The Public Relations Blog

Social media is a growing platform with many different channels for a company to engage over, from professional channels like LinkedIn to the more informal options like Pinterest and Snapchat. When companies maintain presences on these various social channels, employees often want to connect with them. However, some employees may not know the best way to go about connecting their work lives with their social lives. Here are a few tips to share with your employees to help them connect with your company’s social media profiles.

Science now allows you to really get into your customers’ heads to see what reaches them. In order to give your customers the best possible experience, you need to know what every step of the customer journey looks like. Take care of your customers because without them, you wouldn’t have a business.

Social media is now the No. 1 way the majority of Americans spend their time on the Internet. Currently, there are more than 1 billion active Facebook users and 400 million Twitter users – and these numbers are increasing rapidly. It’s clear that social media is booming. People use it for everything: to obtain news, to be entertained and to research and buy products and services. In fact, social media offers a straight, quick path to your target audience – which is why you can’t afford not to be using it.

Learn all about thought leadership and how you can use PR to attain it

There are plenty of corporate buzzwords and phrases floating around these days like “dashboard,” “human-to-human” and “goal digger.” Most of these will go just as quickly as they came. One that has remained throughout the years is “thought leadership,” and for good reason: It’s important.

You may have been told that your company or CEO needs to be positioned as a thought-leader in your industry but don’t really know what all the excitement is about. With help from PR, you can gain a better understanding of this vital term and achieve it for your company.

Public relations can be a credible and useful tool in any business’ marketing arsenal to enhance business development and hiring efforts, as well as industry profile. This doesn’t exclude law firms. Many attorneys perceive PR as an unnecessary expenditure requiring too significant a budget to warrant meaningful discussion. However, intelligent attorneys are more ready to recognize PR’s potential, though they require substantive, fact-based reasoning to back it up.

It’s great to see a company using PR in a smart and astute way to boost sales. Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. announced last week that its Outback Steakhouse Restaurants are now open for lunch nationwide. The company, looking to increase its revenue by expanding its menu and hours, initiated a campaign of national awareness after testing the market on a much smaller – and quieter – scale over the past year. Outback Steakhouse began offering lunch service in select restaurants last year to assess the overall consumer interest and operating expenses. After successful trial runs, the corporation was ready to formally announce its plans to launch lunch service at all of its restaurants across the nation.

PR explains the top 6 phrases you should never put in a press release or pitch

You want to attract media attention, so you create a dynamite press release announcing your company’s brand new initiative or event. However, you may be sabotaging your great news by using old, tired phrases in your press release and turning off reporters.

Writing press releases is like a balancing act. You must provide enough information to pique a reporter’s interest without divulging too much. It has to have all the pertinent details without being too lengthy. In addition, certain overused phrases can be annoying to reporters and make them stop reading. Experienced PR pros can show you how to avoid this and craft press releases that get results.

Use these tips to educate your company on PR’s true value

You know that your company needs to be more visible and engage more customers in order to increase sales. However, it can be difficult to sell management on public relations as the solution.

Many companies see PR as just something to pull off the shelf when there’s a crisis. This misunderstanding makes it difficult for them to see the true value of PR work. Once you effectively explain all the ways that public relations can help you boost sales and advance your company’s goals, you’ll have an easier time convincing management that it should be an essential part of your strategic plan.

Optimize your digital footprint with these steps

Incredible amounts of research have gone into determining how people form first impressions. The digital age has complicated the phenomenon by eliminating physical signs and signals. In place of smiles are likes, retweets and reviews, not direct word-of-mouth referrals. Businesses must therefore consider how their digital first impressions (gained not only through their websites but also via social media chatter and search engines such as Google) impact their brands.

How a social media policy can help you in a crisis

It seems that, almost overnight, social media has taken over our lives. We use it to stay connected, express opinions and follow the issues that are important to us. Some people feel they couldn’t go one day without it.

Unfortunately, the technology has evolved faster than many can manage it. Businesses especially have found themselves playing catch-up, struggling to engage customers and increase profits through social media platforms, lacking the necessary guidance and making reputation-crushing mistakes along the way. With assistance from PR, you can create your social media policy and avoid disaster.