When answering a customer support enquiry, when replying a reporter’s email or a fan’s request, when simply sending out a sales offer, anticipating the next move you need to make to help the customer is the secret to your impressive success.  You need to be able to predict what their next question will be and reply to it before they actually ask it.

Let’s consider a few examples to better support my statement: anticipating questions is a PR superpower and by extension a business superpower. Continue reading

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

There is no better way to start the week then reading last week’s best business, marketing and PR pieces! So let’s kick this week off with a few reading recommendations!

Guest blogger Lena West explores The Unfortunate Burden of Poor Social Media Examples on LipSticking, discussing how bad examples seem to weigh a lot more than the overwhelmingly numerous good examples of businesses using social media.

Do you know what the difference between reach, outreach and reaching out is? Liz Strauss explains it in a great piece, stressing the importance of reaching out and connecting with someone, building a valuable relationship.

Once again proving there are things to be learned and to be successfully applied to your business virtually anywhere, Karen Swim shares 5 Sweet Business Lessons from the Cake Boss. Continue reading

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The Expendables, a movie long awaited by many fans of the action genre and the action stars it features, has just hit the theaters and topped this weekend box office, cashing 36 million US dollars this weekend. For a film that got harsh reviews from everyone, the numbers tell a different story: people actually wanted to see it. And post-movie watching comments show they thoroughly enjoy it.

Why is the movie such a smashing success? The story has nothing really special and is not very thick either. The plot description on IMDb says it all: “A team of mercenaries head to South America on a mission to overthrow a dictator.” It’s an 80 million dollars movie in which all funds were spent on getting some once god-like action stars, some that are still on the wave of success and to orchestrate explosions, fights and lots of gun shooting. Continue reading

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Guest post by Derek Vaughan

Having been involved with PR since the days before new media, I have made numerous adjustments to my PR strategies to maximize the impact of my news releases in the digital era. Unfortunately, I have also seen many ”old school” agencies and PR experts who have overlooked these critical elements of the modern digital news release. Here’s a bit of what I believe they may be missing.

1. Using keywords in the headline

To anyone who’s ever used Google news or a blog post to gain website traffic, the need to have well targeted keywords in your titles is obvious. Search engines (including specialty search like Google News) automatically look through online content and begin with the headline or title of a piece to determine the overall category for the content and the search terms that may trigger that content to appear. Continue reading

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Regardless of the line of business you’re in, you’re bound to run into a few customers who will put your patience and communication skills to test. Some need you to spend more time explaining what you’re doing than actually doing your job, others think they know your profession better than you do, some will take too long to respond when there’s an emergency at hand. But when it comes to public relations and nightmare customers, these are the ones we fear most.

1. The DIY customer

When something’s going on, why bother talking to the PR guy in your company or to the company you pay to handle such issues? Go ahead and make your own statements, release them and then have the people you initially ignored clean your mess. Think of the Cleavland Cavalier owner who decided a post attacking LeBron James was a good reaction to the player’s decision to choose another team. Continue reading

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