The Public Relations Blog

Advice for students planning a public relations career

The school year is in full swing, and public relations students are likely juggling multiple class projects and thinking about the thing that’s on most college students’ minds: getting a job after college. Here are six tips to help students secure a great job in PR.

Use creative content to reach your audience

With search engines placing more emphasis on valuable content, a once-static website can now become a more dynamic calling card for any company. An optimal way to keep your website fresh is to create and maintain a well-crafted blog to attract new visitors and further build relationships with those who have visited previously. With greater focus on inbound marketing, companies are ditching aggressive sales and marketing approaches of yesteryear and replacing them with conscientious, thoughtful and strategic engagement to assert differentiation.

Blogs are evolving to incorporate useful and creative content in the form of videos and hyper-localized content. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you consider your blogging efforts.

How to make the most of your social media engagement

There is no doubt that social media marketing is very important. It allows companies to directly engage with their customers, build brand presence and ultimately grow their businesses. You can use various metrics to measure your social media strategy success. Some companies believe that the total number of followers or fans is what matters the most for having a well-established presence online. How do you determine the value of your social media following?

Invest wisely; don’t underspend on PR.

Most companies are looking to save money — especially on items they don’t believe are essential to success. You might think you should hire the low-cost public relations solution rather than finding the right solution for your company. However, choosing a cheaper solution instead of the solution that addresses your company’s needs may jeopardize your company in the future.

Public relations builds a company’s brand. It’s a vital element to success. Don’t endanger your company by underspending on PR. Use these four strategies to ensure you’re hiring the right PR solution for your company and not making mistake #5 of the 15 mistakes companies make when hiring a PR firm.

October 30. To most it’s just another day of the year. However, in the public relations and journalism worlds, it’s a day to celebrate. October 30 is National Publicist Day.

(See also: What’s the difference between publicity and public relations? Hint: PR strategists hate when we call them publicists.)

On this day in 1906, well-known public relations pioneer and productivity consultant Ivy Lee wrote the first documented press release.

6 tips to help you obtain news coverage for your company

Public relations professionals should understand their clients aren't looking to put a news release in a frame on their wall. They want a cover story or great feature story to frame. So how do you make it happen? There’s no sure-fire way to earn that coveted feature story placement. However, there are some things you can do to help make the dream a reality.

How to attract more traffic to your social media platforms

 Many companies rely on their social media strategy to help grow their business. Social media spreads the word about your brand, establishes your credibility, gets you more leads and brings you convertible traffic. Obviously, you want to use social media platforms to their full potential. The question is how? Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. There are, however, certain key steps that work to maximize your social media efforts.

Public relations has historically focused on creating or transforming public perception. Today, in an era of heavily used social media and rapid-turn news, companies now have both unique communications challenges as well as limitless communication opportunities.

It’s no secret that client, employee or vendor opinions can make or break a business. Glassdoor, Indeed, BBB, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor and others provide fertile ground for opinion seeding. And opinions, even from strangers, drive sales. Once rooted in a solid handshake, the sales process has shifted somewhat in that companies can digitally seduce new business while driving more traffic to their website, blog and social media platforms. It’s within these digital locations where many relationships begin and often result in a sale. Here are a few tips to easily establish positive relationships with your visitors and turn them into company promoters through inbound marketing:

This is one post about company productivity. Read about the value of a daily huddle for more. 

In today’s multitasking society, it’s often difficult to stay focused. Distractions abound, and many of us think that the more we do at one time, the better. This may not be the case. There’s a method that works for our company, and we think it will work for yours too. The Ivy Lee Method is simple and achieves maximum productivity. Since we first learned about it from keynote speaker Verne C. Harnish, we use the method daily and recommend it to our clients and their leadership teams.

Instagram, like most other social media platforms, invests heavily in fine-tuning and further developing its platform. With many changes afoot, including the addition of new features and advertising options, how can your company stay ahead of the curve and keep its Instagram account effectively reaching followers?