The Public Relations Blog

Commercial newswire services charge companies to distribute their news. 

The big players in this space – at least in the United States – are Business Wire, Cision PR Newswire, Cision PR Web, GlobeNewswire, etc.

These are often confused with newswire services, also known as news agencies.

When it comes to media relations and corporate communications, PR pros should follow AP Style

Anytime you communicate with a client or customer, you make an impression on behalf of your company. You want to represent professionalism and quality of content, and your written communications are simple ways to do that.

Spelling and grammar mistakes make your company look unprofessional, sloppy, and uninterested. If you don’t ensure all your written communications are error-free, it looks like your company didn’t put forth the time and effort to produce its very best work. Clear, consistent copy editing improves your company’s corporate communications.

Earned media is the coverage your company gets without paying for it. This isn’t done through self-promotion or advertisements nor posting news releases on PR newswires.

Earned media shouldn’t be confused with paid media, which would be paying influencers or running social media ads. It is distinctly different from owned media as well, which is the attention your company’s website attracts.

Sending a perfect media pitch can feel like a balancing act. Structure and timing are everything. To avoid becoming a mere drop in an ocean of emails, here are nine media pitching tips directly from journalists, according to PR software Muck Rack’s research.

In most cases, Facebook can be a delightful asset to your company, generating goodwill between you and your customers or generating strong leads that allow the inbound marketing strategy to fall perfectly into place. However, at times, Facebook can breed negativity. 

When that happens, you don’t want to waste time being unprepared.

Tell stories instead of just stating facts.

Imagine you’ve finally got a good pitch ready to send to the media. You’re well prepared, and now it’s time to get that phone call done. Despite hitting it off with the media contact, your contact ultimately declines to run the story. What happened? You did everything right; you had the main point and some facts to go with it to give context.

When it comes time to give the breakdown of a story in writing, news releases are usually sent. Long and filled with information, they’re viewed as the best ways to get a story to the media. But are they really the best way? Your legal team and, most importantly, reporters don’t like them when they’re for medium or smaller stories. Reporters prefer having information to base their own writing off of instead of simply publishing a news release. If the people actually working with your news releases don’t like them, then what should you do?

SERP is a buzzword used in the digital marketing space. Do you know what it means?

Search Engine Results Page is the web page rendered by search engines like Google to the searchers with a list of relevant URLs answering their search queries.

The search engine algorithm walks through millions of websites to generate the SERP with best-matching results. The idea is to present search results that are in close sync with the user’s search intent.

Every search engine has a unique algorithm and displays two primary types of search results on the SERP.

People want to share their ideas and be heard, and social media is how they fulfill that desire. Having access to various platforms is a valuable opportunity to listen to your audience and gain insight into their values and feedback. However, it’s not enough to simply have an account; you must know both the platform and your community to become a valuable and trusted resource to your audience. 

Here are some things to keep in mind to improve your social media presence. 

Use these two questions to guide your content-making process

In public relations, content of all kinds is important. Whether it’s videos, written content, or any other kind of information people can consume, content is one of the biggest drivers for public relations. Content helps you stand out from your rivals.

However, you need to be making the right kinds of content to further your public relations goals. Simply making anything isn’t enough. Use the two questions below to see if your content is actually helping your public relations plans.