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PR and marketing must remain distinct: PR must not answer to marketing. Marketing is centered on the brand, PR centered on relationships. Whilst I strongly believe that marketing plays a central role in business and that PR can and must support the brand, I also believe that PR and marketing must remain two distinct responsibility centers: PR must not answer to marketing, period. They must work closely together – marketing centered on the brand, PR centered on the relationships. Or, put another way, marketing centered on the consumer and PR centered on the citizen.... [Thoughtful post by Craig Pearce - JD]
It is not hyperbolic to say it: Public relations professionals now have an epic opportunity to serve the global society and thereby win new appreciation of our profession. In fact, some are already well into that mission....
You could see this public relations vs billionaire Mark Cuban crisis coming for miles. It all started with Cuban’s advice in Entrepreneur.com to startup companies including: “Never hire a PR firm.” He's wrong on two counts of course...
Remember this ‘90s personality (for lack of a better term)? He had a way with words. Well, guess what—Shore’s films (and turns of phrase) offer tips worth noting. Regrettably, Rosetta Stone doesn’t offer a program on the native tongue of “Paulywood.” And that’s too bad, because many of the actor’s most notable movie roles offer lessons in communications and marketing. Don’t believe us? Here are five lessons from his various movies....
As an industry PR is challenged: it struggles with who we are, what we do and how to measure our work. It should be no surprise then that there’s a great deal of discrepancy to be found in the methods and results of sizing up the PR industry.
Case in point? The latest VSS Communications Industry Forecast: “The only Traditional Marketing segment to outperform the economy, Public Relations & Word-of-Mouth Marketing, will see CAGR of 14.0% in the forecast period to $10.96 billion in 2015, as the role of PR in integrated marketing campaigns expands and social media fuels gains in WoMM spending.”...
When activists target an organization, typically the corporate communications function is on point for a response. This article discusses sweatshop allegations against Nike and Levi-Strauss and how the corporate leadership dealt with transparency.
Ever wonder just how much a front page story actually does for your bottom line? Most likely a great deal, according to a recent MediaMiser report that studies potential correlations between media coverage and sales outcomes. According to the report – featuring an analysis of Toyota Motor Corp.’s U.S. media coverage from January to May of 2011 – the overall number of Toyota-related articles and media mentions showed a direct correlation with that company’s sales figures....
Recently there have been a number of blogs and articles that discuss how companies should treat their PR firm in order to get the best results. Many of these tips are usually hard to argue basics...
What struck me recently in conversation with a few thoughtful PR pros was that we should be concentrating on adding values as well as value to programs. When you look at a grove of old growth trees do you see value or values? That may define the true PR professional...
Check out this infographic for a brief history of top PR campaigns. Their success indicates that the principles of PR remain the same.
News Hawks Review is not about hawks, it's P.R. The Los Angeles Times recently flagged a troublesome trend at Google News. After an abundance of glowing coverage about the California Central Basin's new recycled water system started showing up in Google News, The Times found proof that the search giant had been duped by a site called News Hawks Review. Sam Allen (a human journalist) reported on Tuesday that Google News (a mixture of human and robot journalists) had included content produced by a corporate communications firm in their collection of news sites. Google promptly reacted by pulling the site out off of their list of trusted news sources....
Ethics: The rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc. This small six-letter word packs a whole lot of meaning behind it, particularly in the PR and journalism world....
All CEOs should speak this way.... ...In an era in which communications professionals, attorneys, and brand consultants scrub everything many CEOs say, this was admirable and refreshing. More CEOs should speak like people. It makes them more approachable and likable. It reminds everyone that they are people doing jobs. And it makes everyone actually listen to what they have to say. In any event, when Carol Bartz got canned as Yahoo's CEO, she went out exactly the way she came in: With a short note to the staff...
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“For decades a stream of bright young men and women, most of them with college degrees ranging from B.S. to Ph.D., have been coming to my office to ask me and my wife how to enter the profession ... It seems there was real encouragement for those with intellectual capability to work in public relations. Indeed, Bernays saw public relations practitioners as a bridge between thinkers and doers. But I’m beginning to believe the majority of modern practitioners view PR as a non-intellectual trade, where craft skills count most, along with a friendly personality and a preference to spend time churning out releases and Tweets rather than thinking about anything more important they should be doing....
Kirk Hazlett, APR, Fellow PRSA, ponders what has and hasn't changed in the field of public relations. I stumbled into the field of public relations some 40-plus years ago so … The obvious … and first … response is “a lot.” After all, when I was a public affairs intern working for the US Army a million years ago, a remarkable piece of technology appeared that made it possible to transmit the written word via a telephone line to remote and exotic locales. Yes, I was alive and kicking when the fax machine altered the way in which we communicated! But then I get serious with those who truly are interested and say that, in terms of objectives and strategies, nothing has changed....
The primary code of ethics I refer to is my own moral compass. In most cases there is a clear right or wrong way to go about business activity though this too is subjective. Where does PR’s loyalty lie? Because a communicator is employed by an organisation, he or she has first and, arguably, overriding responsibility to them. However, we all live in society and have a broader responsibility, as well. So it’s not a simplistic equation. Truth and honesty are values I hold in high esteem....
Everyone in public relations or journalism knows it. It’s a love/hate relationship. In many cases, we make friends and contacts that mutually benefit each other’s careers. In other cases, we do what we gotta do to make our client or managing editor happy. Some PR pros are better than others, while some journalists are easier to work with than others – it’s just the name of the game. I’ve split my career on both sides of the media relations aisle. First as a journalist, and later a PR pro. I’ve always thought that both disciplines were very similar, but not exactly synonymous. In the past, there has been a very distinct line between the two, but that is all about to change. Welcome to 2012 – the year it all turns upside-down....
Is traditional PR dead? What role does social media play? I remember conversations a few years back when I sat around a table with a group of colleagues and asked “is traditional PR dying?” With the declining newspaper industry, and increasing digital world, it seemed that traditional PR may go by the wayside. I’m happy to report that it is not dead. But it definitely is evolving....
A Guest Post by Justin Goldsborough: What if I was writing this blog post with only the hope that it would be published? What if I took the time to research the topic, identify the story, and find the case studies with no guarantee anyone but me would ever see any of that work come to fruition? What if I was completely reliant on a third party to decide if my post has what it takes to make it to the Internet? Sounds absurd, right?...
Using the four cultural dimensions that academic Geert Hofstede created to explain how cultures differ, we look at whether the same aspects are also present in the way cultures approach social media too. ...our cultural differences are still alive and kicking – and they have a profound impact on the way we deal with social media. Some of our findings even confirm what we know about culture from well-established academic literature. In other words: people from different nationalities react to social media in a way that could have been predicted by social science. In this post, I’d like to take you through the four cultural dimensions that academic Geert Hofstede created to explain how cultures differ back in the Eighties, and if they can be seen reflected in today’s social media channels....
How to breakdown and calculate the different marketing costs when using social media, and how to show their impact on your public relations efforts.
Corporations—and other institutions—are now facing a level of radical transparency that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. At many companies, it was still possible five or 10 years ago, to believe that the brand was everything the company said about its products and services, the sum total of its logo, its advertising, its press releases, its sponsorships. Today, the brand is no longer determined by what the company says about itself; it’s determined by all the things that are said about the company by others, in the real world (over garden fences, in hair salons, the supermarket check-out line, over drinks and dinners) and in digital and social media....
Call it new-school PR. Today, PR pros are drooling over the journalist or news organization with the most followers on Twitter. Remember that guy who caught Derek Jeter's 3,000th home-run ball, politely gave it back to the Yankee and was showered with gifts that amounted to an unaffordable sales tax? Miller High Life offered to pick up the tab. And though other brands were also capitalizing on the news, the beer brand's coverage might have been the most prominent -- all thanks to one journalist's considerable Twitter following. Call it new-school PR....
An interesting story about putting the PR blame where it really belongs. It started when I read a whining complaint from a high tech entrepreneur. ...I decided to look at Cabulous’ past PR efforts and do a quick analysis to figure out why it never got its fair share of media coverage. It looks like such an interesting product and story. Their PR problems were painfully obvious....
A PR writing teacher uncovered a disturbing trend among the PR industry’s future practitioners. See how schools are tackling the problem. September is PR ethics months. To mark the occasion, the Public Relations Society of America is publishing a series of posts on the ethics and ethics training. Here’s one. It began simply enough: a conversation about ethics with freshman and sophomore university students in my PR writing class. Then, one young woman said that it was OK to be dishonest because “PR people are supposed to lie.” At least six other students nodded their heads in agreement....
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