The Public Relations Blog

Public relations, like anything else, has its own vocabulary. When you’re working with your PR team to plan a successful campaign, it helps to know the meaning of terms that PR professionals use. The terms outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impacts are important elements of a PR campaign that you should know.

When designing a public relations plan for your company, Axia Public Relations starts with your goals and objectives. Then, we break them down further into inputs and activities. This is the first part of creating an effective PR program for you. We’ve created a scenario around Twidget, a fictional company, to illustrate how this process works and to help you understand what we mean by inputs and activities.

You do have the time, money, and data to measure public relations

The reasons for incorporating measurement and evaluation into your company’s public relations strategy are many:

• You know actual metrics behind reach, impressions, items, mentions, and engagement to understand the effectiveness of campaigns.
• You see which media channels certain audiences are most responsive to.
• You can predict future trends for better planning and agile response.

Blockchain has received a lot of attention in recent months, especially after the explosive growth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in December. Many people associate blockchain solely with financial applications. Others see potential for blockchain technology in nearly all aspects of life. It’s helpful to have a basic understanding of what blockchain is in order to thoughtfully consider how it may help your company, including your public relations efforts.

Don’t make these errors when a crisis hits your company

On the afternoon of Thursday, April 12, an employee at a Starbucks in Philadelphia decided that two men who were sitting at a table and had not purchased anything were a threat. That employee called the police who arrested the men and held them in custody until 1:30 a.m. the next morning. The men, who were waiting for a business associate, were African-American. Another Starbucks patron, Melissa DePino, recorded the incident and posted the video to Twitter at 2:12 that same afternoon. She tagged the video @Starbucks.

Applying the PDCA/Deming Cycle to public relations for strategic growth and improvement

Using measurement and evaluation (M&E) is a process that takes deliberate planning to thoroughly implement. It’s more than lifting some data from your analytics software and hoping to do better next month. Our previous blog posts discussed the difference between measurement and evaluation, the importance of knowing your purpose in this process, what kind of measurement data to collect and how to create SMART goals.

With the increased emphasis on quantifying the results of public relations actions, having a solid grasp of the fundamentals of measurement and evaluation is essential in making wise decisions around the use of data. Although many people put them together, measurement and evaluation are separate concepts. To be most effective, you must remember that they’re distinct tasks at different places within the framework of data collection and analysis. 

Is a crisis an operations problem or a public relations problem?

Facebook has received its fair share of negative news coverage in the past; however, it’s nothing like the current firestorm around it and the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. While the debate continues as to whether Facebook knew that the firm was actively harvesting user data to personalize content based on profile analytics, there’s no question that many Facebook users feel Facebook violated their privacy and are even questioning if the information presented to them on their personal news feeds manipulated them in some way.

To a buyer, sharing is caring

Understanding the journey of a prospective online buyer is essential to designing a flow of information that encourages the behavior you value. Shared media (social media, online reviews and user generated content on channels and sites you share with other companies and individuals), often pivotal in the online shopper’s journey, is a public relations game changer. However, it can also be a wildcard. After all, we don’t dictate who’s doing the sharing or what the audience is saying. This can be scary considering that, professionally, our goal is to control the product message and facilitate interactions between the company and consumer in a positive direction, typically with the overall intention to drive sales.

3 reasons to change PESO for PR

The PESO model for segregating paid media, earned media, shared media and owned media has been around for years. Some PR and marketing professionals are adopting its communication framework to manage their efforts in reaching audiences. The PESO Venn diagram provides a holistic picture of the many channels that influence audiences’ buyer behavior in the decision-making process.