PR Hack of the Week

Everyone wants their company to grow, but what many fail to realize is growth starts with you. Being a professional means always being a student, always growing, always learning. Take a 15-minute break to watch a TED talk or listen to a podcast on your drive into work. Big change happens from little changes over time. As you develop yourself, so will your team, and thus, your company.

With the world being digital, the core focus for PR is still earned media. To understand the mix, we need to understand the context of paid, earned, shared, and owned media to channel the best contributions and exalt a brand’s narrative.

Find what you’re good at, stick with it, and grow. These are the best ways to find your specialty and better offer your clients the demands they’re searching for in the market.

It’s easy for presentation attendees to become disengaged. To maintain your audience’s attention, use emotional inflections in your voice, engage with your audience, incorporate movement, and never read from the slide.

The fastest way for a news release to be discarded is with irrelevant information. Knowing your audience is key for a successful release. Without knowing your audience, you may be providing information to a publication that specializes in an area of expertise outside of your topic.

The best way to keep a consistent and cohesive Instagram aesthetic is with a photo pretest. Purchase or make your own preset on Adobe Photoshop to enhance your photos and create an Instagram feed that’s worth following.

Earned media is still at the core of what we do. To win business, come in with the data to back it up. We can’t go on intuition. Data analysts provide data and research and is what keeps most agencies from being a media shop.

Having relationships with people you meet academically and professionally can benefit you in the long run. Knowledge of your personal character and work ethic can be gained from personal experience; these are things that can’t be obtained from a resume or cover letter.

Keeping up with trends is important in showing your clients where your brand is headed in the future. But building your own trends, helps to build credibility and value for your company.

You never know when a crisis will occur, so you need to be prepared to make a statement that effectively communicates all necessary information with the public’s interest in mind. You never want to be in a position where you are silent for too long.