The Public Relations Blog

Axia reviews the Upitch app

Building a strong relationship with journalists is a key component of public relations. It ensures you aren’t pitching a story to the wrong person and creates a connection you can leverage for future stories. However, as technology evolves, newsroom staffers continue to get cut and journalists get more and more jaded. This means that making a journalist’s life easier is another key component of PR.

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.

In many matters, it pays to take your time and think about a decision – that's why mortgages and car loans allow a three-day, penalty-free grace period in many states, just in case buyer's remorse sets in. When it comes to dealing with a corporate crisis, however, time is always of the essence. Here are four reasons why you should move quickly during a crisis.

How to create an effective, integrated PR campaign

Apple’s “tap and go” technology offered through the Apple Pay platform uses advanced payment security developed by MasterCard. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus were the first devices to include capabilities for this technology. With this launch, the MasterCard public relations team, working in collaboration with a PR agency, was eager to push MasterCard ahead of competitors and position the company as a leader in contactless payment safety and drive consumer use of the technology.

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.

Customer feedback is incredibly important for any business, so online reviews are very valuable.  E-commerce sites have made it easier for consumers to price-check and do quality comparison for any product or service they are interested in.

Nobody wants to waste money on sub-par purchases, so for customers, reading online reviews is an important step in making their buying decisions. This means that online reviews are critical to businesses because they affect their online reputations and business productivity.

Learn how making the right decisions can advance your news coverage efforts

Some say that ethics comes from knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. Sure, there are ways to cheat and get around rules with little or no consequence, but is that the way you want to run your business?

Just as there are right and wrong ways to run your company, there are also correct and incorrect ways to manage your media relations efforts. Before you create or adjust your media relations strategy, it is important to be aware of the ethical issues involved to ensure that you don’t damage your reputation in the pursuit of news coverage.

Use PR expertise to learn how to work with media

Many companies want to know how to control the media. They want to know exactly when a story will appear and what it will say.

The truth is you cannot control when or if a news outlet will run a story. Nonetheless, with help from PR, you can learn to better target your media relations efforts, give journalists what they want and increase your chances for coverage.

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.