The Public Relations Blog

When creating your inbound marketing strategy, maintain high standards

Inbound marketing takes time and effort. You do your best to write interesting original content; create social media posts and monitor comments; find captivating images for your work; and manage your readers’ testimonials. Through all your hard work, keep in mind that it’s important to be honest with your audience in your every inbound marketing effort.

Read More

Learn why both are important to your company’s image and bottom line

Your company’s reputation precedes you in every meeting, event and interaction with the public. It’s what consumers use to decide whether they can trust you and your product and if they should spend money with you.

You may think that a good reputation just happens; that if you are well behaved and don’t actively seek to do harm, people will notice. But this is not the case. It’s vital to manage your reputation – and do so ethically.

Read More

Learn how to get the most value from public relations without crossing ethical lines

We ask public relations professionals to tell our story, but do they have to tell the truth? If your PR firm, in handling a crisis for you, chooses to omit unfavorable information about your company when addressing the public, is that dishonest? More importantly, if unethical behavior from PR helps your company, should you care?

Read More

Learn how making the right decisions can advance your news coverage efforts

Some say that ethics comes from knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. Sure, there are ways to cheat and get around rules with little or no consequence, but is that the way you want to run your business?

Just as there are right and wrong ways to run your company, there are also correct and incorrect ways to manage your media relations efforts. Before you create or adjust your media relations strategy, it is important to be aware of the ethical issues involved to ensure that you don’t damage your reputation in the pursuit of news coverage.

Read More

Here, you win by demonstrating your ethical know-how

Is fakery rife in the PR industry? Lying has unfortunately become more common with some PR practitioners – especially lately, with the majority of outlets slashing their seasoned workforces. This leaves tightened budgets, added responsibilities and time-crunched junior practitioners with little experience and apparently no problem turning their heads when it comes to unethical tactics.

Talk to ethics experts and they’ll tell you that the best defense against ethical problems is keeping it real. Professionalism – not exaggeration – is the key to the future of the PR industry. PR is all about building relationships and brands; if the brand image tumbles because of a faulty message, that can damage your relationships, products and services.

Read More

In addition to September’s status as Ethics Awareness Month, the arrival of fall signals the beginning of professional and collegiate football, tailgating and, of course, the return of the NFL to news headlines. However, those headlines aren’t exclusively focused on superstars, injuries and scores; rather, the spotlight illuminates a 2015 scandal (“Deflate-gate”) that rocked the NFL mere months after several players’ public domestic violence incidences.

Read More

Use these tips from PR to guide you

September is Ethics Awareness Month, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK for your company to misbehave for the other 11 months of the year. This recognition serves to remind us of the evergreen importance of ethics.

The Public Relations Society of America details a stringent code of ethics to address challenges and serve as a guide for ethical actions within the industry. With help from PR, you can learn about the importance of ethics for your own business and improve your chances of getting it right.

Read More

A public relations mentor of mine spent many years hammering home a philosophy that he lived by not only professionally, but personally: the THINK principle, which serves as a series of governing rules for communication.

Public relations professionals are trained communications experts often sought after to convey information with clarity, but when I first heard this philosophy, I found it rather perplexing. Is it really possible to hold to these principles with each sentence we utter? It seems like an awful lot to consider. The THINK philosophy is outlined as follows:

Read More

For more information why you shouldn't hire an advertising firm to do PR, see Signs you’re working with an ad agency instead of a PR firm

 

Never let an advertising agency do your PR.

 

The other night I saw a commercial from Apple, in which it claimed that the iPhone is now the most-used camera on earth. Not the most-used camera phone, the most-used camera, which would mean its integrated digital camera has surpassed stand-alone photo giants like Nikon, Canon and Fuji. Added to the number of Google searches, emails and Facebook updates performed every day on smartphones, the popularity of cell-phone cameras is a powerful testament to just how much you and I love and depend on integrated technologies. (Remember when you had to remember your camera, film and batteries? I do.)

Read More