The Public Relations Blog

4 pro tips for staying on top of your PR game

It’s a great time of year for sports. Plenty of slow-paced baseball games balanced with intense hockey and heart-pumping basketball playoff games. When comparing your public relations approach to a sport, aim to be a right wingman or power forward, not a center fielder.

PR, after all, is a contact sport. If you want to win in the PR game, you can’t be afraid of contact. Here is some advice for incorporating more contact into your PR approach and, as a result, building stronger relationships and garnering better results.

5 ways to guard your company against digital hackers

You think it won’t happen to you, until it does. Whether it’s your identity, your reputation or your social media accounts, digital hackers are alive and well.

Last week, Ole Miss Rebels lineman Laremy Tunsil personally learned just how social his social media accounts could be when they were hacked during the NFL’s opening draft night.

Social media is a necessary tool for any company, and hiring a social media agency could be a great business boost and time-saver. But is your agency really representing you well?

Here are five secrets your social media agency may not want you to know about social media.

Learn how you, too, can use PR to grow your business

In business, growth is the name of the game. Many small- and medium-sized companies look to large corporations to see how it’s done. Knowing this, you may be curious about how much large, billion-dollar global corporations invest in public relations.

Big companies invest heavily in PR firms, typically $250,000 to $25 million annually – often less than one percent of revenue – to achieve big results. Even if you don’t have that kind of revenue (yet), you can still take maximum advantage of smart public relations, if you know how.

When you compare cost to results, you will always come out ahead

As a medium-sized company, you have more resources than a small business, but can still maintain a level of flexibility not present in large corporations. Although you have more money to work with, you still need to ensure that you spend it wisely. So, are you spending enough on public relations?

When it comes to your growth and success, invest wisely

You have decided that your company needs the services of a public relations firm. Perhaps you already have in-house staff that could use an extra hand to get more done. Maybe you are looking to invest more resources and time in your company’s PR efforts for increased visibility and results, and you have determined that a PR agency is your best option. Whatever the reason, you first need to know how much hiring a PR firm will cost.

When your CEO creates a firestorm

An instance of self-induced crisis cleanup began on Wednesday when Verizon workers went on strike over several key issues – which, in itself, wasn’t the crisis.

In the presidential campaign events the next day, both Democratic candidates took to the stage to support various aspects of the Verizon workers’ decision. This is common for politicians; it only became an issue for Verizon when the company’s CEO chose to respond to only one candidate, Bernie Sanders, but remained silent regarding Hillary Clinton’s similar statements on the same day.

Don’t dig yourself into a hole during a PR crisis

Not having your customer’s pulse for your brand can hurt your business when the public is expecting a response from you, but so can a knee-jerk reaction. No matter what noise is in the background, responsible corporate statements always need to stay on message, on time and be delivered via the appropriate channels.

Learn how company culture can increase productivity and profitability

The Emmy-winning CBS network reality series Undercover Boss is one of the most popular shows on television. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a program where CEOs of medium and large corporations go in disguise as low-level employees at their own companies to find what’s really going on in their businesses. Along the way, they meet and are touched by the real employees who are helping (or sometimes not helping) the companies stay successful.

In the past, crisis communication was usually done on an ad hoc basis and in a relatively reactive manner. More recently, companies have realized that communicating messages during times of corporate stress should be carefully managed so that the right message is sent to both their customers and to their employees.