 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
A recent press release from the Acme Hotel Co. in River North, Chicago, included these phrases: Snapchat Spectacles, Amazon Echo, ESP Guitar, DIY cocktail. Yes, it may be time to provide a translating service for hoteliers trying to keep up with speeding changes related to technology and demographics. This hotel, whose website says it’s targeted at the “tragically hip,” offers Snapchat Spectacles at the front desk on a first-come, first-served basis. The glasses have a button on them which, when pressed, will create a 10-second video “snap” that is wirelessly uploaded to the memories page of a personal Snapchat, readied to be posted for friends and family to see. Of course, the in-room Amazon Echo — one of those personal digital “assistants” now rampant among the tech savvy — can help guests decide where to go in town to get the best videos. The DIY (do-it-yourself) cocktails can be created with an in-room kit that costs $18, makes two drinks “and the shaker is yours.”...
The idea was cute. It always is. Ask members of the public to post there selfies with New York police officers, tag them with #myNYPD, and sing "Kumbayah" together. OK, that last part maybe not. The response was overwhelming -- overwhelmingly bad. Soon the hashtag was used as a bashtag....
When it comes to sales, PR has always been thought of as a "top of funnel"; contributor. While PR's impact on the top of the funnel cannot be denied, this association does not fully encapsulate the impact PR has throughout the buyer's journey in today's digitally-driven landscape.
The most critical ingredient in virtually every sales funnel is content, which is something PR produces and owns in droves. From earned or owned media, to analyst relations and social media, PR has an arsenal of assets at their fingertips that can influence potential customers along every touchpoint in the funnel.
Below are three places where the work of PR can be harnessed to usher potential customers through the funnel to maximize the chance of conversion and ultimately, stimulate a continuous flow back into the top of the funnel....
Good quotes are like tiny poems.
They can inspire a feeling or drive you to action, describing more in a sentence or two than paragraphs of text from lesser writers.
There are a plethora of quotes that are applicable to PR pros, including pithy sayings about publicity, simplifying communications and improving skills. Paired with pictures, the best quotes become even more inspiring.
Here are 15 of the best quotes for communicators....
What is Hey.Press?
It's a search engine for startup journalists. You search for a keyword, e.g. 'Oculus Rift', then we scour the net to find the most relevant journalists.
You can easily build small, highly targeted press lists. How much does it cost? Search is completely free!...
A piece of great content is an asset that has value; the sharing of it should be given appropriate attention and care.
Strong content deserves a strong PR plan.
Never thought about it that way? Not convinced your content is worthy of a PR campaign? Ask yourself the following question: Is your content marketing as worthy as your last strategic partnership or personnel announcement?
Don’t make the mistake of under-estimating your content. Content connects and content converts....
Google is constantly changing its algorithms. We all know about Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, but what people often forget is that each one is periodically updated, often without any confirmation or announcement by Google.
The latest known Panda update is Google Panda 4.1, according to the Moz Google algorithm change history log, which has had a profound effect on PR agencies.
The Panda algorithm, in particular, has made huge waves across the PR industry. According to the article ‘Did Google Panda 4.0 Go after Press Release Sites?,’ industry expert Barry Schwartz launched a study which revealed prominent PR agencies like PR Newswire, BusinessWire, and PRWeb lost up to 85% of their visibility within a matter of days.
Studies like this demonstrate that PR agencies are intertwined with the SEO industry, and must adapt or perish in a changing environment....
I tried to explain public relations to my grandmother once ...
This was many years ago, back when PR pros cut press coverage from publications we could actually hold in our hands, and few marketers talked about SEO in everyday conversation.
“So, it’s advertising,” she’d say, and I’d try again to explain that, no, it’s not.
“Advertising is about paying for attention; PR is about earning it.”
I don’t think she ever got it, and she’s not alone. Most people still think PR is some kind of black magic flacks work on the press -- you sprinkle a little witch’s potion, and TA-DA! You’re in The Wall Street Journal. But PR is a more strategic, sustained practice than that, and it’s a field content marketers need to understand as owned, earned and even paid media continue to intersect.
Below are seven PR lessons for content marketers (and for my relatives who still don’t understand what I do).....
Did you catch that breaking story? Somewhere (anywhere), an opportunity for your brand just landed online. What did you do about it?
If you wrote a blog post, created a video, or launched a campaign and got press coverage, you’re already newsjacking.
More and more, inbound marketers are using newsjacking to create a tidal wave of traffic around their brand. The secret to their success? A powerhouse media monitoring tool.Newsjacking is impossible to completely prepare for, and relies on reacting as soon as possible. That means newsjacking teams need to know where to look for opportunities, and get updated on them before they’re old news. Not really possible when you’re manually searching for stories...
The advancement of SEO has been influenced by a number of different things, from social media to content marketing. In fact, it’s as if all marketing practices mixed together yield great SEO.
When you have a collection of best practices, you can learn a lot from the older practices that led to this point. The same is true with SEO.SEO isn’t just a modern practice. You can learn a lot about it from the histories of advertising, copywriting, word-of-mouth, print marketing – even old school press relations. Here are a few lessons today’s SEOs can learn from the PR execs of old....
Amid widespread year-on-year increases across the US, three regions in particular saw notable spikes in median salary compared with last year.
The Northeast region saw a 12.9% hike (from $91,000 to $102,700); The Central region increased 21.2% (from $78,000 to $94,500); and the Plain States rose 9.8% (from $76,500 to $84,000).
Industry leaders from each region shared their explanations for these boosts...
Today, editorial voices are outnumbered by public relations professionals by almost 5:1. In order to grasp the big picture, the first thing you need to understand is a publisher’s capacity.
On average, 45% of writers publish one story per day. Meanwhile, 8% of writers get pitched more than 100 times per day, 11% more than 50 times per day, and 40% more than 20 times per day. In other words, these writers get 100, 250, or 500 pitches a week for only five story spots!
When you take into account that only 11% of writers said they “often” write a story based on content that was sent through pitches, you quickly realize that the amount of email waste rises well above a person’s threshold to tolerate it....
Back in 2007, when Twitter was taking off, the PR industry faced a pivot point. It was no longer effective to cold email as many journalists as possible....
What PR practitioners found was four key elements to getting their stories out there: - Tell a story
- Help journalists stand out among their competitors
- Create captivating content that customers and journalists are going to find valuable
- Do extensive research to find where the audiences are, and distribute your content there
In other words, they began doing content marketing. There are several other ways content marketing has changed the way we “do PR.” Here are a handful of examples:...
|
In Trump We Trust — .com, that is.
Not your politics? Maybe check out ThrowOutTrump.com.
Actually, they're both empty websites, what you call parked domain names: bought and paid for, but not used.
More interesting is that they both belong to the same guy — Donald J. Trump.
A big hat tip to CNN, which had the idea to search for all websites registered by the Trump Organization and came back with a list of more than 3,000 — all the way back to the original DonaldJTrump.com, registered in 1997....
As our influencer marketing columnist Raymond Morin blogged sometimes ago, there are 3 main types of influencers: - celebrities - opinion leaders (traditional media, online media, social media) - ambassadors (satisfied customers, happy employees).
With the democratization of social media influence, there are simply more people that yield influence in social media. Perhaps this is one reason why Influencer Marketing continues to soar in 2015. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, because numerous stats have already documented the power of online recommendations...
Luckily, advertising isn't the only thing that makes the marketing world go round. Remember public relations? Yup. And while public relations (or, as today's buzzword dictionary would have it, earned media) won't necessarily solve a starving publisher's problems, it will help get a marketer's word out to market by circumventing ad blockers.
So too will content marketing and native advertising (which will help publishers stay afloat). Writing in an Advertising Age article entitled "The Solution to Ad Blocking Is to Double-Down on Earned Media," Edelman Chief Content Strategist Steve Rubel wrote: "We may look back on this time as the beginning of the great era of earned media." ...
For meaningful growth, startups must completely change the rules of traditional marketing and innovate outside of those growth channels. You should be thinking growth when building your app. Companies like Dropbox, Mint and the recently sensational Slack incorporated sharing into their functionalities.Mailbox used the waiting list to their advantage and it worked.
Lot of startups now look beyond AdWords, SEO or popular marketing strategies to find users. These are a collection of products, tools and apps to grow your startup or new business....
Though there are many things to consider when designing an image for a campaign, one crucial thing often falls by the wayside: optimizing the image for the width of the site you're pitching. Editors don't want to make their readers have to struggle to understand your image, so if your design is too wide or narrow for the site you're pitching, you could easily be rejected.
With that in mind, Fractl and BuzzStream looked at the main or featured body tag images for 35 of the top publishers to determine the most popular widths. We also looked at any larger layouts and pop-ups to determine a maximum width for each publisher when available.
We’ll walk you through four insights below that will help eliminate some of the guesswork during your next design phase....
By adding in the content part of their offering they make an excellent case to the client for having an ongoing billable relationship rather than simply overhauling the SEO as a one-off project and then moving on.
But it means an SEO agency is getting work which might otherwise have gone to a communications or marketing company. This is the heart of the issue....
At Onalytica we have been looking closely at the transformation of PR as we know it. Our vision is to evolve media relations into influencer relations professionals by managing relationships with hundreds of key influencers rather than just journalists.
Think about the numerous analysts, politicians, bloggers, thought leaders, industry professionals, stakeholders and influential consumers that all have big audiences that you want to reach. Influencer relations is a truly essential part of modern PR (we also offer a B2B influencer relations platform for PR practitioners)
One of the most time consuming parts of influencer relations (or influencer marketing) is identifying the right thought leaders. What if you just wrote a new blog and you have no idea what influencers would be interested in your content?
We’re here to help! We built a new tool to do this. Before it took up to an hour to find 10-20 relevant influencers, now you can do it in less than a minute…
Given the job PR has done to support the growth of the tech industry, it's time to celebrate the top tech PR executives globally. And there are 100 of them.
We have therefore decided to celebrate the top tech PR executives that have played their part in supporting some of the now household names in the tech industry and developed the sector as a whole.
To do so, we have again put the decision in the hands of the Hot Topics community and asked them to nominate the 100 top tech PR executives globally.....
We often hear Sanjay Dholakia’s quote, “Marketing has changed more in five years than the past five hundred.” What we don’t hear as much, however, is how public relations needs to transform itself to adapt to a changing world.
Here are three trends that are forcing PR agencies and professionals to step up their game, and what your organization can do to wield them to your advantage....
PRWeek's Global Agency Report launches on April 27: Here is a sneak preview of the trends agency bosses identified as defining 2014 and shaping the year ahead....
If you use social media to get smart on subjects you’re inexperienced in, Twitter hashtags can help you bone up on public relations. Here are some of the best hashtags to follow and use, along with why they’re so great.
“Today PR often encompasses everything from social media to content marketing andeven native advertising in some cases,” says Rebekah Iliff, chief strategy officer ofAirPR, the PR marketplace and technology platform.
While once the stepchild to its more glamorous sibling advertising, PR today can in fact far surpass the performance of advertising thanks to its ability to turn more traffic into leads.
For example, AirPR's data show that PR generates conversion rates 10 to 50 times that of advertising conversions.ahead
A recent Nielsen-inPowered study showed that earned media--which is just a fancy word for PR--is more effective than branded content at all stages of the purchase funnel. If you...
|
Is Chicago's Acme Hotel cool or what?