These days most businesses are handling a considerable number of their operations online. Many companies are finding that many of their commercial transactions are being handled online, much of their marketing campaigns are being waged online, and even many in-house operations are being pursued online. For instance, a good number of companies conduct seminars for leadership training online.

Many companies are also storing their data online, in the cloud, in order to save money on hardware and energy costs. One of the newest online trends for businesses is reputation management services, all of which seek to shape a company’s brand by developing positive web content and SEO. Where once a company might have focused their Public Relations budget entirely on events and publicity, the rise of the Internet and social media has forced all industries to keep track of brand awareness online. Here are a few of the ways this is being done:

Bring in the bloggers

Many prominent bloggers will write sponsored reviews and if their blogs receive considerable traffic a link to your company’s site can accomplish a number of tasks at once. One, it is a great source of link-building, which helps your SEO. Two, it (hopefully) creates positive content about your brand name. And three) with the help of social media you can get the post shared, tweeted, dug, stumbled upon, etc. Your company should have it’s own blog too, which is necessary for any kind of meaningful SEO.

Engage with consumers directly

One of the most beneficial aspects of social media for businesses is the ability to easily engage with consumers through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In and dozens of other sites. Where branding used to be limited to television and print advertising, the Internet presents an entirely new niche for brand management. Use Twitter to monitor what people are saying about you, build networks, index conversations, integrate third party tools into your company’s blog (again, your company should definitely have a blog). In 2010, Pepsi spent their entire Super Bowl advertising budget on social media promotions—20 million dollars. So, yes, it works.

Keep track of negative reviews

Bad Yelp reviews can badly harm your business. In addition to releasing positive content to counteract the negative, you should engage with the reviewers. Offer them incentives to return to your service. Address their concerns and grievances. In many ways, reputation management is the new PR, or at least the newest incarnation of it. If your company is looking to get an advantage over the competition, optimize yourself for the web and invest in online reputation management.

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.

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Languages evolve. New words appear, we start using them, they eventually make their way into the dictionaries, and are thus vouched for. Until that point, new words are o sort of mambo jumbo for a lot of people. We all remember when the very common verb ‘to google’ first appeared in the dictionary. It then continued with blog, blogger, tweet, woot, sexting, bromance, and other words that have recently made their way into our every day chats.

PR professionals and communication experts have an interesting position when it comes to these new words, especially when they focus on the online part of their profession. On one hand, we have netizens who expect us to address them in their own manner of speaking and writing, on the other we have serious business people that expect the utmost professionalism when being reached out to, which includes correct use of language and grammar. Officially, until they are introduced in the dictionaries and accepted as real words, what we’re using is not clean English (or what ever other language you address them in). 

So what is there to do? Use quotation marks or italics when using an unconventional word? Promote new words and lobby to get them accepted faster? Go the way the media and journalists go? They are easier to handle as they do adopt new words soon after their audience starts using them.

The truth is there is no right choice. A PR professional will always have to adapt their speech to the audience they are addressing at one point or another. You won’t be strict about choice of dictionary approved terminology when addressing a group of online youngsters that expect you to translate everything to include the specifics of their always connected virtual lives, with all the smiley faces that entails. You won’t put a ton of the same smiley faces in an email to a General Manager of a company you want to land as a client. When addressing teachers and professors who are particular about word usage, you might be careful about your own linguistic choices.

But no matter what, a PR pro needs to quickly and constantly adapt to new words and trends. Because you will ‘plus one’ something, you will tweet and skype and google and that’s not all that you will do!

The world of public relations is a very exciting one to be in. Something new happens every day and it very rarely is boring. It might be annoying, downright crazy, disappointing or fun, but bored is not a feeling you are likely to run across as a PR pro.

Of its many paradoxes, one that has always intrigued me concerns PR being or not something personal. If you think about it, a good PR pro is a person that gets involved all the way in the campaigns they run. They have to know the products or services they promote, they have to love them and they have to really put their soul into what they do. If they don’t get involved, it shows in the words they pick, in their nonverbal communication, in their inability to relate. So PR is a very personal affair. 

On the other hand, in order to keep your sanity, you have to remind yourself that a lot of the things that happen to you as a PR professional are not personal. It’s nothing personal and explicitly directed at you when a journalist overlooks your story for a far less interesting one from a bigger company, no matter how good your pitch has been. It’s nothing personal when people call a PR fail something that a client did by disregarding your advice. It’s nothing personal when you get an amazing story published and the only clients who comment are those with a problem with the company the story is about. It’s nothing personal when clients get enthusiastic about PR, then decide it’s too expensive and it actually takes time to get results (regardless of how you explained this very points right from the start).

So in order to be a success in this profession, you have to be able to be all heart and then say to yourself: “Hey, it’s nothing personal!” Easy to say, hard to accomplish. At least in the first wave a reaction, we take what we shouldn’t very personally. The disappointment and sometimes hurt is quite real. So if you cannot completely become impersonal when you need to, find a secluded spot, give yourself a couple of minutes to recover, and then look in a mirror and say: “It’s nothing personal!” although for you it is.

What are your personal experiences? What do you consider being personal, directed at you, and when can you be detached and see things as something that has nothing to do with you? How do you cope and how do you keep yourself motivated?

Trust is a rare and very valuable commodity in the world of public relations. It is what seldom makes the difference between success and failure for both PR professionals and the companies they represent. To better understand how trust capital impacts a PR career, read on for an analysis of three main ways trust defines your day to day work.

Journalists and trust

The way a journalist views a PR representatives and their clients often determines their angles on stories they pick up and write about. If you are trustworthy, they will also be more likely to pick up the topics you pitch and cover them. What trust means when it comes to a PR pro’s relationship with journalists is that a reporter or editor trusts the information you send to be accurate, believes you when you say you and your clients are available for follow up questions and any other background details they might need and also trusts you to let them know when something worthwhile is happening.

That does not mean they will just take everything you send them and copy/paste it in the next print or online edition of their publication. They are still journalists, so they will do their research and verify the details you share. But other than starting with a positive view on you as a professional and the company you represent, they won’t immediately jump to your throat in case of a PR crises. They might actually wait for your input and review your take on a certain burning matter instead of throwing dirt at you as they might do in the case of a shady PR professional. They won’t be aggressive and try to get to what you’re hiding instead of listening to you.

Audiences and trust

The trust capital you have in your audiences’ mind is a more complicated matter. First, it is a reflection of how the media sees you and those you represent. If you are portrayed by journalists as a trustworthy company that’s actually involved in the community, aware of critical issues and out to get more than just quick profits, that image will partly be translated to the people you are trying to reach. To this filtered view, their direct perception adds up. This is developed through direct contact – social media, the corporate website, consumer questions at events and trade shows your clients interact – and it is often more powerful than anything other information they get through third parties.

Let’s say they just love the product, how they interact with a company and its representatives, how you nicely addressed their concerns on their blog or Facebook page. In case of a crisis, be it a product recall, interruption of service, data breach or any other incident that might disrupt the natural course of business, they will be more likely to perceive it as a one-time mistake. We are all human and we all make mistakes. What is very important is to renew their trust and never betray it by reacting quickly and fixing the initial error, preventing the incident from happening again.

While crises are a great way to capitalize on trust, building a relationship based on this particular feeling is useful in more common, everyday situations. A customer that trusts a brand or company is more likely to be interested in new products or services they release, in programs they launch, events they organize or CSR campaigns they might be promoting.

PR professionals and trust

Another sometimes overlooked aspect is the trust a public relationship professional has in his or her own skills, his or her abilities to learn new things, adapt, think creatively and come up with something interesting to day about a client or another on a daily basis.

How you view yourself impacts how others perceive you. If you trust you can get that new client, nail that new campaign, get that journalist to reply to your email or call you back, collaborate with a that A-list blogger on a smart contest, chances are it will actually happen.

A PR professional has to be the first to trust their message, their approach, their ability to create meaningful relationships, their methods and their ethics. If they believe in themselves with good reason, nothing will be standing in their way to success. It may be a longer or shorter road to glory, but a way to great achievements nonetheless.

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About 30 seconds. That’s how long it takes for a reader or journalist to decide if your press release is worth their time. And that’s of course an average! In other cases they get bored after 15 seconds. Unfortunately, it’s often not about the quality of the story you’re sending over email or publishing online. It is more often about the information overload we have to deal with everyday.

Hundreds and hundreds or emails, articles and newsletters are received by journalists, employees and business owners every day. For the unlucky ones, it’s thousands, including the 20-30% of it that’s spam managing to trick their filters. Getting 30 seconds of someone’s time is a privilege and you need to make the best out of it. If you succeed, they they will spend an additional minute on your news release and maybe decide to write about it or buy your product.

What can you do? Use the same visual tricks that online article writers and bloggers use to make sure their pieces are easy to scan and allow readers to get the important information fast out of 500 words. Here are a few tricks you can use:

• make sure your headline is not only catchy,but also informative
• have a clearly marked summary
• make sure your first paragraph contains all the important information
• use bold formatting to highlight important ideas in the press release
• use lists when possible – to list benefits, for example

Granted, some services for online press release distribution like PRWeb don’t allow you to format that much. But you can do it in the version you post on your website and in the emails you send to the press.

Remember, in the age of online reading, most of us don’t read every word of an article. Or if we do, we don’t do it the first time around. We first scan the article to get its juice and if it’s interesting enough, we read it all. It’s the same for potential clients, business partners or the press.

The journalists vs. PR professionals war has been going on for decades. It is fueled by frustration, impatience, beginners in both fields, moral high grounds being taken over every day and powers beyond your imagination, such as trends, traffic and boredom.

The two opposing armies

Journalists – mostly overworked, tired, frustrated, bored of seeing the same announcement and questions and mistakes over and over again. In control of powerful mass destruction weapons (revealing dozens of spammers in their magazines) or targeted, refined technology (taking it out on a certain individual).

PR professionals - a joint force of company employees and agency staffers; mostly overworked, tired, frustrated, bored of seeing their story dropped for hard to grasp reasons. Wielding powerful weapons such as exclusives, hot stories, tips and inside information

The facts: there are no perfect journalists and there are no perfect PRs. Everyone has made mistakes, several and sometimes repeatedly and that’s how we learn. What both sides lack is more consideration, more patience and a genuine desire to understand the other side.

The big losers of the war

Clients of both sides – advertisers, readers, companies, professionals with a story to tell.

That is the reality people, these are the big losers. The readers that come for great stories to a certain outlet and instead get a more-than-500 words story about how X PR rep has annoyed the journalist to death and it was so much after so long that he just had to tell the world how bad that PR rep was. Oh, and that the company should hire some one else because of a momentary lapse of judgement.

Also, the companies that want their stories told. Some of these stories are great. Some of them are worthy of the outlet’s readers. Yet they never get told either because a PR rep did not do his or her job right or because a journalist is to bitter, bored or tired to dig deep into the list of emails to find the great stories.

The companies and readers pay the price for this long lasting war that I don’t get. And you know why I don’t get it? Because I made so many mistakes over the years as a PR rep and because I saw so many journalists making silly mistakes at the same time. I am sorry to break it to you, but we’re all human and quite imperfect.

How this war should end

Simple! Before pointing the finger to the other side, we should consider our own mistakes. They usually are many. And after analyzing them and seeing the human being inside of us and not the god-like persona we would like to be, maybe we will be able to see the human side of the person we’re so harshly judging in that moment.

Clients are those who matters. Not just those of the PR rep, but also the clients of any publication. They should come first. And because we chose our line of work, we should learn to put them first more often and make sure we work together to have a smooth communication which will benefit them in the end. And it will also benefit us, as we will be less angry, frustrated and ready to take in out on the next person who looks funny to us.

So, dear fellow PRs, take the extra ten minutes to see what a journalist actually writes about and at least customize your email’s first paragraph. Reply on time and try to help out as much as you can. Dear journalists, try to make it clear what you cover or are willing to cover. Dear editors and chiefs and star-journalists, please be more patient with those who fail you. Because sometimes, just sometimes, it’s unclear to tell who covers what or your beat list is severely outdated and a PR professional might rely on you to direct them to the right person.

Just so you know, I have been blogging for years, I have a journalism background and I am a PR professional. I have been on a company’s side and I now run my own agency. I have learned from my mistakes and from those of others and I am still learning everyday. I try to understand both sides and see how it can all be made just a little better.

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.

Attacks, rushed statements, strong words powered by momentary anger, they all damage a company’s image. Once they are out, it is much harder to patch them then it is to take 5 minutes and discuss what you’re about to do beforehand.

2. The walking disaster when it comes to being spontaneous

You might be the greatest PR agency ever, you might have the best strategy in place and a nice plan to handle everything. Once your customer is in a constant spotlight, if he or she can’t handle statements made on the spur of the moment and has the habit of saying the wrong thing, you’re doomed. Think BP here and the “I want my life back” statement. While honest and heartfelt, no one cared Tony Hayward’s life was not as good anymore when others had died and many more were losing their livelihood and were bound to suffer the consequences of the oil spill for many years to come.

3. The “Do your thing, I’ll do mine” customer

While in the first case we were dealing with a customer that we knew would take PR in his/her own hands and in case two we talked about spontaneous reactions which are harder to control, our third nightmare customer is even more tricky to deal with. It’s that customer who will consult you on the matters at hand, will let you come up with a solution, strategy, plan, methods etc, will seem to agree on the best course of actions and then surprise you by doing the exact opposite. It’s that customer that you spend months with explaining how to write a proper news release to then take the next big launch and release something that goes against everything you have discussed and it is filled with mistakes so obvious even a rookie would pick up. The even better part is when your name and company are sent together with it

What about you? What do you fear most when it comes to your customers? What other scary types have you run into or heard of?

I have crossed paths with quite a few companies lately that have taken the DIY approach when it comes to PR. Although they had no real team, no real expertise, and the people specifically hired to handle such tasks had nothing to do with the job at hand, they felt they could do it on their own. Later on, they decided hiring an agency was better suited for them. They of course could have saved a lot of time, effort and ultimately money by hiring the experts to begin with.

Why did they choose not to at first? It’s simple, when companies calculate costs, they usually don’t pay attention to details. They believe that if an employee has some spare time, that time can be used in any way. Effectiveness, ability to learn, natural talent, they are all disregarded, as of course we are all good at promoting ourselves. Much like the physicists in The Big Bang Theory who were supposedly marketing geniuses as well…

A company has three choices when they take the in house approach: use existing personnel, hire someone new with little to no experience and have them trained, or hiring a PR expert.

Wasting the time and expertise of existing employees?

If you hired someone on a certain position, you did it because they were good when performing the tasks the position implied. If now they have some spare time, using it to make them learn something completely new is a waste. Why?

• it would take far more time to learn something new than perfect their existing skills
• if they are interested in a field, making them take an interest in PR might cause them to lose motivation and interest

The alternative? If you have too many employees, and they don’t have enough tasks for a full time position, you could either downsize or switch them to part time jobs.

Inexperienced wannabes to cover your public relations needs?

As I mentioned, they lack experience, they lack the required skill set, they might turn out not to be really good at it. Especially if their past experience is on a completely different career path. Your costs include, among others:

• paying salary for someone who needs months of training
• paying for training – no one in your company can do it, you have no PR department
• even after a few months of training, they will still go through a long period of trial and error, and you will pay for both their time and their errors

Hiring an in house PR specialist is by far the best option of the three. On the other hand, PRs who are really good at what they do are not that easy to come by and they are not that cheap to have either. Other than paying for their salary, you’ll still need to give them time to adjust to your field and learn a few tricks. On the other hand, you will need someone with PR expertise to help you hire them in the first place, and such services don’t come for free.

Why is a PR agency cheaper?

If you’re looking for a long term relationship with a PR agency or an experienced consultant, you can negotiate an advantageous monthly flat fee. For that fee, you will get specific services from your agency of choice. While their fee includes time for research and getting acquainted with your field, it will always be cheaper than formal training. And often times, the monthly flat fee is lower than what an internal PR department would entail. Let’s not forget, salaries are not the only costs, you still have to think of benefits, providing employees with an office, a computer, a phone, etc.

The most important aspect is that you don’t waste time, you start promoting your company’s products and services right from the start. And if you’re considering PR, you know how important starting early and getting it right really is.

A lot of PR agencies or corporate PR departments still believe spam is the way to go. They have built or bought quite a data base over the years, they keep expanding it and then shoot an email to everyone on the list. While they might have had some common ground when starting to develop the data base, over time names and emails just keep being added without any further checks. Who cares if you’re interested, we’ll email you anyway.

I am not talking about asking for permission, or allowing people to unsubscribe, I’m talking about at least making sure they are remotely interested in what they’ll receive. For example, why would I be interested in a debate held in Beverly Hills between a Rabbi and some woman I know nothing about on dating in a material world and if money can or cannot buy love?

If you’re gonna spam, at least be wiser than the average spammer! You should be able to at least do that if you’ve ever read anything, even a tiny article on PR and/or marketing. If you’re going to take your chance and spam, at least make sure people won’t delete your email because they simply don’t care!

I’d advise you to refrain from spam alltogether. Sure, contact someone to introduce yourself and ask for their permission to send press releases. But don’t start out with an attached PR and a one-liner asking them to call you for details!