exposure, chances are you may have to deal with some kind of social media crisis sooner or later. A crisis can occur at random (insensitive tweet), or it can occur with a product misstep or even a social media account hacked. In this digital world, speed of these harmful conversations can implode on you or your company in mere seconds.

While there is no once size fits all approach, the below basic social media action plan will help you quickly identify the crisis (issue) and resolve it before it goes viral and turns into disaster.

The first stage of social media crisis planning is to identify the problem or issue in real-time before it gets out of control and goes viral. There are many tools out there that can help you keep tabs and monitor the majority of social media platforms. Most of these social tracking tools depend on keywords important to you or your company. Keywords such as “Company” or “product name” “name of person” “events” “competitors” “social media accounts” etc.

A short list below:

  • Social Mention. A great social real-time listening tool for your brand. It measures your influence within four key categories: passion, sentiment, strength, and reach.
  • Google Alerts. Track your brand mentions across web and news sites.
  • Mention.net. Track your brand across blogs, news sites and forums.
  • Talkwalker. Track your brand across across mostly blogs.
  • Twazzup. Real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.
  • HowSociable. Measure and track what your competition is doing in Social Media.
  • Spredfast. A great Social relationship platform to monitor your brand as well as tailor and engage in the right audience.
  • Sprout Social. Great tool for monitoring and measuring your brands.
  • Radian6. A salesforce product. It allows you to quickly and efficiently track, monitor, and react to comments, questions, and complaints as they happen on most all social media platforms.

Here are five basic steps to include in your social media crisis plan:

1. Act quickly. Speeds kills, but speed also resolves! Explain the issue or problem FIRST and what your going to do to address it ASAP before it takes hold on Social Media. Be very transparent. You need to do this before it destroys your brand or major lawsuit.
2. Take charge. Step up and take charge of the issue and move fast (even if its at 2am).
3. Be transparent. If its bad and your company screwed up. Take ownership. Own up to the problem or issue!
4. Engage. Engage all the nay-sayers. Engage all the Social Media Trolls and critics.
5. Spread the word. Post your PR response on your website, company blog, social media pages and media releases.

Bottom line: Don’t wait until the threat to your company’s reputation becomes visible. Identify the crisis and get out in front of it before it takes hold.

QuantCast – A Tool to Check Blog or Website Legitimacy

Quick tip: If you are a PR pro or digital marketer looking for audience demographics, QuantCast is a key tool to check targeted blogs or websites for your service, products or clients. Digital marketers, PR pro’s, and product managers can tailor efforts based on unique audience insights using QuantCast tools.

Why is Content Marketing So Crucial?

Besides driving traffic to your corporate website, good content marketing reinforces your brand – your brand becomes a more famous name online as people notice your content and start remarking on it, retweeting it, helping to build you into a household name. These effects “gel” over time and you will see the traffic benefit and the conversions.

Content creation success is measured many ways including:

– Spike in visitor traffic and page views on the specific content.
– The number of Shares, Likes, Pins, Tweets, Forwards.
– Major media mentions and stories covering your business.
– Website ranking (SERPs) increase.
– Conversions or Sales.

Increase Your Blog Traffic!

With Google + getting more relevant in Google’s search traffic ranking, its crucial that you share your posts via Google+ (in addition to Twitter and Facebook). Don’t miss this easy opportunity to leverage additional traffic or just increase brand awareness. LinkedIn also has this feature (status updates) that you can easily link your blog posts. These content sharing platforms also increase your chances of going viral as well as interacting with your own community. Don’t forget to exploit in your status updates! Consistently using this strategy every time you post to your blog will increase your followers and drive traffic back to your site.

Your Social Media Strategy Must Include These Platforms

  • FaceBook (encourage Likes and Shares)
  • Twitter (create robust profiles that link-back to your company website)
  • LinkedIn (many forums you can promote your business)
  • YouTube (create marketing & product videos to technical support “how to” solutions)
  • StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon now accounts for more than 50% of all referral traffic from the top social media sites)
  • Wikipedia (The key to getting traffic from Wikipedia is to simply post external and reference links)
  • Blogs (base your blog on the WordPress or Tumblr platform. The “reblog” strategy helps generate traffic. Post at least one blog post a day. Don’t have blog content? Pull some content out of existing white papers, or marketing collateral) 
  • Forums (get active in your online community!)
  • Social News Sites such as digg, reddit, Slashdot, etc.
  • Q & A Sites such as Yahoo Answers, Quora, Answers.com, etc.
  • Document Sharing Sites such as Scribd, docstoc, slideshare (generate good content that people will want to share)
  • Check-in sites such as foursquare

These Social Media sites create “signals” to Google in which they take into account when ranking search results. They also push enormous amounts of traffic back to your website. An active social media presence creates branding opportunities as well as goodwill for your customers (think customer support). In cases of PR messaging, social media delivers instantly.

How to Reach the New Media Influencers

Media is one of the most powerful groups out there. Whether your a big company or a small company, developing relationships with all kinds of media is crucial for your PR campaign. Knowing how to pitch the media is also crucial. Most of the online media world hate PR flacks. The influencer’s such as review site editorial, niche bloggers, or the online and hard copy magazines all have different ways they would like to be approached. For example. I know of one very influential hi-tech gadget blogger that will not look at a PR email blast or a canned email asking to review product. Instead, this blogger wants people to get involved in his blog community first, then pitch him on his FaceBook wall or Twitter. He doesn’t have time to read canned PR email. He wants a 1-2 line pitch he can read FAST and from a person whom he sees in his blog feedback section that’s active in his blog.

How do you find the names, websites, blogs or email address of the influencer’s within in your industry?

Try these resources:

  • www.highbeam.com (Enables searching the blog library, RSS feeds, web to research facts, articles, and journalists in your chosen industry).
  • www.vocus.com (provides a web-based software suite to help find and manage key journalists, analysts, bloggers).
  • www.cision.com (Cision’s MediaSource software enables professionals to compile a general or TARGETED media lists online).

These resources can also have the value benefit of answering questions on how a journalist or blogger accepts pitches or how they like to be contacted. Bloggers are increasing within the media world everyday and attract millions of eyeballs. Within my company I have created a “Bloggers Relations” group inside the Media Relations department. We concentrate on these blogs and establish working, friendly relationships with them. When its time to actually pitch the product or service, our blogger relations people have an easy time convincing the blog editorial on our newest product or service. mediabistro.com is also a great resource for pitching tips and classes.

PR and Blogging

I woke up this morning thinking about my blog and how important blogs play a role in the new “PR”. I have friends and colleagues at other companies that think blogs are a waste of time and offer little or no value. However, they are mostly in HR and/or engineers. They think that blogs are just rants with random entries people pontificate in their downtime. What they completely underestimate is the fact in this new world PR world order, a blog can become a destination, and aggregate of knowledge and expertise that helps customers (or investors) make decisions while also building relationships with them. Relationships are THE name of the game.

Most companies are paranoid (see legal dept.) that if their employees start blogging, then it can also hurt relationships and even start creating misinformation that could lead to lawsuits. Every company (public) and most private need to have a safeguard in place if it’s to allow employees blog about the company and products on company time. There needs to be a final sign off on all blog posts (preferably PR or legal) before it goes live. This safeguard is a necessity. Now, if the employee has their own personal blog and they do not write on company time, then so be it. They can write anything they want if it’s their own personal blog. Nothing wrong with that.

Everyone within a company is responsible for Public Relations. Media or investor relations are specific responsibilities of communications professionals. Those conversations are going to happen out there with or without them, and if companies aren’t on the radar screen, then they are missing valuable opportunities.

Blogging also helps bring customers and relationships back to your company site. This additional traffic will help brand awareness, sales (duh), and Google rankings.

Need blog traffic? Just write good compelling content. It’s that easy. Other techniques to get your blog up and pumping traffic include: Links to other blogs, Link Building, buy Blog Ads (many sites out there offer this service), submitting to blog directories, sitemaps, or write guest articles for popular websites which allows you to tap their brand equity, user trust, and traffic stream for free. So many ways. This is the new PR world order. Go get your company some exposure. Create relationships that go viral. The traffic and exposure will follow. Blog……….because your competitor is already doing it.

Why You Should Be on Facebook

Because its a great business networking platform for self-promotion, branding, advertising, sales, and multimedia interaction. Why? Why spend the money and time? Below are a few basic reasons (stats):

1. 93% of adult US Internet users are on Facebook. (source: BlogHer, April 2011)

2. Facebook is overtaking Google and Yahoo in total time spent online. (source: ComScore, August 2011)

3. More than half of B2B marketers agree that Facebook is an effective marketing tool. (source: Outsell, December 2009)

4. More than half of small businesses agree that Facebook is beneficial to their business. (source: Ad-ology, November 2010)

5. 67% of B2C and 41% of B2B companies that use Facebook for marketing have acquired a customer through this channel. (source: HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report 2011)

6. One out of every eight minutes online is spent on Facebook. (source: ComScore, February 2011)

The demographics are almost limitless for all different products and services. Just a simple Facebook fan page will work. A fan page is an official page for a brand on Facebook. A Facebook page is created and other users can become fans of the page. Put a linkback to your website and its yet another way to increase traffic.

Utilizing a Blogger(s) to Spread the Company’s Message

A quick “blogger relations” example: A friends company found a popular blogger who had spoken highly of the company’s product + brand. Just prior to launching a new product, the company sent the blogger a free sample, inviting him to review it with “no strings attached.”

Long story shot, after a back and forth conversation with the blogger during his review, he (blogger) wrote a favorable review that generated a flood of comments. The company got nearly free publicity and feedback for a future version of the reviewed product. This blogger is a very popular on a very popular blog with thousands of followers as well as content that is syndicated. Product sales surged 35% right after the article/review was written. The traffic to the company’s website from the blog tripled (as tracked by google analytics data). Welcome to Marketing Web 3.0