Guest post by Susan Daniels

When most people think of blogging, they don’t conjure up images of brand blogging. However, even Coca-cola has a blog to further empower its brand. Brand blogging helps your business out in two ways: it gives your customers a sense of community and it allows you to gain greater online visibility.

But starting a brand blog doesn’t simply mean writing an article every couple of days or so. To make your brand’s blog successful you need to incorporate the following into your every day posting:

Media

A brand’s blog should never be text only. Images and videos including the brand should be integrated throughout the blog to make it more appealing to readers, and you don’t need to hire a creative agency to create these for you. You can easily take and create them yourself; however, if you aren’t competent with your video editing, hiring a professional may be beneficial. Including images and videos also give you a greater chance of a post going viral which can greatly increase your PageRank – and thus, your overall online visibility.

Relevancy

One of the most important aspects of blogging is content relevancy. If a soda product is your brand, then you don’t want to be writing about dog food. Instead you want to be writing about anything and everything that pertains to your brand – the people behind the brand, different flavors being released, projects you may be involved in, and any other interesting tidbits.

Hype

When you have a blog that is focusing on a certain brand, you want to make sure that you are able to create hype through your posts. If you are improving a brand or making changes to products and services, you want to give your brand loyalists little insights into doing so. Not only will this get them excited and coming back for more, but this will also keep them from panicking when an updated product or service is released that may be slightly different from the old ones.

Creating an image of a company is hard, and trying to get as high as you can in the search engines is no easy feat. However, blogging can greatly help you attain new customers, engage the old, and manage your online reputation – all of which are needed if you wish to remain successful.

About the author
Susan Daniels is a freelancer writer that specializes in business and technology.

Guest post by Susan Daniels

Social media is an integral part of any PR efforts. We all know the importance of having multiple social media accounts, and why we should be Tweeting and posting everyday to maintain good online standing.

But what do you do when Tweeting or posting to Facebook fails? How do you manage the masses and save your business when an inappropriate Tweet or post hits the web? A social media PR fail can ruin a business, but that doesn’t mean it has to ruin yours. By integrating the following 10-Step program you can be on the positive road to recovery in no time:

1. Admit You Are Powerless

Once you click submit, there is nothing you can do about it. Instead of frantically trying to devise some mastermind way to crash the internet or trying to buy the best SEO software to bury your FAIL deep, simply accept the social media PR FAIL you have just created.

2. Admit Your Fault

Once you realize that you have done something wrong, you need to figure out what type of social media disaster you have created.

3. Accept Your Shortcomings

After your failure, you need to immediately act. This is not the time to dwell on you or your business’ shortcomings that brought you to this disaster. Simply accept your shortcomings and start being proactive.

4. Realize that There is a Solution

While a social media failure can cause serious harm to a business, it doesn’t mean that the business is ruined forever. Realize that there is a solution, and that it must be actively sought.

5. Create a Plan

Trying to recover from a social media PR Fail can quickly become overwhelming – especially when the angry masses are coming after you. To prevent yourself from further panicking or abandoning hope altogether, it is wise to create a plan for recovery you can actively stick to.

6. Consider all You Have Potentially Harmed

Noting all the damaged parties is a great way for you to prepare yourself for the onslaught of remarks that will come your way. People will be upset, hurt, and/or angry. If you know who you have potentially hurt, it will make apologizing in advance easier too.

7. Apologize to All You Have Harmed

Now comes the hard part – apologizing. Even if you believe that your post or Tweet was taken out of context, you must swallow your pride and apologize. Refusing to do so will only incite the angered masses even more.

8. Continue to Lay Low

Although you have apologized, people will still be upset. Be prepared to continue to deal with this by simply laying low and continuing to apologize. You should currently be in damage control mode.

9. Seek Further Insight

The calm after the storm can leave you wondering how you or your business will ever recover. Don’t be afraid of the debris left behind. Seek insight from other companies that have experience similar events, and also ask yourself what caused the social media outburst to begin with. This insight will not only help you rebuild, but it will keep you from repeating the same mistakes.

10. Redeem Yourself

Now it is time to continue on as the good business you were before – but a little more wisely this time. Be the business you want to be, and give your once loyal customers a reason to trust you again.

The road to recovery after a social media PR fail is by no means easy. But if you actively seek recovery, you and your business will be able to eventually recover. Just know that it will be an uphill battle and it will require both time and energy.

About the author
Susan Daniels is an internet marketer for 43a.com. In her spare times she likes to write guest posts for marketing related blogs.

Public relations is not always an easy-peasy walk through the bark. A lot of times getting results from a PR campaign involves a lot of effort: thinking it through, brainstorming, drafting and then reviewing everything you need, choosing the right channels to communicate, reaching out to the media, bloggers, fans, evangelists, friends and partners, monitoring and measuring your progress, fine-tuning and starting again, right from the beginning.

It takes time and resources to make PR efforts work for a certain company, person, non profit or cause. But there are also times when an opportunity to make your story known just lands on your lap. An interview request , an invitation to speak at a conference, a friendly request to take part in a high profile online debate. Everyone would smile and cheer just thinking of such a possibility. But the reality is, a lot of companies just don’t find the time to make the most out of these opportunities. 

I know both from the stories of others and personal experience that companies, especially small ones, often ignore such requests due to lack of time or lack of resources (a person able to properly respond to such invitations). Some of you might be surprised, but it happens. Money is not the only resource that’s often lacking in the business world. Bare in mind I am not referring to companies that get media requests 10 times a day, but those where such events are not frequent at all and they could use the publicity.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, what can you do? Here are a few ideas:

• Try harder to find the time. Offer overtime payments to your employees, free up a few hours in your own schedule, even if it messes up your weekend, but don’t ignore an opportunity to get some awareness for your brand and possibly reach some potential customers.
• Find someone to do it for you. An agency, a PR freelancer, they are not that hard to find and for such a small project it won’t cost you a fortune. It would definitely cost you less than advertising in the same publication and also would be cheaper than paying someone to generate such an opportunity for your company.
• If you just need more time, contact the journalist or conference organizer, or site owner and ask them for a few more days. It works a lot better than ignoring them. Even if they don’t have enough time, you can start a conversation with them and maybe convince them to keep you in mind the next time they cover your industry or an issue where your expertise is an asset.

Actually finding a solution for a problem is sometimes easier than it seems at first. Opportunities are not something to take for granted or ignore, they are something you need to spot and make work in your favor.

Have you ever been in such a situation? Do you regret missing an opportunity to get your business known?

Guest post by Susan Daniels

New research out in the PR space seems to favor the use of theory-based PR relations techniques. But by thinking inversely, like a person using a search engine’s reverse phone number lookup to stop businesses from doing solicitations, people can build great stories to capture any audience and build better brand recognition.

Catherine Sweet is one that disagrees with those perpetuating the theory-based PR. She says that “my teaching has made me realize the power of ‘story telling’ as being the best form of PR and communication there is. As humans, we are hardwired to listen and learn; it’s how we acquire language in the first place.” To her, storytelling is a much more effective communication technique for PR, and gives those in PR some creative expression to think directly or indirectly.

Whether good PR using storytelling helps promote a product, business, brand, person, cure, or country, it has to take inconsideration different aspects of building a story: structure, them, plot, characters, perspective, and overall message conveyed. PR storytelling is all about listening more and talking less, informing less and entertaining more to an audience ready to here a good story.

The top four points you need to consider when using storytelling versus theory-based PR techniques to build brand recognition or company appeal include:

1. Think about how media has changed over time

When the internet was first circulating, people trusted the web much like their local news—to inform and educate. In today’s time, for the majority of people using the web, they turn to internet to entertain them more than to inform or educate. The more tech-reliant a person is the more storytelling PR will capture them. This is the time to think of all the components of good story telling like setting, plot, conflict, climax, dialogue, and theme.

2. Try to add drama to the story

Journalists, bloggers, and writers cannot succeed unless they use storytelling and PR professionals need to think that way. Dramatic content always appeals to individuals and businesses more than purely informative. The best way establish dramatic content in PR storytelling is to compare contrast time and/or technology. By this, I mean to create as much distance between two time periods or when something new was created, which makes any brand, company, etc. seem that much more innovative and progressive.

3. The Human Brain Craves stories

Children and adults alike are conditioned from a young age to become dependent on stories. Stories are how people inform their lives, build memory about situations, and store knowledge for later use. PR professionals must realize that people use stories to interpret events and make sense out of anything their looking to consume and/or purchase. A good story creates a sign to buy.

4. Use storytelling to create personality

By having fun with different ways of thinking, inverse or traditional and direct or indirect, good PR storytelling needs has eliminated unnecessary jargon, lingo, or traditional terminology from the matrix of the particular business or brand.

PR professionals should turn to storytelling or theory-based techniques to make a brand and/or business grow and sustain a positive image (creative indirect thinking works better).

About the author
Susan Daniels is an internet marketer for 43a.com. In her spare times she likes to write guest posts for marketing related blogs.

Photo source

One of the things we consider when creating online content is it’s ‘shareability’ factor. Meaning how eager readers are to share it with their online connections after reading it. While the content itself is directly responsible for the desire to make people want to post it on their social pages or send it via email, it is not enough. To increase the ‘shareability’ factor, we often add little tools or plugins – google + buttons, Facebook like buttons, retweet buttons, Stumble Upon buttons. We attempt to make it easy for the reader to share that content.

But in the process of website updates and management, we sometimes forget that sharing is supposed to be easy and take as little time as possible. That is why we forget to check the buttons and the plugins and see if they work. When these tools don’t work properly, most readers will give up. They don’t have time to edit the tweet or Facebook update! It should all run smoothly. Others might choose to take the time and do the work, if the story is really worthwhile. But if they are in a hurry, they might postpone it for a bit – which can turn to quite a long time if they forget about it in the craziness of their own day.

So when you’re done nailing down that ultimate headline, when the post and the subheadings and the joke and the questions are done, please remember to check your plugins! If they work properly, you have better chances to have your post spread like wildfire!

Companies screw up. Intentionally or not, they at one point do something wrong. That’s easy to understand, as they are opperated by human beings who are extremely prone to error. After they screw up, they do damage control: try to fix the issue and engage in crisis communications. This damage control PR campaign might go either way: it may help present the company in question as human, but trying to fix everything quickly and make amends for their mistake; or it may end up portraying a greedy, careless entity that makes matters worse by improperly handling the crisis they have created.

Once the issue is solved, the press stops buzzing about the error and its consequences, there is no guarantee the company won’t screw up again. The downside is that this strike two will bring to mind the initial booboo they are known for. Doing damage control for this second PR crisis is ten times harder, especially if it’s close enough to the first incident. 

This is the case of BP, the company responsible for the largest ecological disaster in modern history, the explosion and subsequent oil spill that spread through the Gulf of Mexico. They communicated poorly and everybody hated them, they took ages to fix the problems and clean the waters. And now they have wronged mother nature again. Once more, on American soil, in Alaska that is.

BP employees mistakenly shot dead a polar bear from Alaska, messing with the local ecosystem, which is already quite delicate. Of course, as news of this incident spread, all the anger towards BP was rekindled.

What can a company do in such a case? Not much to prevent possible errors. It is virtually impossible to forsee and prevent anything any of your employees might do wrong. What you can do is learn from your mistake and handle it all better next time. React faster, show genuine interest in making ammends, and of course, hope and pray it does not happen too soon!

Is there anything else to do? What do you think?

Photo source

When it comes to social media, a lot of things don’t happen simply because people are afraid to ask for them. You don’t get enough stumbles or tweets or shares on Facebook, your questions go unanswered, and you think it is because people don’t like you or your content enough. The truth is that people might just not see a certain tweet or blog post from you. Most of us follow several blogs and accounts and have our own work to worry about. As much as we try, we miss out on a lot of important things in this information overloaded virtual world of ours.

If it’s something important that you would like to share with the world, why not ask your community for help? If they follow you, that’s because they find what you have to say interesting. They have retweeted and shared your thoughts before, so why not ask them to do it again? 

Asking for help from your community takes courage. Why? Because you have to trust yourself and to trust them at the same time. You practically take a leap of faith and wait to see if those you rely on will actually help you. As a friend of mine pointed out, deciding to help someone means you’re in control, asking for someone else’s help means losing control and delegating the entire decision making process to someone else.

While scary at times, this is the role of a community – helping and supporting each other. Of course, there is right and a wrong way to approach your online connections, so here are some pieces of advice to get you started:

1. It always has to go both ways. If you ask for something, make sure you’re ready to do the same for the others in your community. Better yet, it’s better to ask for help after having offered it.

2. Don’t take advantage of your community. They will help you every time you need it, but that does not mean you have to ask for their help everyday. If you abuse their kindness, they will eventually stop helping you.

3. Be nice! When you ask for help, when you give it and everywhere in between, remember to be kind and pleasant to your community. Say “please”, “thank you” and “you’re welcome” whenever needed.

Extra tip: it takes time! Just because you showed up and people welcomed you in, does not necessarily mean you are in a position to ask for anything! Gaining trust takes a while and it’s better to work on your relationships with members of the community before starting to ask for favors.

Now that you have read the tips, I believe an example would help! Last week I published a review of My Blog Guest, a community where blog owners and guest posters meet, connect and exchange guest posts. I wanted the review to get as much visibility as possible because My Blog Guest helped me a lot and I believe there are many bloggers out there who would benefit from joining this community. So I asked the members of My Blog Guest to help me spread the word and they did! Of course, I had been around for a while and the visibility the community would get would benefit all of us.

How about you? Have you asked for help from your community, be it to share something, answer a question or give you advice? How did you approach them and did they come through?

I have recently ran across some articles about the cost of press releases. While the authors were throwing numbers and averages, no one took the time to also explain what you actually pay for. A press release costs X amount is a limited way of putting it. What does that price refer to in the end? Here are a few things you should consider when analyzing the price of a press release:

You pay for press release writing

The actual press release has to be written by someone. Unless you already have the text, you pay for the service of having a public relations professional writing it for you. Or editing and rewriting it if you have a rough draft of what you want to say.

The price of press release writing services vary. Who writes it and their expertise matters, how much material you provide and how many hours of research they invest in it adds to the price, how soon you want it might shift the price in one direction or the other. It’s one thing to need a press release where the person or agency you hire will need to support with basic research and have a two weeks deadline, and a completely different thing to require the PR pro to spend a full day researching your business and industry and also need to have it all done in two or three days.

You pay for press release distribution

After having the press release written, you might want more from it than see it posted on your website.You might prefer it to reach journalists, potential customers, business partners and other audiences. In this case you will need distribution added to your press release. There are free online distribution sites that you can try, or you can go for more advanced options. You could pick the top tier press release distribution service from PRWeb for about 400 US dollars or try other less expensive or more costly options.

There is also the possibility of the public relations pro or agency you hire building a custom media list for you, adding the news outlets, blogs and online magazines that would best fit your company and contacting them individually to pitch your story. This is of course one of the most expensive solutions, especially if mixed with a distribution service.

You pay for press release monitoring and reports

Someone has to see who picks your news release, where they publish it and what impact their actions have. Are people discussing your release on social networks? What are they saying? Compiling all this data takes time and interpreting it requires skill.

Here it is, a division of included services in the general cost of a press release. The quality of work, the expertise backing a certain PR pro, the speed at which they can deliver the service, these all should matter in your choice. But first and foremost you should know what to expect and moreover, what to ask for when buying a press release.

Guest post by Alexis Bonari

The Fed says we’re in recovery, but there’s no doubt in my mind that there continues to be a great amount of uncertainty about the economy. Looking at various economic indicators like gold futures, gun sales, and home security systems definitely supports this theory. People feel threatened and insecure, and that fear shows up in their spending habits. These are serious considerations marketers need to take into account in order to prosper under these dire circumstances.

We’ve all seen advertising campaigns based in fear, and as much as we may dislike these techniques, they do tend to work. Given the length of time that our current economic troubles have been going on, an increase in consumer awareness, target demographics, and media fatigue this base strategy will not be profitable for every market. A good marketer knows how to make the best of every situation, and what follows is some advice for how to successfully approach these stagnant markets.

1. Think about how your product fulfills your clients’ needs in this type of economy

For us Internet types, this is pretty obvious. Large numbers of unemployed people have taken to the Internet to try and make some cash. For bloggers, this means an increased opportunity for guest posts, for SEOs it means a larger potential client base. This group of people is not necessarily going to be the most Internet savvy crowd, but they need an income; by focusing your marketing strategy on how you can fulfill this need you are sure to win.

2. Think of how you can add value to your brand for this new demographic

With times being as tight as they are, most people, especially unemployed ones are reluctant to spend money on anything that isn’t clear in its returns. An investment of several thousand dollars, which for example, is quite reasonable for professional SEO services, may be out of their reach. If you are a well established SEO you may not want to split your services and lower your perceived value, but there are other avenues you can take to pick up that business without devaluing yourself. Be a little creative in addressing the needs of this demographic in order to convert their visits into sales. For example, stress your past successes in marketing start-ups and small businesses.

3. Learn to effectively manage fear instead of blindly playing into it

Start-ups inherently have a lot of uncertainty, especially for people that haven’t done them before. Successfully mitigating this fear is essential to prospering in this type of economy. While there is no sure fire way to do this, you’re marketing strategy should have it in mind. Prove to your customer base that an investment in your services will result in returns, and be honest with them what kinds of returns they can expect. Remember that this demographic is taking a gamble, and while you might not be able to guarantee their success, since that is dependent on the quality of their own work, you can guarantee the quality of the service you provide.

About the author
Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching environmental scholarships as well as political science scholarships. Whenever she gets some free time, she enjoys watching a funny movie or curling up with a good book.

There are moments when a certain story simply takes over the world. Or a country, or a city or a small town. The scale really does not matter, the effect is the same: every media outlet will cover that major event. It’s a journalistic rule you learn in the first year of journalism school. If something is really big, it takes over and becomes the most important piece of news, regardless of anything else.

Such events are the royal wedding we’ve just had, big elections, the earthquake in Japan, or Osama being killed. For a longer or shorter stretch of time, they have the spotlight and no one can compete. And it’s not just lifestyle magazines or political newspapers that cover them! Tech blogs and magazines will talk about the Twitter user who live tweeted the attack on Osama, financial newspapers will analyze the cost of the royal wedding or analyze the impact on foreign markets a natural disaster has. Travel outlets will talk about the travelers taking over London or the travel warnings issued after the Osama bin Laden death. 

Sure, all these outlets will still need other stories to publish, you cannot fill an entire edition with one story and the related ones you can think of! But will the other stories matter as much? Will anyone notice them? Those who are interested in the main event will overlook everything else, those who’ve had it with it will simply log off for the day. Therefore, at times like these, the best approach is to postpone your pitch unless it is directly related with the main event and strong enough to make it through the clutter. For example, if you’re the company providing the wedding flowers or designing the dress, you could pitch your story and actually get tons of attention. If you’re a small restaurant that decided to celebrate the wedding and are throwing a party with a longer than usual happy hour, the BBC will probably not publish your press release!

So instead of fighting for 5 seconds in a day where it means 5 seconds of being ignored, but on the air, it’s better to postpone your announcement. Plus, in case of major disasters, if you also have the bad luck of them occurring in your country or city, you and your client might be perceived as heartless. Unless you have a big event planned for months ahead, with press conference, partner meetings and people expecting you to show up, just put it off for a while!

You might see it as a hassle, but it’s not all bad. From each event, there is something to be learned. Don’t believe me? Have you read or heard President Obama’s speech on bin Laden being killed? If not, read it now, and also read this article by the Bad Pitch Blog providing valuable insight on what events like these can teach you.