In With the Old, In With the NewBest Practices in PRBlogs, corporate social responsibility, WOM marketing... and the list of best practices in public relations can go on and on.
The point of outlining the best practices is not to prescribe methods of operation, but rather to describe what works for many in public relations. Tradtional communication scholars like Henri Fayol and Max Weber attempted to create a standard and model organization in which all other businesses should follow. As we now know, scientific management and business operation perscriptions simply do not work.
Throughout the semester, I noticed several reoccurying themes, skills and practices. I compiled a list of the most popular and useful "best practices" from my point of view.
By no means do these best practices insure success or problem-free situations, but they do provide options that many public relations professionals currently use on a daily basis. I think more traditional practices enhance and back up the newer, yet equally as important, practices.
Traditional Best Practices - Strong writing and public speaking skills
- Ability to research and measure media hits
- Substantial and strong relationships with the media
Today's Best Practices
- Keeping up with technology: understanding and using blogs, RSS feeds, email and Podcasts
- Understanding and learning how to relate to different cultures in America and abroad
- Remaining transparent and ethical
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Utilizing pop culture
Celebrities Become PR ToolAccording to the
Economist.com, Americans buy 7.5 million celebrity magazines each year. TV channels such as E!, VH1 and MTV dedicate some of their shows to cover celebrity gossip and news.
With large media attention focused on celebrities, I think it’s only natural that public relations professionals and agencies are incorporating the rich and the famous as a tool to reach their audiences.
Look-Look and
Backstage Creations devote pop culture and trends as their main tactic to gain exposure for clients. Agencies automatically have a credible third party source for clients by putting products in the hands of celebrities.
Popular award shows are excellent resources for pop culture PR professionals because several celebrities are in the same place at the same time. The Oscars, Tony Awards and MTV Video Music Awards draw a large crowd of extremely popular celebrities, and award show gift basket put products in the hands of these people.
Celebrities receive some of the most popular and newest products on the market.
The 2005 Tony Awardsallowed the presenters to customize their gift baskets from a $20,000 gift collection.
The 2005 MTV VMA gift basket puts $16,000 worth of promotional products in the hands of the performers and presenters. Among several other items, the basket includes 23 bath and body products, four pieces of jewelry, two pairs of sunglass and free stays at hotels.
By reaching the celebrities at award shows, public relation professionals gain a wide range of exposure for their clients because Americans constantly monitor celebrity trends and fashion. If Lindsay Lohan is using a Sidekick to text message her other celebrity friends, her fans and followers will want to copy her.
We all want to be rich and famous, but we won’t. However, we can live vicariously through celebrities by copying what they wear and the technology that they use.
PR professionals can strike gold by giving celebrities new products first, especially if the paparazzi catches them wearing the new Versace sunglasses.
Lesson Learned, Cover All Your BasesCase studies often provide insight and somewhat of a “how-to” guide for other PR professionals and students. Rather than looking at how an agency or company handled a crisis situation, I opted to search for how a case or product launch was handled well.
Ogilvy Public Relations provides a list of case studies, and
The Heart Truth campaign caught my attention.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute partnered with Ogilvy to launch a national public awareness campaign about the number one killer of women, heart disease.
Heart disease kills 8 times as many women as breast cancer, but few women know this fact. In order to raise awareness among middle-aged women about this health issue, NHLBI launched
The Heart Truth campaign in the spring of 2002. The entire campaign used the slogan, “Heart Disease Doesn’t Care What You Wear– It’s the #1 Killer of Women,” through out all the events and tactics.
The Heart Truth also received tremendous support from the media, corporations and the fashion industry from the start. Corporate partnerships with
GLAMOUR, Smart Ones and IMG Models allowed further exposure to different demographics of
middle-aged women. Following
The Heart Truth’s slogan, a red dress became the symbol to carry on the theme of the campaign. Fashion designers such as Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karen all designed red dresses for Fashion Week in 2003. The Red Dress Pin also helped draw attention to the campaign. First Lady Laura Bush advocated the cause by appearing on all the network morning shows and by
participiating in eight
Heart Truth community events. Education booklets and pamphlets provided education materials for women, doctors and leaders to reference and spread the word about the dangers of heart disease.
The results of the campaign show that covering all your bases- everything from an agreesive media campaign to creating a well-known symbol- all help to gain recoginition from the target audience. Heart disease awareness among women increased by 12 percent in less than one year. After two years, the campaign made over 400 million media impressions, and 500,000 Red Dress Pins were sold.
I think
The Heart Truth campaign was very successful based on the partnership with high-end fashion designers and Fashion Week. This probably raised the most awareness, in my opinion, because women tend to pay attention to fashion and trends. The health-awareness campaign did a phenomenal job of targeting specific mediums and gatekeepers to reach their audience. As a college student, I even caught wind of the heart disease statistic and saw the red dress pins on some of my peers and parent’s friends. I learned the value of research and targeting a specific audience from this case study, and I definitely think hitting all the major mediums will gain the most exposure for clients.
Will They Hire Me?As the semester comes to an end, internship and job advice seems to consume most conversations and even some classroom lectures. My junior year is almost over, and I have not had an internship yet. Although I’ve been very active on campus and held a steady job over the past three years, I worry employers might overlook me due to my lack of official public relations experience. Also, all the abundance of advice is overwhelming and it’s difficult to decide what works and what really is important when searching for internships and jobs in the communications industry.
Mike Lake from Burson-Marsteller and Jodi Venturoni from Weber-Shandwick offered wonderful and similar advice when speaking to my Advanced Communications Skills class. Both explained strong writing skills, a solid work ethic, and past experience all help in landing an internship.
Many of my peers explain dressing professionally, asking questions at the end of an interview and showing an outgoing personality works the best during the interview process.
However, if every applicant basically acts the same during interviews for internships, what are employers searching for on the resumes? How do employers distinguish between two applicants who performed well during the interview? How can I stand out against my competitors on my resume and in my interview? Are employers really just looking for strong writing skills?
Furthermore, not much of the advice deals with how to act while interning with an organization. How do interns prove themselves worthy of working there as an intern and as a future official employee? Am I going to make copies and coffee, or will I get the chance to work on real projects? What do employers consider when they are looking to hire an intern to become an official employee? Is there a line between an overachiever and a brownnoser?
All these questions make me anxious of the internship search, but I am confident I will figure everything all out before I step into my first interview. If anyone, anywhere has “best practices for landing an internship” advice, please send it my way! I can use all the help I can get.
High Tech PR
There’s no doubt that emerging technologies, especially online, are impacting public relations and marketing. As many have already discovered, blogs are the newest communication tool, and over 75,000 blogs are created daily.
For the past week, I’ve been researching other technologies that are changing the way PR works. Podcasting, RSS, SEO, and mobile marketing have developed as the blogosphere continues to grow. I’m still unsure about what some of this means, but Ketchum defines these new tools better than I ever could.
"Blogs: Online conversations, diaries, and commentaries of their owners on a variety of topics, whose growth in number to more than 9 million indicate that individual voices are more influential than ever in the marketplace.
Podcasting: A Web-based broadcast medium in which audio files are made available online – it’s blogging gone audio. Essentially, podcasts are niche radio programs on the Web that enable organizations to bypass mainstream media gatekeepers to deliver messages directly to the marketplace. Already, there are 5,000-plus podcasts and counting, and three out of every ten iPod/MP3 player-owners have downloaded a podcast.
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS: A method for ensuring broad distribution of blogs and podcasts by circumventing cluttered e-mail boxes and delivering information upon request directly to consumers, journalists and others who sign up to receive it. RSS is experiencing rapid interest and adoption in the U.S. as users of iPods and other MP3 players multiply; already most journalists use RSS aggregators to keep them up-to-date on breaking news.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO: Control of the order that links appear on the results pages of key online search engines. This enables, for instance, links to organizations’ Web sites to appear top-of-list for qualified audiences such as consumers and reporters.
Mobile Marketing: Delivers a wide variety of marketing information via mobile phones anytime and anywhere. In 2004, wireless users numbered an estimated 668.5 million with 14.6 million new users in China alone in the 2004 fourth quarter. Mobile technology is still evolving with wireless devices and quickly turning into multimedia devices, thereby expanding the possibilities for mobile-marketing content."
New tools have many professionals searching for ways to keep up with Joneses. More importantly, however, the concern is what to do after they figure out what tools they want to use. I thought I was the only one having a hard time figuring the blogosphere out, but even national conferences are being held to discuss the implications and importance of new technology in the PR industry.
Citizen journalists, CEO’s and students like myself are discovering the importance of these tools at the same time. There isn’t an expert or theory to turn to. We’re all figuring it out together. Although we may not know if the blogosphere will stick around, we can weigh the pros and cons of online tools and their impact on the communications industry right now.
Overall, new online technology tools allow companies to be more transparent and consumers to offer feedback more quickly. Anyone who has an opinion can voice their concerns on the web. Corporations can also track consumers’ interest in their operations. Schwartzman and Associates part of their business and website to online media tools for clients, showing how quickly professionals are changing the way they approach business.
On the other hand, I think focusing too much on the latest, “hippest” technology, people completely side-step the possible disadvantages and shortcomings. Too much of a good thing is always possible, and the vast amount of blogs makes it almost impossible to search through all the information. Just like advertising, consumers may start ignoring mobile messages. What if people don’t want to be tracked or sent information about a company just because they visited a website? What if people don’t want to be contacted through grassroots marketing?
As technology continues to move forward, it’s important to keep in mind where to draw the line. I think as the interest in online media tools levels off, a balance between information and application of new technology will make it easier to navigate in the blogosphere.
Moving Beyond the Press Release
Getting Ink for ClientsWell-written press releases, creative media kits and strong relationships with the media used to be enough to get adequate exposure for clients. These traditional communication tools and skills no longer provide the best way for securing media hits, which forces public relations professionals to explore innovative ways to grab the media’s attention.
Everyday the media is bombarded with emails and phone calls from people attempting to get a product or company’s name published in a credible source. People in PR are beginning to realize the easiest way to stand out from the competition starts with having a creative idea for a campaign or product launch, not with mastering the art of standard forms of communication.
Hosting special events, integrating advertising with PR, donating money to charity and even blogs all grab the media’s attention more than traditional strategies because they offer additional information that separates inventive clients from other standard companies.
I found several examples of companies that take PR to the next level during my search for the best tips for getting ink for clients. Both
Jeremy Pepper and
Andrea Weckerle provided useful insight, opinions and advice that exemplify the creative tactics needed to get the media interested in a client.
While discussing some of the best practices in an email with Wekerle, she said “I know that word-of-mouth is the best promotion a client can receive.”
Womma.org defines word-of-mouth marketing as “the act of consumers providing information to other consumers.” Once consumers and the general public create a buzz by talking about a company or product, the media is more likely to take notice. Green Gear Cycling, also known as Bike Friday, has created a network of loyal customers who spread the word about the custom bike company by giving former customers 12 prepaid post cards after they purchase a custom bike. Whenever someone inquires about their bike, these “customer evangelists” gladly hand out one of the post cards, which serve as referrals to a potential customer. According to
CMOmagazine.com, about 10,000 of Bike Friday’s customers came from these referrals and they generated $1.3 million in sales by utilizing the word-of-mouth tactic.
In one of her more recent
blogs, Wekerle also describes how tie-ins with celebrities can help raise awareness about a new company or service.
Yly, a new social networking website for teenagers from ages 13-18, asked
Nick Lachey to be a spokesperson for their website because many cyberpredators started using his name to entice underage internet users off the web. The idea behind the website is interesting enough, but adding a celebrity to the company’s name separates YFly from other social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook.
Furthermore, the line between advertising and PR is starting to become blurry.
The Dallas Mavericks combined advertising and public relations to promote the basketball team by placing the team’s logo on the
hub caps of 115 taxicabs throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. The Mavs are the first to use hub caps as a form of advertising in North Texas. Although the hub cap idea seems like strictly an advertising move, the Mavs generated free publicity by being the first in the area to place information about the team in this creative way.
Heineken also created a buzz by using new technology and an innovative form of advertising to promote the company. According to
Eric Schwartzman’s blog, 5,000 digital-downloading jukeboxes displaying Heineken’s brand were placed in bars across the country. PR strives promote brands in off-the-wall ways, and Heineken’s new ad campaign incorporates PR tactics because the company is one of the first to try jukeboxes as way to promote the brand.
Whether or not it’s appropriate, a controversial campaign sometimes effectively grabs the media’s attention more so than the average press release.
Media Orchard stated
PETA “launched its latest campaign -- and like most of its recent efforts, it seeks to shock and awe people into paying attention.” The campaign uses a parody of the scandalous Girls Gone Wild videos in order to draw attention to the hazards of drinking milk and the little-known abuse of cows. Granted PETA may cross the line with this campaign, they still get their message out to consumers because they are so controversial.
The Milk Gone Wild campaignwas banned from television, which instantly draws attention to their website. Word-of-mouth marketing plays a key role in getting people to visit their website to see the banned content, which in turn has media interested in what the buzz is all about.
In addition, Jeremy Pepper suggested building a concise press list, writing a succinct pitch email letter and making the effort to actually call reporters to help get a client’s name published in the media. A strong idea or creative campaign like the examples above are still part of the process in getting ink for a client, and the traditional PR tools become useful only after a company grabs media’s attention. Creativity is a must in corporate communications, and I think unique tactics will continue to separate the strong companies from the weak as technology advances within the next few years. The blogosphere may open up new doors for communications, but only time will tell how far this trend will go.
What’s My Age Again?
21 and Feeling Old in the New Blogging WorldMerriam-Webster declared “blog” as the top word for 2004, but the buzz about blogs did not stop there (
BBC News). Two years later, people around the world continue to create their own blogsites, allowing for new channels of communication and feedback to flow from just about anyone who has an opinion.
As a corporate communications student, I never thought online journals would become part of my curriculum. However, weblogs or “blogs” recently transitioned from the latest trend to the next necessary tool for corporate communications and public relations within the past year, and I found myself scrambling to catch up on the latest technology.
Several public relations professionals, CEOs and journalists started using blogs to create a sounding board for anything from new products or campaigns to general opinions about the communications industry.
Loss of trust in the media is a major discussion point among blogs for public relations because they allow for open discussion about negative perceptions and incorrect generalizations about corporate communications. Incidents like the
James Frey and The Lewis Group scandal lead people to believe the media lacks solid ethics and morals. Richard Edelman, the president and CEO of Edelman, uses his blog (
6 a.m.) to discuss his strong opinions about the negativity surrounding the media and the future of public relations. He explains, “Our business is being dragged down by an erosion of the hard and fast line between advertising and public relations. We don't buy space and we don't pay off journalists.” Before blogs, his explanation wouldn’t be available to the public in such a casual manner, and I think his blog exemplifies what this industry needs to help change the negative stereotypes.
Furthermore, many corporate communications blogs discuss the future of the industry with the advancement of the new internet technology. More traditional tools such as media kits and press releases are now turning digital, changing the way communications works in all areas of the industry. Both
Jeremy Pepper and
Edelman give their own take on the future of public relations through their blogs. Pepper says, “PR has never been about control… but has been about messaging. That's what PR should always be about - access to the message, getting the message out.” Blogging seems to have become an effective communication tool for those who figured out how to use them. Edelman calls the move from traditional communication the “Me2 Revolution,” and he says blogging shows “a yearning to move beyond the simple act of consumption of information to social networking.” An eclectic mix of people’s opinions is now easily accessible, and the concept of citizen journalists is on the rise.
One of the more interesting blogs I discovered combines several blogs into one. Although some PR bloggers direct most of their attention to specific product launches and new campaigns,
Media Orchard by IdeaGrove merges all facets of the latest news in PR from different blog sites. Anything from new products to tips for public relations agencies are found here.
Slowly, I am starting to get a general idea of how corporate communications and public relations benefits from blogs by using them to evolve communication tools once again. I still feel a little apprehensive about the process of blogging, probably because new technology always throws me off balance. Granted, even if blogs disappear within the next two years, it is still a nice change of pace from writing press releases for the umpteenth time. So get blogging!
