The Monday Digest: First Things First
Happy 4th of July week! If you haven’t noticed, your email inbox and television screens have been bombarded with sales and incentives around this celebratory holiday. You may have gotten flip flops for a dollar or nabbed a summer dress for 50% off. It may not seem like it matters but there’s a likeliness that you also bought something in that store 100% full price. If not, don’t worry, you’ll return soon. The point is, tactics like these get potential clients in the door and reward existing clients for all of their loyalty and dollars. To build your clientele or increase your customers, give them a reward for coming in your door and be sure to well publicize it.
Enjoy the links and Happy Monday!
PRCouture: Fashion Bloggers, Brands and Sponsored Campaigns vs. PR Outreach
PR Daily: Why A Reporter Didn’t Open A PR Pro’s Three Email Pitch Letters
Wired PR Works: How to Gauge Twitter Reactions and Results
Denver PR Blog: Engaging Your Customers
Strategic PR: Context + Relevance - An Important Equation
PR Newser: 3 Tips to Up Your Personal Brand
Tech Effect: Five Reasons Why I’m Not Using Facebook Advertising
PR Sydney: The Difference Between Advertising and PR
Got more questions about this? Email us! Blog@ThePRWorkShop.com
The Monday Digest: Free Publicity For All
Happy Post-Thanksgiving Monday! We hope you had enough turkey - and sleep - to hold you over until Christmas. Today’s links have one focus, getting you FREE publicity, for yourself, your brand or your product. As much as we support paying for public relations and building relationships with the right agencies and publicists, we know that its often not feasible. Here are a few tips, tools and strategies to help you and your team take the plunge yourself.
Enjoy and Happy Monday!
PR Daily: How to Cultivate Reporter Relationships on Twitter
ComPRhension: Five Ways to Make Your Content Stick
Tech Crunch: Social Proof is the New Marketing
Communique PR: Mastering the Nine Second Sound Bite
PRCouture: 5 Free Digital Tools No Fashion PR Should Be Without
PRCouture: The Ultimate Social Search: How To Drive Clicks and Retweets on Twitter
Journalistics: The Best Day To Send a Press Release
Got more questions about this? Email us! Blog@ThePRWorkShop.com
Five Must-read PR Books For Any Startup
Want to rev up your pr efforts? A little self-education may help. Our premise for starting our company as well as this blog was to help entrepreneurs help themselves in their public relations and marketing efforts. Many budding and experienced entrepreneurs have business books galore. They cover the basics: finance, human resources, partnerships, etc. But one thing often goes very forgotten…public relations.
Not to worry, here’s to upping the ante. We’ve compiled a short reading list of new and old must-reads.
The Purple Cow by Seth Godin
The New Rules of Marketing and PR - Third Edition by David Meerman Scott
How To Win Friends and Influence People By Dale Carnegie
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogliivy
Bonus: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
The Monday Digest: Back Up & Running
This Monday, we’re back with the blog. Hooray! Things have been busy and we’ve gotten lots of placements. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The New York Post to name a few. Now that we’re back in the swing of things, here are links for the week.
PR News: Have You Analyzed Your Facebook Strategy Lately?
PRSA: People Share Press Releases More On Facebook But Twitter Produces More Traffic
Quest PR Blog: Why Ask A Journalist to Do Your PR?
Inc.: 7 Ways to Make a Mini-Marketing Campaign
Business Insider: Write a Book & Become Smarter
Everything PR: Clearing the Clouds of Doing Business in the Cloud
Communications Corner: 40 Useful Things To Share on Facebook Besides Product Updates
The Monday Digest: Tips to Run With…
360 PR Blog: Dear Foursquare, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby
Wired PR Works: Marketing and PR, We Belong Together
The Bad Pitch Blog: Following Up - The Secret World of Enthusiasm
Honestly: How Not Improving Can Help Your Business
Two Four Seven: Foursquare Pages Not Just For Big Brands
Inc.: Recovering From a Blow To Your Brand’s Reputation
The Monday Digest:The Future of Media?
The Telegraph: Young People Getting Bored With Social Media
Mashable: Dunkin’ Donuts Uses Foursquare and Facebook to Launch New Campaign
Social Times: Will More News Affiliates Report The News Via FourSquare
Seth Godin: When Ideas Become Powerful
Wired PR Blog: The Future of Earned Media
PSFK: Why The Future of Work is Play
Got more questions about this? Email us! Blog@ThePRWorkShop.com
The Monday Digest: PR News
Wall Street Journal: Web Startups Fuel PR Boom
PR Daily: Guidelines for Success in Sending Products To The Media
PR Newser: BMW’s Latest PR Stunt - The BMW Guggenheim Lab
Fast Company: Brand Building Like Google - Be Entertaining or Be Useful
Mashable: Flash Sales - How One Entrepreneur Bootstrapped a Burgeoning Fashion Empire
PSFK: Missoni for Target Creates Interactive Video Campaign
Set Your Mark: Targeting Your PR Efforts
A large part of public relations is communicating, an even more important part is communicating your well-thought out message with the right audience.
There are startups who buy our products and are often unsure about the next step in the process, they wonder “How can I do this pr thing on my own?”. That’s why we have this blog of course. To guide. After you’ve got the message you are trying to convey prepared and in hand, the next step is targeting the ears and eyes you’d like to receive it.
These efforts are best kept both simple and efficient. Meaning its a waste of time to throw darts everywhere. Here are the three groups to keep at top of mine.
Direct Consumer: This includes your existing customers, the people you spend your days trying to attract as customers and any person who resembles the target consumer you should have identified at the outset. All of these will have a tendency to frequent the same locations on the internet as well as outside of it. Connect with them, speak to them, engage them. Once you have their interest, you have a sale.
Press: This includes magazines, newspapers, blogs, webzines, trade publications and in come cases social media. Be careful, never carelessly contact a journalist simply because their employer is “XYZ Magazine”, after all, they could be a music writer when you need the business section. Read articles, use google, Linkedin and social media to spotlight exactly who you should speak with, then use the same method to speak with them.
Influencers: This group includes celebrities, people of influence in your particular industry and early adopters. These are people who’s opinions influence the opinions of others. They can sway an undecided consumer to buy and introduce products via something as simple as a tweet. This group is powerful and usually are followed by a group or tribe of your target consumer.
This is how pr pros target, now its your turn, best of luck.
The Monday Digest: #StartupNation
MSNBC: Startup Generation Ready To Fix Economy
CNN: Black Entrepreneurs Pitch Their Dreams To SiIlicon Valley
Huffington Post: 0 - 5 Years…Enough Work Experience To Become an Entrepreneur
Washington Post: What Young Entrepreneurs Need To Know
Women 2.0: Why Its Important to Hire Women in Your Startup
Humbled MBA: Success In A Startup Takes Time
Mashable: Snapshot of Success: Instagram’s Kevin Systrom Shares His Startup Secrets
Mistakes Happen, There Are Two Ways To Move On
1. Say something
2. Say nothing
At some point you may need a bit of damage control or you may even want to avoid it. On the rare occasion, or even on many you will make a decision that has an adverse effect. Whether its offending someone or launching a product that flopped, there are ways to come back from mishap no matter the size, evenly seemingly large ones.
There are multiple strategies used to save face and recoup value during a crisis, however your new startup and likely small slip-up will be fine optimizing these.
Say Something
People are much more forgiving than we think. As humans, we don’t like to be offended, wronged, belittled or embarrassed and that’s how you have to think when considering your audience. At the end of the day, they are human, just like you. They don’t like being lied to. In situations where you’ve received a great deal of negative feedback from loyal customers about say an interview you’ve done that may have come off degrading to a specific group, the best way to earn forgiveness and redemption is to admit you were wrong. Perhaps your words were reported inaccurately, perhaps that is how you felt at the moment but don’t particularly feel now, the only way to fix it is to discuss it.
Address the situation, this can be in an email, in your company blog or even via one or all of your social media channels. Speak to your audiences concerns, the mistakes that were made and how you intend to fix them. This doesn’t have to be long, as a matter of fact, its important that its not. This not only closes the door to criticism but opens the door to rebuilding your image and audience’s trust.
Say Nothing
This makes sense in cases where something you had high expectations for just didn’t do well. The new product line you added that you said - and absolutely expected - would be brilliant but completely flopped. The boring blog series you began that only attracted one reader. The partnership that went wrong. In cases like these, its best to let them go and quietly move on. Large corporations, music artists, personalities, etc. do it all the time. Think about how many times actors address the worst movies in their careers. They don’t, they move on and commit to doing better (with a great deal of self-evaluation and hard work toward improvement behind the scenes).
Just as people forgive, they also have a tendency to forget, especially when technology moves so fast and they’re spoon-fed something newer, shinier and faster every day.
Don’t waver, don’t wallow, stop what doesn’t work, immediately, and move on or move back to what does.
Got more questions about this? Email us! Blog@ThePRWorkShop.com
